August 28, 2024 — I have a backlog of interesting scientific work to do, but an important free speech matter has come to my attention. Warpcast is suddenly considering adding blocking.

I don't know whether some powerful people have joined and are pushing for this in secret, but I do know, as Farcaster user #158, that what has attracted a lot of active users to Farcaster has been our desire for a censorship resistant town square.

I hope in this short essay, we can show why Warpcast should veto adding blocking, now and forever in the future.

We will use the illustration below to define our terms.

A common argument made in favor of blocking is that black users must be protected from some firehose of responses coming from blue users.

But this is physically impossible. Blue users are just humans, who have to eat, sleep, take a piss, cook for their kids, and do a million other things.

They do not have time to dedicate their lives to "piling on" to black users.

It must be considered that the black user subconsciously knows they are doing something wrong, and so is experiencing extreme cognitive dissonance causing them to exaggerate the volume of messages from the blue user.

(Note that bots posing as humans should be blocked, but at the global protocol level and with efficient means to appeal to avoid the dangers of false positives.)

I am currently blocked by the below 4 popular users on Twitter:

name	user	followersInMillions	earliestBooster	blockedAfter
Massimo	Rainmaker1973	2.2	true	Asking for citations after reporting inaccurate information.
Nassim Taleb	nntaleb	1	true	Posting data that refuted a tweet.
Garry Tan	garrytan	0.465	true	Trying to share helpful feedback about the SVBank situation.
Suhail Doshi	suhail	0.307	true	I don't even remember. I helped him for free for many years.

In all three cases I was blocked after trying to help improve their ideas and better inform their users, who are all communities of people (science, statistics, startups) that I have a 20 year public track record of caring deeply about.

I also was an early public booster of all 4 of these people, with years of public proof behind that, so one can not only show evidence that my actions were good, but that there is strong evidence of long term good intentions and good will from me to these people.

I couldn't care less about my own ego, and I find it humorous and harmless when people mute me-I can be annoying with all my intense data and mathematical thinking. Muting is fine!

But to block me is to commit active harm to your users. It is censorship. It is anti-free speech.

It should not only not be done, but it should not be a feature of these digital town square platforms.

It makes me sad that these people, who I respect and enjoy their work, would have their worst impulses encouraged by Twitter allowing the blocking of users.

I blame Twitter for encouraging their worst impulses. I hope dearly Warpcast does not make the same mistake.

Thank you for listening. If you disagree, I am happy to look at your data and math in favor of adding blocking. And if I disagree, at the very worst, I will mute you.