Tweeted a Compliment and Got Blocked, Be Careful out There!

Pretty spun out about it, here's the scoop.

I'm an artist and this year one of my goals is to start having a presence online -as- an artist. One of the pillars of that is social networking right? So I've been using tumblr and started participating in twitter as well, one of the first things I wanted to do was show some appreciation to the people I follow, that's a grand total of 10 right now so I figured I'd write out something quick to the one of those I've most recently paid attention to. As it happens that resulted in the following:

Now I don't know if I tweeted wrong or it just doesn't read the way I meant it to, as a compliment, but when I checked twitter again this evening I was definitely blocked. Obviously I feel awful so I wanted to reach out and remind others to keep in mind what the climate is like out there for games writers right now. Because there's nothing worse than sincerely complimenting someone and it having the opposite effect on them.

I feel like the scum of the earth thinking that someone I admire has presumably lumped me in with the worst kind of degenerates in the games community.

I knew my damn Australian mouth would get me in trouble eventually. I think I'm going to drop the language in any future twitter musings. Just to be safe.

(If anyone has feedback on how that tweet might read to others I'd love to hear it, cheers!)

I wouldn't worry about it kid. Just remember to follow the golden rule; never meet your heroes.

Or interact with them on social media. Bad scene all around.

Me and my friend were at a thing and Nick Cave was standing closeby.

Friend: "That's Nick Cave, I'm going to go and talk to him".

Me: "Don't, you'll ruin Nick Cave for yourself. You think he wants to be friends? Have a beer?".

Friend: "No, I'm just going to chat".

My friend walks over and quickly returns.

Friend: "I said: 'Hello Mr. Cave, I don't believe in heroes, but...' and he didn't let me finish my sentence and walked away".

We also met Matt Groening a little while later, who was a little friendlier. You see my point.

Don't get so worked up about it duder. I assume it's probably just a mistake - you're a fairly new account with not a lot of activity it's easy to automatically mistake you for a bot. If that isn't the case then think about how much traffic someone with that level of followers gets - could be the straw that broke the camels back etc. I wouldn't take any personal offence. Twitter is a fireworld of garbage and SCARY as helllll.

lol Wut.. Some people got thin skin.

I would say it was due to your low twit count

@drgrumbles: He's Australian. We are legally required to swear.

Okay, not really, but it's still super ingrained. I read that and I think absolutely nothing of it. I use FAR worse language talking to my mother.

Thanks for the back up you guys, I'm just bummed out that I inadvertently added some shit to someone's day when I just meant to make a kind gesture.

But you're probably right on point @rmanthorp, with the kind of traffic those cats get it probably didn't even register.

Fuckin' internet man.

@vamino: As an Irishman I also read it and got confused. Sometimes I forget other nations don't find casual swearing acceptable.

Most likely though its your low twitter numbers.

@vamino: Right?! If I'm swearing at you it probably means I'm being friendly.

I've only gotten banned once. It was a video game forum in 2005 and I said that the PS3 was a toaster compared to the 360 didn't attack any person or anything just a console and it got me banned (these days I actually play mostly on PS). I don't understand how that is a bannable offence but sometimes the moderators just want to ban you.

I read it and while the structure seemed awkward I did perceive it as a positive tweet. No idea why she would go as far as to ban you outright instead of just ignore the tweet like most people with thousands of followers do - kinda can't blame them. Either way, your foul Australian mouth indeed go you into a pickle, and now no one will ever respect you again!

Don't worry, if Cara ends up coming to work for Giant Bomb*, we'll all eventually get blocked for complimenting her too.

(* There's a since dormant thread that theorizes that the GBNY job posting was written for her, since it mentions "knowledge of the Japanese language" as a plus, and she is one of the most recognizable game writers with such knowledge.)

As someone who blocks people on Twitter at the drop of a hat, I...actually, I didn't have a point with that. Anyway, yeah, you gotta be careful with what you say to people. One time I got blocked former(?) GameSpot employee Shaun Mcinnis (spelling?) on Twitter, and I could never figure out why or how it happened. At least you have a decent idea as to the tweet that led to this!

Cara's Scottish. Casual swearing is about as common as shitty weather over here, I doubt that had anything to do with it. My guess is she's probably so used to dealing with asshats on Twitter that she assumes anything posted to her is sarcastic by default.

Edit: Or she eventually got fed up with dealing with asshats on Twitter so she uses a script to autoblock anyone who posts potentially nasty tweets.

I'd probably re actively block someone with the handle expatriategamer as well.

The fact that you seem so upset by it shows that you've got a good heart duder. Hang in there! From your tweet the only thing I could see was maybe the cursing. Maybe she didn't actually read it, saw the curse and just sorta auto banned? Could be a self defense system of sorts. And if she didn't fully read it then she couldn't have been really too bothered by it then, right? Meaning you didn't make anyone's day worse in anyway. =)

As someone that doesn't have any interest in Twitter ... is that the norm? If you only have a few tweets you get banned? That seems weird, everyone has to start at some point, right?

Cara is pretty quick on the draw ...

... though it would be the funniest thing in the world if she blocked me now too.

I'd just stay off twitter all together if you care about your 'online presence' no one on twitter comes across as anything other than a whiny asshat anyway.

At some point I was literally blocked by Brianna Wu in the aftermath of something I said in response to someone else about her blog. Like, she literally had to be pro-actively looking for something to block. I can understand where the worry comes from I suppose, but...

Huh so I wasn't far off with the automatic defense thing. I figured it was a misunderstanding. =D Glad that worked out!

@jesus_phish: I'm an Aussie, but I understand this sentiment:

I've been similarly blocked due to a misunderstanding a couple of times, and while it definitely sucks and feels terrible, you're better off not putting too much thought into it. With the current tumultuous climate of discussion on social media, people can be very quick on the trigger, and it's pretty easy to sympathize and understand why they would be.

@polekat: Do you know what ex-patriot means? It's someone who has moved to a different country to live (usually for retirement). For example there are a lot of British ex pats in Spain.

This seemed perfectly appropriate to me, and in fact it actually seemed like a pretty awesome thing to say.

But i'm Australian too, so I guess my input is kinda fuckin' worthless.

Back when I frequented Kotaku I got banned and de-starred (that's how long ago it was) for defending Owen in the comments from some random asshole. Apparently he thought I was being sarcastic, we chatted through e-mail, and I was unbanned.

It's nearly impossible to decipher sarcasm on the internet, and you can never tell what kind of day people are having. Not to mention Twitter seems to be worthless for anything other than complaining with very short arguments (IMO). I wouldn't worry about it.

It's a sad statement of the times. Hopefully in a few years things will have cooled down, or there will be better measures to prevent internet harassment.

Did that "block together" thing ever take off? I wonder if someone were to be mistakenly blocked by an automatic script, that other scripts would then block them from other twitter users.

@captain_insano: Reggie D Hunter is a pretty cool dude. I went to see Steve Hughes perform one night, there was nobody listed as the warm up so we all just assumed it'd be a standard, some local guy. Local guy walks on and does his set then introduces "special guest Reginald D Hunter" and Reggi D walks out, gives a hell of a performance then came back out during Steve's set. Was a great night.

@Expatriategamer just blocked you too, don’t feel too bad. It can happen to anyone.

I say just delete your twitter.

If anything happens on twitter of the slightest importance it is posted elsewhere within seconds.

@boatorious said:

Cara is pretty quick on the draw ...

... though it would be the funniest thing in the world if she blocked me now too.

@reisz: I don't know if you noticed, but boat-man here is a little bit of a saint. Also, I took a gander at your tumblr, and your work really ain't half-bad. Hopefully we'll get to see you do something GB related in the future.

Where can I see your work, duder? Would you be cool with posting a link to your tumblr?

basically this

You have no reason to feel so guilty about, it what you said was completely innocuous. Also it's just twitter son, it's not like she un-friended you in real life.

It's okay, OP. I checked that person you tweeted at, don't even follow or ever communicated with her, yet I'm also blocked. So don't worry about it, some people just like to bury their head in the sand and live inside a bubble.

@boatorious: Hm. Had no idea this rumor was even going around.

*Waits few seconds*

Aaaaaand I'm hyperventilating over Cara working for Giant Bomb. Soooo cool!

Also, to the OP, I've had a similar thing happen to me. I wrote what I thought came across as a "good job, fight the good fight" message to Patrick after one of his Gamergate articles, and he responded like I shit in his cereal. I couldn't possibly have felt worse, ever.

This is because of a large group of game journos sharing blocklists with each other into one massive blocklist. So even if you never said a word to half of these people they've probably blocked you because you ended up on one of their lists.

This whole shotgun approach to blocking people over the Gamer Gate stuff is the dumbest way to go about this.

@demoskinos said:

When has dumb ever stopped anybody?

Fixed. :D

Sorry, could not resist.

@boatorious: Oh dude, you're a cool person. That was above and beyond, it didn't even occur to me that people would run scripts to automatically screen stuff like that. Having no effect is better than having a bad effect. Thanks for being cool.

@justkamtoo: Oh you,

@stryker1121: rhysbarber.tumblr.com, thanks for asking man, I hope you dig it.

@do_the_manta_ray: Thanks duder! That means a lot. I totally have Giant Bomb related ideas, I'll chime in when they get done. Metal Gear Scanlon 3 will definitely light the fires.

@lilman1101: Fuckin' oath.

So what did I learn; Twitter is weird, prominent games writers have shit to do and Giant Bomb forum people are still awesome. Case closed.

@marokai: Some people are just aching to get hurt. Twitter must have the highest concentration of thin-skinned narcissists of anywhere on the Internet.

The funny thing about the automatic blocking scripts is that it was found out a bunch of the anti-GG side had started blocking themselves by accident.

@vamino: cara ellison is scottish though. We swear even more than Australians do. The four letter word which makes all Americans shut down in horror is a term of endearment here.

Don't sweat it too much, OP, a lot of people with lots of followers seem to act a bit shittily on twitter almost as a defence mechanism as far as I can tell.

I got blocked by John Cusack.

I think it was more due to the guy having a low following/follower count since he just started using Twitter. I doubt it was because his name was on a blocklist so there must've been a script that just determines low following count. Anyways, its been fixed now.

I've had the same thing happen when I've been grouped in with GG stuff on accident. I pretty much just avoid Twitter these days. And YouTube comments. :-)