> when they try to engage with _anyone_ on the platform

But it's not anyone, it's only those that are under assault and have turned on the block.

How many people are going to do that? Only the people that need it to continue using Twitter.

Personally? I interact with people I know, not #brands. And I do that by following, not by @'ing out of the blue. Everybody I know does the same. If somebody with a name I recognize follows me, I'm gonna follow them back and @'ing is fine.

What you are describing is a tinder approach to twitter, which serve fundamentally different roles in the online social sphere. I understand that is how you and yours use twitter, but extrapolating that behavior across hundreds of millions of users is almost certainly hasty.

> I interact with people I know

I prefer have far less public services for this. Feels like airing dirty laundry to do it on twitter

If "engage" means "HA HA U SUK TRUMP UR AZZ MAKE ME A SANDWICH" then maybe Twitter isn't a good place for them.

What if engage means "I want to blow the whistle on something, can you get me in touch with a journalist?" for 0.01% of blocked messages and "u suk vote yrump" for the rest?

Well then there's email, phone, text message, snail mail, fax, carrier pigeon, whatever for that 0.01%.

"The Boy Who Cried Wolf" comes to mind.

I clearly said not a harasser...

> maybe Twitter isn't a good place for them could have fooled me because if you built a platform purely for harassment it would resemble twitter closely