Twitter says it just made blocking people easier. It didn't

Twitter is so rife with abuse that its last CEO admitted failure and said it posed a huge risk to the business. The company's approach to improving its user experience since then has been excruciatingly incremental, including bold measures like — and this is not a joke — rearranging the paragraphs in its terms of service. But when it's not fighting harassment by writing blog posts, occasionally Twitter will rearrange some buttons. Like today, when Twitter announced users would only have to press three buttons to save themselves from another user, instead of having to enter the code 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42 into an Apple II located in a remote island bunker.

Here's what you need to do now to block someone in Twitter's app:

• Click on an abusive tweet, ensuring you will see the abusive tweet twice
• Look past the reply, retweet, "heart," and direct message buttons to find a hidden menu indicated by ellipsis — a not-so-subtle indication that any further action you plan to take on this tweet is not a priority for Twitter and thus deserves to be buried in an obscure menu
• Click the "block" button

As you can see, this is a vast improvement over the most recent implementation, which required users to look past an emboldened "Cancel" button and press the block button again, to fully validate your commitment to not wanting to be abused on Twitter.

If you're a Twitter engineer who thinks this is an intractable problem, here's what you need to do to reject someone on Tinder:

• Swipe left

• ViaEngadget
• SourceTwitter