Do you have a criteria for what qualifies as block-worthy offence or are you just doing it when you feel like it?
Bonus question: how long is your block list?
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I block assholes. It drives me up the wall when someone is disrespectful for no reason. I also dislike those who get unnecessarily aggressive on the first message because the previous comment doesn’t align with their views. I’ll usually set a boundary and let people correct their attitude. After that, I’ll block.
I’m also considering blocking those who make a hobby of subverting the previous comment by twisting people’s words and overloading them with something the person did not mean to say, but those are trickier.
- Genocide denial
- Fascism
- Racism
- Bad-faith arguments
- Really really stupid & low effort
- Consistently really really negative
- Vote manipulation
- Spam, CSAM
I’ve banned 1074 accounts from the instance I run, most of them for boring reasons like spam. Usually between 1 and 10 per day.
Tankies go straight to the Shadow Realm
I’ve blocked a few bots but I would only block an actual person if they’re harassing me. I’d rather downvote or report people that are saying hateful things.
Mostly racism, sexism, bad-faith arguments, and some religious stuff. I often double-check a person’s post history to make sure I’m not just reading it wrong. I also do so to make sure I’m not blocking someone for a single bad day or bad take.
I think younger me would have argued more or tried to convince them of things by showing evidence, but I just don’t have the time or energy at the moment; I have a full-time job, a small farm, and home maintenance on the (used) house I moved into 6 months ago.
Posting/commenting right wing garbage or tankie “North Korea is a great place” bullshit. Also flat earther crap. Pretty much any insane, out of touch with reality stuff.
I blocked two accounts on my instance that kept posting porn without the NSFW tag, as a troll. From the message it was likely the same person who owned both accounts.
I don’t tend to block anyone online unless I feel like they are harassing me. Haven’t blocked anyone on Lemmy so far. I think people can be too quick to block others who have different points of view these days.
Bad faith arguments and hatred of any minority. That covers about 99% of it
My blocklist is 30~40 users long. [For reference, my blocklist in Reddit reached 400 or so.]
To keep it short, I typically block people who, egregious or consistently:
- show lack of reasoning, even if I agree with the conclusion
- misrepresent what others say
- take things off context to judge them, even if I agree with the judgement
- vomit lots of “hard” certainty on things that they cannot reasonably know (e.g. the others’ emotional states over the internet)
- engage in passive aggressiveness (note that I tolerate some clear hostility, just not pass-aggro)
- show clear signs of sealioning (e.g. “I don’t understand” + misrepresentation of what someone else said)
- tell others shit like “trust me” = “I expect you to be a gullible piece of rubbish”
Note that “egregious or consistently” are key words here. Like, I’m not going out of my way to block someone out of a brainfart; this is not some sort of petty revenge, it’s just removing from my sight people who I believe to not contribute with my overall Lemmy experience. I also don’t take issue when people block me, for whatever reason they might have.
Sealioning is a made up term by those too lazy to explain a concept and looking to antagonise others because they “cannot possibly be unaware of X fact that I care so much about”.
Funnily enough saying someone is sealioning falls within the passive-aggressive behaviour you seem to despise so much.
Sealioning is the discussion equivalent of a DoS (denial of service) attack. In both, the content of the reply is irrelevant; the goal is to flood the person/machine with multiple requests, until they reach a limit and
stop droppingdrop the requests altogether.And while the concept has some problems because it handles some esoteric babble called “intentions” (see: “goal”), it’s still useful when you focus on the behaviour instead.
Funnily enough saying someone is sealioning falls within the passive-aggressive behaviour you seem to despise so much.
Pass-aggro is about tone, not content. You can state something like “you’re sealioning” in a passive aggressive way, or a rude way, or under a bald-on record, so goes on.
[Edit reason: phrasing.]
I don’t block people because I think it’s important to understand that people have different viewpoints and ways of articulating them
Right. Blocking people for no other reason than “I disagree” or “I don’t like that” turns the place in to an echo chamber. Like, if that’s what you want, fine, but one reason I left Reddit was to get out of the echo chamber.
I don’t block people, even if someone is being stupid I doubt I’d run into them that often again. But of course, if someone was personally harrassing me, I’d block, it just hasn’t happened here.
If someone is harassing you, IMO the best approach is not blocking but contacting the admins; either of your instance or the person’s instance. If you simply block the person they’ll keep harassing you, but now on your back as you won’t see their comments.
I block people for my own peace of mind. If they want to follow behind me and be public assholes, they are just showing everyone else who they are.
A bunch of my innocuous posts wind up with a single lonely downvote. It makes me laugh because someone out there is really fucking butthurt over something I don’t even remember any more.
When it’s just for your own peace of mind, or just some muppet downvoting you all the time, that’s fine. However, harassment strictu sensu often causes social repercussions that harm the person being harassed, even if they’re oblivious to that. And often harassers don’t just stop at one person, they pick multiple targets; it is not the sort of people who you want in a community.
So often it’s simply better for you and everyone else to report them instead.
Yeah just hiding the content of people who harass you is really not a good practice. It’s the whole reason why Reddit introduced two-way blocking, they know that this type of harassment can’t actually be combated by simply ignoring it. Here on Lemmy we don’t have that, the next best thing though is to report to admins or Community moderators, but I would recommend admins since they can take care of the users more efficiently.
Yeah I agree these types of people really should not be in communities and instances. While it may be up to moderators and admins to ban people on the site and communities, it is us the users who are responsible for bringing these types of bad people to their attention, by reporting and reaching out.
Think of being a user on these sites as being like part of a neighborhood watch all the time. You are obligated to report people who are behaving suspicious or in ways that are harmful to the community. Maybe if one or two people ignore them it’s fine but if a majority of people do this it won’t be, and isn’t. It’s part of the reason why I think that there are so many trolls and bad faith actors here who never get banned from communities or instances despite the fact that they have zero restraint about where and when they lash out at someone. It’s because people just block those guys and never report them.
Well said.
I think Lemmy’s devs seem to not understand this problem otherwise they would’ve kept a version of two way blocking in Lemmy and wouldn’t fight this idea so much:
- https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/4041#issuecomment-1777961579
- https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/4205
Proper blocking systems for preventing harassment need to at a basic level stop people from replying to the user or their content. People can argue that this can be abused but not having it will be abused more in exactly the same way you said.
I think that it would be possible to implement true/two-way blocking while minimising the amount of abuse, if the blocklist is public. As in, if Alice simply mutes Bob, nobody knows it; but if Alice blocks Bob, you can see in Alice’s profile “blocking: Bob”.
I also think that the mute / block user option needs to have a confirmation window. From this thread it’s obvious that a lot of people are muting bad faith users, instead of reporting them. That’s bad because the problems never reach the ears of those who can act on them.
(I’m just throwing ideas around, mind you. Take them with a grain of salt, there might be some catch that I didn’t realise.)
I don’t on Lemmy because it doesn’t really do anything besides hiding their posts. On Mastodon I block people who are AI trolls, political trolls, reactionaries, and in general people who are hostile. People who are objectively horrible people, sometimes it’s because I see them doing it, but other times because they lashed out directly at me. Most blocks on Mastodon are preceded by reports to server admins but I still block them because it usually takes time for people to be moderated.
it doesn’t really do anything besides hiding their posts.
That’s what I need it to do. Out of my sight. Doesn’t matter if they can still see my posts. I hope they write me a lot of long and nasty messages that I never see.
It’s not about them seeing my posts it’s their ability to interact without my knowledge since different types of harassment can be quite harmful even if you don’t see it (i.e. lying, disinformation, accusations). So it’s not in my best interest to block people on a platform where the block system treats the threat of these people as non-legitimate by allowing their continued interaction and replies.
I hope they write me a lot of long and nasty messages that I never see.
I sincerely hope you never meet with any of the more elaborate trolls or bad-faith actors who use more aggressive tactics like accusations or disinformation against you. This can be very harmful, even more so if you cannot see it and respond to or report it, especially reporting it. Also a lack of reporting and substituting reporting for blocking can be harmful in the long run because when users are not reported, they may never be actioned by mods or admins. Which is awful for the health of the community, maybe you think others can report for you but bystander effect is real and the people who think this way eventually compound allowing trolls and bad-faith actors to operate longer if not indefinitely, so it doesn’t benefit anyone to hide them and pretend they don’t exist.
You don’t find it limiting you can only talk to people who fit your understanding of acceptable conversation?
Nah, there is no point interacting with people who are pro Israeli military action. Supportive of Israel sure whatever but the people who are happy that they are actively killing civilians and think it’s justified, just aren’t people that are worth talking to, discussing, or arguing with. You’re never going to be able to make them less shitty, all interacting with them is going to do is make your day worse. So block away, because conversation needs to be a two way street. If it’s already one way, may as well not have any traffic on it at all.
This goes for any vitriolic and aggressive people, not just active genocide supporters, they’re just usually the ones I end up blocking. Tankies too but since I filtered ml I see way less of that shit.
Well I’d say what you are describing is similar to using a screwdriver to hammer in a nail, and then giving up after the 5th time fails.
Its not the goal thats impossible, its your methods. There are people changing peoples minds out there but they aren’t doing it with unwavering arguments and unbeatable logic.
Can I hammer a nail with my forehead? Maybe, if I try enough times. However, it fucking hurts, and there are literally thousands of nails to go. It just is not worth the personal cost.
I guess thats gonna be true until you find a hammer I suppose.
I’ve never blocked someone. Idk why. Maybe too much action for something that doesn’t make any big difference.
This isn’t meant to judge over people who block others, there could be good reasons like stalking etc.
I don’t block people either because my mom didn’t raise no pussies.
Furries, gay porn, sports, and posts in languages I don’t understand.
You block other users for mentioning sports?
Posts, not comments. But sure. I can do that.
