I had to block a few users yesterday. Today, I noticed about ten notifications from users I’ve blocked—they replied to me, continued to make up lies about my heritage, and I continued to see their comments in my notifications.
It seems that the only effect of my blocking them is that I can no longer see their comments in context—although I am still notified of their harassment. This is quite the opposite effect from the one I was going for—I mean, I’m happy to spend less time engaging with them, but the block feature seems to be guaranteeing these bigots the “last word” and preventing me from even reporting them. They can then follow me anywhere on kbin and continue to harass me, the block function is only stopping me from doing anything about it.
At least one of these users is on the same instance as I am, kbin.social.
Why doesn’t blocking work?
It wasn’t like that until a few years ago, and people disliked the change.
To clarify, a few years ago, the blocked user could not see the message either. The logic behind the change was, “you can just log out and see it anyway, so what’s the difference?” Most people spend most of their time logged in. The difference is significant.
Maybe there’s been another change. In the original system I meant, blocking was one-sided only.
To quote Reddit themselves:
Like I’ve said in the other comment, not entirely sure on whether replying was possible since I’ve never been blocked myself.
But this is definitely false.
People dislike change. Besides I see no particular reason kbin should be copying reddit.
Well, aside from the fact that people expect the “block” function to block the blocked user, and not merely mute the blocked user…
“People dislike change.” Coming from any other platform, they expect the “block” feature to work the same way it did all their lives. When they find out it doesn’t, they will feel that kbin breaks the established norm of reddit, mastodon, twitter, instagram, facebook, every messaging client, and every other site with a “block” feature, constitutes an unannounced and unwelcomed change from every other service, and not only leave, but carry and share strong negative opinions about the fediverse.
Maybe having the fediverse not being janky garbage software would be better?
What you’re saying makes sense, but I think the big issue here is that blocking as it currently works on Reddit is harmful because it’s too easy to abuse. If the only reason for the change is familiarity, then you’ll just make the platform worse for actual users just to lessen the barrier of entry.
So, why does any platform even need this, besides familiarity? If you don’t want to see a user, hiding them from you will achieve that perfectly.
I really can only think of malicious reasons. Shutting down an argument or badmouthing someone without giving them a means to respond or defend themselves.
Like, if it’s to avoid stalkers, this would do literally nothing to achieve that. They can just log out and continue doing what they were doing.
I don’t think kbin should be blindly adopting bad ideas even if everyone else does them. If it was actually beneficial, sure, have kbin go for it. But this doesn’t seem to solve a problem, nor does it actually improve our quality of life. Rather, it does the opposite. It introduces a problem we could just do without by keeping what we have currently.
This is really not a problem on reddit, especially in the face of rogue moderators doing the same thing, except on the scale of a subreddit. Nobody
I explained it many, many times throughout this thread. Harassment is bad. People’s expectation to be able to block harassers is not just familiar, it’s good. People should be able to free themselves from harassment—not just from knowing they’re being harassed.
Right now, the assholes I blocked could, for all I know, be chasing me around the fediverse commenting on everything I say. They could be stalking me. They could be doxxing me. This is too easy to abuse.
On top of that, these threats make it dangerous to even use the muting feature against those real assholes. Muting only makes sense for people you find mildly annoying. I’m afraid when I mute a harasser, afraid that their harassment will continue, that I won’t be able to reply to it, and that people will believe every nasty, bigoted thing they say about me. My only chance at safety comes from blocking them.
Muting serves the same function, only punishing the person who uses the mute function instead. Thereby discouraging use of the mute function and perpetuating toxic debate. Toxic debates need to end, they should be shut down—not for a winner or a loser, but because they make everybody’s lives worse and really don’t enhance access to the truth. Insults should be shut down, rather than going back and forth ad infinitum. Harassment should be shut down. These are not free speech—you can speak freely anywhere. Persistently talking to somebody who doesn’t want to hear your bullshit is harassment.
This will do a lot to prevent stalkers, because even if the stalkers realize they need to log out to stalk the user, they now lose every “follow” function, every logged-in function, and have to stalk the user manually. Most stalkers will never do that—they will lose steam the second they realize they’ve been blocked, and go worry about something else.
“blindly” while I’ve explained the issue throughout the thread? This is exhausting.
Thanks for the writeup, it helped me see things from your perspective. I don’t fully agree, but I get now why you’re asking for this.
What I’m wondering now is, does the fediverse actually support the kind of block that’s being asked for here? Like, is there precedent on this being implemented on other platforms like Mastodon or Lemmy? The issue here is that kbin isn’t in control of who sees your posts, I wonder if it’s actually possible to implement this in the first place.
If you actually believe this, you’re a bit shortsighted. This is the fediverse, people can just jump onto a different instance. And even on Reddit multiple accounts for the same person were allowed.
People can also run their own personal instance which doesn’t honor those blocks.
Yeah, Mastodon has separate block and mute functions. Somebody just accused me of “playing the underdog card” for saying that babies should have their heads attached to their necks, in a whole long chain of comments where he frequently mischaracterized my points, so yes, I blocked him.
well, multiple reddit accounts to get around a block or ban were specifically forbidden, but you’re right, it’s possible.
the thing you’re still confused about is thinking that it’s something everybody does the second they get banned. There is a limit to the amount of work people actually end up doing to troll others on the internet. Some trolls have an iron will and are stubborn to no end; the vast majority will lose steam eventually and just go do something else.
If you set up your own instance just to troll people more effectively, and somehow manage to stay federated with your victims’ servers, you might just be a corner case.