via Pixelant/Flickr

Despite all the language of disruptive innovation and the future and all that, when it comes to social networks, internet users are incredibly adverse to change. It happens every time Facebook is altered slightly: Everyone complains and claims this is the end for a few days before getting used to it. But there was something different in the backlash to Twitter’s updated blocking rules, which still let blocked users interact with their blockers to some degree. Still Twitter’s response was a surprise.

Citing safety concerns expressed by users, Twitter brought back the old way of blocking, even though, as vice president of product Michael Shippley put it, “we believe this is not ideal.”

Under the old—and once-again current—blocking system, a user couldn’t interact with someone who blocked them or see the blocker’s tweets—unless they just logged out and viewed the tweets on the blocker’s public page.

Under the briefly lived new blocking system, blocking a user only muted their actions—favorites, responses to your tweets, or any time they mentioned you—from your feed, while nothing changed on their side. Twitter’s goal was to cut down on retaliation or harassment by blocked users by making it more difficult for them to figure out that they’ve been blocked.

It makes sense to me—if nobody can hear a troll, is the troll even trolling? And some Twitter trolls seem to get a certain amount of satisfaction from being blocked—a triumphant finish to a successful trolling. The new blocking feature was built around the principle that if you don’t see it, it can’t hurt you.

Twitter users didn’t see it that way, and had the perfect tool ready at hand to express as much, tweeting their concerns as well starting an online petition. People who had been harassed or stalked through the site felt like this was giving more power to the harassers and made Twitter a less safe place, even as they acknowledged that it really wasn’t all that safe before. They were concerned that allowing blocked users to retweet would allow them to gather their friends to continue the harassment. 

In response, Twitter executives “rushed into a meeting Thursday night,” according to Reuters, and opted to bring back to the old block function. 

Some have wondered if Twitter’s notorious lack of women made this possible—if any of them had ever been victims of web harassment, would they have changed the block function? A Twitter spokesperson told Selena Larson of Readwrite that the point of the new blocking policy was not only to reduce post-block anger, it was also “to remind people that everything they tweet is public.”

That’s a solid reminder from Twitter. It’s also important to remember as well that blocking isn’t about stopping the truly horrible—there’s a place to report an account as abusive for that, which can lead to account suspension. But even if someone’s kicked off Twitter entirely, they can find and read any public profile. Twitter isn’t in the business of IP blocking.

Even if the old blocking system had its shortcomings, the concerns raised by Twitter’s users were more serious than the kind that accompanies Facebook moving the poke function. By bringing back the old block system, even while noting that it didn’t want to, Twitter comes off as more attuned to its users than Facebook and Google. The petition directed at Twitter had less than 3,000 people before the policy changed back. A petition aimed at Google asking them to bring back the old YouTube comments section is at over 224,000.

The common thread connecting Youtube comments and Twitter blocking is harassment. Social networks, have all the problems of any society, including the gap between the governing body’s ideal and the way it reverberates down to the individual. But Twitter, fundamentally a communication device, may not have shown great foresight, but at least it showed it can listen.