[Mari]

Hey! Today I'm going to talk about a somewhat unusual topic. It's not a pleasant topic and it'll unavoidably have to allude to certain other topics we usually avoid for good reason. So if you have no strong opinions about the ability to post Twitter links in the chat and don't want to stress yourself with the topic, feel free to skip this announcement.

So, I'm sure most of you are aware of the recent Twitter takeover. If you're not, Twitter was bought by a very rich man named Elon Musk. He has been making changes to the site since then which can only be described as an unmitigated disaster for both that community and it's future. It's unclear if Twitter will even exist in a couple of months.

However, regardless of Twitter's future these changes have created a bit of an unusual problem for us here on SSB:Li. See, as Twitter is right now, it kinda violates our policies on what sites are appropriate to post in the chat. It's fallen into a category of websites that are just generally unsafe to be on. A lot of these changes that are being made have been made with a reckless disregard for the mental health of its users. Especially if they're young. The site platforms and enables harassment and hate speech. Musk is talking about removing the block feature to make it harder for people to protect themselves. If I had a kid they would not be allowed on Twitter for their own safety. It's full of very dangerous people capable of ruining lives and Musk wants the site to be this way. It's not going to get better anytime soon.

And yet in spite of how bad things have gotten over there, it still remains popular enough that those links are getting posted. Chalk it up to addiction, habit, or a horde of artists who for some reason don't use any other website. Whatever the reason, Twitter still sees use. We have several members on this board who are trying, and some failing, to quit Twitter. And whenever there's a link in say the chat, they're a single click away from going back. It actively makes it harder for them to take care of themselves.

So you probably know what I'm thinking. I want to block Twitter. My conscience is eating at me. In the past we've never had to block words or websites because people usually understand what they should and shouldn't be posting. And the few times they didn't, we would generally just ask them to stop and that would usually lead to the problem being solved without the need for any of this. But... that's not gonna cut it for Twitter.

If we were to block Twitter, trying to post something on the Discord that includes a Twitter link wouldn't work anymore. An error would show up and you'd have to go back and remove/replace the Twitter link before the message would go through. No one would ever get in trouble or yelled at for trying. It just wouldn't work anymore. On the forum, links would get changed to break them.

And that would probably be it. There would be no ban on mentioning Twitter. If you must credit an artist you can post their username and an interested party can google that. If that leads them to Twitter, well--okay. And of course, you can use Twitter if you want to. I think blocking links would be good enough.

But at least a couple of staffers were concerned that such a decision could potentially be very unpopular. So I'm gonna ask. What do you guys think? Would you understand if we did that?

[LuckiCorii]

Twitter is a zoo. You'd either come there to see the varying levels of degeneracy, find communities or follow artists. Also, the gem mine of entertainment and memes.

At the enclosures with degenerates you either laugh, cringe or cry.

At the end of the day, I say blocking links is for the best. After all, Twitter is a very sensitive site that's currently burning at the hands of Mr. Musk.

[Mr. Game & Watch]

Personally I would never care to use Twitter links to share info or anything like that. My biggest concern in regards to using Discord/Proboard filters to break Twitter urls is that Twitter is also used to host images and I'm not sure if that would start breaking images that are sourced from Twitter. I don't think that would break anything on the skins, but it would definitely break anything that people grabbed off of Google that originated on Twitter. Of course, we could always download any image we want from Twitter and reupload it to another image hosting website, but that's also a slight bit annoying when you're just grabbing stuff on the fly.

Not exactly a huge deal, and something I'd have to experiment with a bit to see how that interaction works, but that's really the only inconvenience I can see coming from this.

Update: nevermind, the urls for images hosted by Twitter use a different url than links to Twitter posts, they should be completely unaffected by using the Discord/Proboards filters. Yeah nah, get Twitter outta here.