Twitter's big tease on abuse updates is extremely disappointing

Twitter has a big plan to combat abuse. CEO Jack Dorsey and VP of Engineering Ed Ho have been chatting back and forth about it, on Twitter, all week.

But don't get too excited just yet -- you'll probably roll your eyes when you hear today's update.

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For all that buildup, the first step, as announced Wednesday: letting you report tweets that mention you even if the user has blocked you.

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Let's say someone blocks you, that person could still harass you and say negative things about you, but you could not report the harassment. Now you can with the change. But the update begs the question: why couldn't you do that before? And why such a small step?

We may never know the answer to the first question, but the second one, well, that's just part of the strategy to combat abuse.

"We're approaching safety with a sense of urgency. As such, we will be rolling out a number of product changes in the coming days and weeks – some will be immediately visible, while others will be more targeted to specific scenarios," a Twitter spokesperson told Mashable.

"We will update you along the way and continue to test, learn and iterate on these changes to evaluate their effectiveness. You can expect to see meaningful progress in this area," the statement continued.

Twitter declined to elaborate on a full roadmap, but its leaders have sprinkled a few hints on Twitter.

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Meanwhile, as Reuters reported earlier this week, short stock sellers are giving up on Twitter. Twitter's stock was down by 2 percent at markets close Wednesday.

The product update comes just hours after Dick Costolo, who served as Twitter's CEO from 2010 to 2015, said that he wished he could turn back time and better combat abuse on Twitter, according to Axios.

You can find a lot on Twitter, including mountains of trolls and harassment, but you can't find a time machine.

"I wish I could turn back the clock and go back to 2010 and stop abuse on the platform by creating a very specific bar for how to behave on the platform," Costolo said, speaking at the Upfront Summit in Los Angeles in conversation with CNBC's Julia Boorstein.

It wasn't the first time Costolo has apologized for Twitter's inability to take action against abuse and faulted himself. In a 2015 internal email, he flat out said: "We suck at dealing with abuse and trolls .... It's nobody else's fault but mine, and it's embarrassing."

This time around he took the excuse a step further: because he was hired from Google as an outsider and wasn't a founder, he felt like he could be less bold, according to Axios. This comes, of course, after he called a BuzzFeed report criticizing his handling of abuse, "total nonsense."

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But now a founder is back in place and the changes are coming. Cofounder Jack Dorsey took over once again as CEO in October 2015.

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Several high-profile abuse cases, including one of "Ghostbusters" actress Leslie Jones being harassed, along with stories of thousands of users, collected by BuzzFeed, plague the network.

It's not like Twitter's done nothing. In November, Twitter introduced new feature, including a "mute" function to block words and conversations from appearing in your notifications.

Costolo, who is now at a health tech startup, suggested on stage that Twitter "should engage in manual curation," Axios wrote, "that highlights authoritative voices rather than just hyperbolic ones." He likened the issue to the battle with fake news.

For now, Twitter has yet to directly curate your entire timeline. Go to a tweet by President Donald Trump or about Beyoncé's pregnancy news, and users can still find abuse.

But products like Moments, its curated collection of tweets and videos, follow Costolo's suggestions. Twitter Live, where Twitter displays live video streams of events like red carpets and Thursday Night football, feature a curated feed of random tweets but could be more personalized and include "authoritative voices" in the future.