In hindsight it is a little weird that blocking exists as a concept at all. When you tweet from a public account you are putting that information out into the public. It seems silly to try to prevent certain people from seeing that content and it is trivially easy for a user to circumvent that block by logging out or creating a new account. Muting seems like the most logical way for people to control who they interact with on Twitter.

Wasn’t it removed at some point? I remember the nature of it changing but then being reversed due to negative responses. At the time I realized people were starting to use Twitter in ways not originally intended.

Verified accounts are not “important”, they are what is says on the tin: verified. The feature is meant to help people who were impersonated, not famous. That nuance got lost very fast on celebrities who like any pretext to feel more important, but I think we would loose a lot by not understanding what it means. For instance, employee accounts on any platform have a de facto similar role because they can be used to authenticate both company message, and more.

Verified accounts are those likely victim of abuse, and I believe that is it likely that if you suffer from impersonation, you also suffer from trolls. Verified accounts are the most likely candidate for the need for more protection.

Something else that is at stake, and something that you are explicitly asking for – but I think it‘s a serious mistake: the dichotomy between celebrities and commoners. There never were a clear gap, there, but the idea that being on TV, in the press, or owning land made you special has proven dangerous. Having a gradient from moderately interesting anyones, to popular people within their social context, to relevant expert, opinion leader, up to professionally famous people, that “smoothness” of fame is a great, empowering change that the Internet has brought and made visible.

I think we need to understand that, and adapt (currently blunt) disclosure rules to that smoothness: you can make something a little bit more famous than they are, but you can’t shift them by several orders of magnitude because the attention, grief, consequence of that is something that needs to be learnt, understood, accepted.

Oh I like that. Might get Twitter to actually do something about how uncivil they've let the general standard of discussion become if having that precious little checkmark meant it was impossible to block anyone.

In reality, those people would just leave Twitter.

That works too.

No, that's terrible, too. The stars of Star Wars, Episode VIII were harassed off social media by a bunch of trolls. No one should be forced off social media by trolls.

Couldn’t blocking just stop those people from communicating with you? You could still read all you want.

Not when they make wave after wave after wave of accounts to assail you with.