They shouldn’t be able to do that!
Blocking someone is not a tool to silence them. It’s a tool to ignore them.
Yeah, by blocking them you are saying YOU don’t want to see their posts. That doesn’t mean you get to make that decision for everyone else. I don’t see the problem here.
I never had a twitter account, but made a bsky account just to support people moving away from there even though I’d them they move to mastodon.
Anyway, I saw a post claiming a certain fetish term was now forbidden because it was being used a slur. I commented that I’ve only ever heard it used to refer to a real person when the person in question was using it to describe themselves. I got some positive responses, but the ended up getting blocked from replying when they disagreed with me. Can 3rd parties see blocks or did it just look like I chickened out?
I didn’t care for that and I think these little “features” of twitter that people have gotten use to has twisted how to interact with other people. On reddit or lemmy, the topic is the main focus and the people managing the topic should be the only ones who control what gets said there. With twitter and bsky, the opening post is the main focus and they get control of what gets said. I prefer the former over that latter.
Reddit also blocks you from replying. Not just to that person, but to the comment thread in general. So many people do the insult-block to “win” a conversation.
The mods of the sub are the ones to decide who gets blocked though. Not the person you’re auguring with, unless you’re arguing with is a mod.
The mods can ban you, but anyone can block you and stop you from commenting on threads they are involved in.
I think communicating that someone is blocked is a useful part of blocking. Even if it’s just a notification after comment “you have a blocked reply, it will not be visible to the poster”.
Someone else in this thread pointed out that this would just encourage bad actors to make sock puppet accounts to get around being blocked.
Bad actors already do that.
A block should also be able to prevent them from seeing your activity. That would not constitute silencing the blocked individual as they can still go anywhere and talk to/see anyone else on the fediverse, just not you.
If you don’t want everyone seeing your activity, don’t post it on a public internet system. Blocks can easily be circumvented.
No, I don’t think that would be good. So for example if there was a guy who thought we should all be eating lead. And every time he posts you put up facts about how eating lead was poisonous. And then the lead guy blocked you. Then every time the lead guy posts about how everyone should eat lead, you wouldn’t see it and so you wouldn’t be able to reply with how lead is poisonous.
So if the lead guy blocked everyone who disagreed with him publicly. Then the lead guy can just post whatever they want and no who knew lead was poisonous would reply because they wouldn’t see the post. So others who didn’t know lead was poisonous would start seeing this guy posting about eating lead without being challenged. And so they might think it’s a good thing.
I see what you mean. Personally I’m gonna side with the folks that need the block functionality as a defense against stalking/harassment though.
The lead eater can ban anyone they want but that doesn’t stop others from posting direct challenges to the lead eater’s rhetoric elsewhere. I think its better to help those in need than to leave them vulnerable with less than ideal tools to protect themselves.
Apart from real world means, the best defence against stalking/harassment is to stop posting on a public account associated with the identity that’s being stalked/harassed. If someone is that horrible to stalk you, they’ll be more than capable of circumventing a block.
Also, while there’s no absolute guarantee, most communities have something vaguely along the lines of prohibiting harassment, as do most instances.
That doesn’t mean that a given user’s idea of harassment and a moderator’s or admin’s idea will always perfectly line up. What you think of as being harassment might be what some other people consider disagreeing. But in general, if someone is clearly following a user around and just commenting with the aim of trying to make them miserable, rather than disagreeing with them on some point or something, you can probably report it to a moderator (or, ultimately, admin) and have them remove their comments and probably issue a ban. Brings a third party’s eyes into the situation.
And if you truly don’t feel that a given community’s moderators are sufficiently-restrictive, you can switch to a community that has more-restrictive rules.
But even that case doesn’t work because someone could use a different account (or no account at all) to do the stalking.
There is a need for more precise terminology. We should refer to “block” as stopping someone from interacting with you or your submissions/comments and “mute”/“ignore” as making it so that the person’s own actions cannot be seen by you.
Discord recently made this distinction; it makes sense imo
I could see someone being frustrated that from a third party, it looks like you are not responding to a reply and that person could spin that as a concession that they were right
I could see a compromise, where a direct reply from such a blocked/muted person is allowed, but indicated so that people are aware a response could not have been done.
When I block someone, I don’t want to see their posts anymore. I know they can still comment on my posts, but that’s okay, I just don’t see their contributions any longer to make me angry.
I have no issue with this whatsoever. I block people so that I don’t need to see their posts, not that they couldn’t see mine. If you don’t want others reading what you post online, then don’t post online.
Also, while other locations in the Fediverse might disable access to unauthenticated persons, comments and post in Lemmy are generally public in that way. So, a blocked user could simply logout (or visit from a different instance) to see the content.
Also, as a third-party I do want someone (e.g. a fact checker) to be able reply to a comment with more information, so that I can see it, even if the commenter doesn’t want to see replies (from the “woke mob” or wikipedians, e.g.).
I understand some people think the reply thread under their comments is somehow “owned” and should be “controlled” by them, but I don’t agree. I think this should also be true in most places on the Fediverse, tho it isn’t (as I understand it) on Mastodon (and the like).
Perhaps some people want others reading what they post online but don’t want to be bullied.
You can block bullies. They can continue to waste their time writing mean messages but those will never reach you.
This sounds like the words of an abuser.
That’s just an unhinged thing to say.
Please rethink your life
Huh . I will.
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
deleted by creature
u ok?
derbated buh crater
I’m more annoyed by losing the “Block Community” button when a sub’s admin blocks me.
That’s why I love Voyager for mobile viewing. Not sure the feature’s exclusivity, but you can tag people and add up or downvotes to their accounts total. For instance, you were at +70 upvotes from me. But if I didn’t like you, I could add a tag to your account with why or whatever, and add -1000, effectively highlighting, for me, how much less I enjoy your input compared to others. It doesn’t hide their bullshit but makes it super obvious who sucks complete ass!
Along the vein of blocking, I like how lemmy does it. I can see the block person left a comment and choose to read it or ignore it.
Blocking means you can’t see them. It makes them non existent to you. It doesn’t hide you from them. It’s working as intended.
I’d call that “muting” rather than blocking.
And it leaves vulnerable communities open to abuse, because they’re unable to police their communities and kick out harassers.
Moderators are still able to ban people from communities.
Easier job to do when you’re actually getting reports.
- Reporting = this breaks the rules please moderate
- Blocking = Fuck them, even if they rechnicly abide by the rules I don’t want them near me
- Muting = I don’t want to see what this person does but don’t want to hurt them beyond that
i do that to, with the 2nd bullet point, sometimes i block people to avoid arguements, even if one of the parties maybe in the wrong.(either you misspoke something or the other guy was misinterpreting) most of the time, i block because they dont argue in good faith.(i almost never report people)
Lemmy communities and irl communities are different things that only sometimes overlap.
For example, the irl trans community could be harassed in a Lemmy gaming community. If mods aren’t sympathetic, then they’re torn between just accepting the harassment, or forking the gaming community. While this is what Lemmy was meant to do, practically most Lemmy communities aren’t large enough to meaningful support more than one instance, so one of the instances is going to wither on the vine. And most Lemmy mods seem overworked, besides.
I’m not sure what you’re suggesting. If a gaming community’s members are harassing a trans community, could the trans community’s moderators not simply ban everyone from that gaming community from the trans community? That’s a power that moderators have. You could also report the gaming community to the administrators of their instance and if the administrators thought it was a problem they could shut down that community. You could also ask your own instance’s administrators to defederate from the gaming community’s instance. All of those things are things that can be done with the way the Fediverse is currently set up.
all of those are unrealistic options
I said that forking the community to begin with isn’t realistic. There would be no “trans-friendly gaming” community because it wouldn’t have enough members to sustain it. Lemmy is too small to sustain multiple communities for the same topic, for all but the most popular topics. When you see multiple communities for a topic, almost always all but one is a ghost town.
so splitting the community, or defederating aren’t really options
hopefully going to mod, or failing that the admin, would be successful. but mods and admins are criminally overworked already, and lemmy is too small to maintain a healthy mod pool.I don’t have great technical solutions here, unfortunately.
I’m just trying to explain that what OP wants is reasonable, and everyone here shitting on him is not being reasonable.I’m just trying to explain that what OP wants is reasonable,
And I maintain that it’s not reasonable. You (and OP) want individual users to be able to control what other individual users can see and do on the Fediverse. They’ve tried that on Reddit. RunawayFixer found this experiment, for example. The results were not good from a pragmatic perspective, let alone a philosophical one.
I think you’re going to have to accept that in a free environment there are going to be people saying things and reading things that you don’t approve of. You can create a community with whatever rules you want to enforce there, but you can’t enforce your rules on other communities. Just as they can’t enforce them on yours.
I’m not trying to enforce rules on other communities.
im not even trying to enforce rules on any communityreddit-style blocking would allow the person to continue to be in that community, they wouldn’t even need to be kicked out.
its crazy that you’re framing personally blocking someone so they cant reply to it as though I’m changing the rules for lemmy communities.
Like, OP wasn’t even saying that blocking someone should hide my content from the person I blocked, just that it should stop them from replying to it. it doesn’t even have to be reddit style, it just has to be more than shutting your eyes and ears and saying “lalalalala”
If they are running their own communities yes they can. Mods can and do ban people from the communities.
lemmy communities and irl communities aren’t the same, they only sometimes partially overlap.
Do those communities not have mods? Oh they do? Report them if they’re breaking the rules then. If they’re not breaking the rules then you just need to harden up.
You need to harden up even if they are breaking the rules though.
That’s unfair. It’s rather fair they don’t see me, I blocked them for a reason.
You get to control your own experience, not their experience.
My experience is, I see that there’s a comment, I can’t read it, I can’t upvote or downvote it, and I couldn’t report it, wonderful!
Why would you want to read a comment by someone you’ve blocked, and why would you want to upvote, downvote, or report a comment that you haven’t read?
Ask yourself that question when it’s about time.
I have on occasion unblocked people just to see what was in a thread. I’ve never really been glad that I did so. I blocked them for a reason. I shouldn’t want to engage with their posts. I’m happier and it makes things more calm when I’m not fighting with morons over shit anyone can see is wrong.
What you are asking for is closer to something like being able to personally ban another user from all your own content.
This would be more like if you made all your comments and posts in your own personal community, and then banned a user from it.
This, your suggested paradigm, can also be entirely defeated by someone just… making another account.
Or even: Logging out, and viewing as a guest.
Closer to message board styled systems are not twitter, are not instagram.
If you wanna try to develop something like a ‘private profile’ mode for lemmy, where you would have to grant access to every individual user you wanted to be able to see your posts and comments, good luck, go for it, code’s open source, best I can tell, all dev work on it is unpaid, volunteers.
I am reasonably confident this is basically impossible given how lemmy is architected, but hey, maybe I’m wrong.
I used to agree with you until I actually spoke with people from communities that get regularly harassed.
Muting is great if all you want to do is hide content you don’t like. But if you need to defend yourself against a campaign of harassment, this only gives power to the harassers.
Yes all the have to do is make a new account, but it’s another hurdle they have to cross. Better than no hurdle and also blindfolding yourself
I used to agree with you until I actually spoke with people from communities that get regularly harassed.
Oh great, this again.
Wtf does that even mean?
I mean…
I am describing a technical reality of how lemmy works.
You can ‘disagree’ with that, but uh, you would just be wrong.
Not in the sense of ‘I do not have enough empathy to consider the plight of a regularly harassed person’.
More in the sense of … ok, then don’t use lemmy, if you don’t like how it works.
Or… make it work the way you want it to work, by actually coding it.
Like, I wasn’t joking when I basically said ‘I am reasonbly confident it is impossible to make lemmy work the way you want it to.’
Thats not my opinion, in a… how should things work in an ideal world, sense of ‘opinion’.
It is my opinion, as a person who understands a bit (certainly not all) about how the code just actually works.
If you can figure it out, I’d be impressed.
Alternatively, if you’d like to pay me $50 an hour to attempt to develop that, I may have some room in my schedule.
I could do it at 48/h, js
I know, i had a whole discussion about this 2 years ago, which is why I changed my mind about this very topic (I used to be very much "things are public by default, no expectation of privacy in a social network).
but that doesn’t make it good. this is a problem with the design of lemmy IMO. Lemmy is the best popular option we have right now, and unfortunately popularity is important. Lemmy is already a ghost town, i cant imagine moving to an even smaller alternative.
better than reddit, but far from perfect.
I thought you blocked the person so you wouldn’t have to read what they wrote
The only way to do that in a federated system would be to effectively make blocks public. That has its own disadvantages.
Sorry I’m a nurse, explain it to me like I’m five years old.
It’s hard to control which Information other people get in a system where many servers share information like posts and comments. Think of it as throwing your post on a public wall. Everyone that walks by will be able to see it.
It’s (relatively) easy to control what information you want to see. Or at least information from which sources you want to see, or not see.
Since each instance is its own ‘website’ that shares content with each other, your block would need to be publicly available so that every other site can see it and implement it.
Thanks Final conclusion, no offence: Blocking is rather useless in the Fediverse, unless you submit to complete ignorance.
That’s mostly true; it’s optimized for wide dissemination of information, and the idea of keeping a specific person from seeing information that’s shown to the rest of the world isn’t very compatible with that. It doesn’t really work on Reddit or web forums that are visible without logging in either since a person you’ve blocked can still view your posts anonymously.
A bit more looking brings me to the ActivityPub spec. Your server should tell the blocked user’s server about the block, and the blocked user’s server shouldn’t allow them to interact with your posts or comments (that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be able to see your posts or comments).
The thing is, in network protocol documents, should means the behavior is optional. Fediverse software doesn’t have to support blocks at all according to the protocol.
Imagine a hypothetical situation where I have beef with you. I create a second account and block you. I use this account to scout your posts, then using that other account, I go to all of the posts you’re commenting on, and post comments calling you out for being… I don’t know, whatever nasty thing I want to call you out for. Because that account has blocked you, you can’t see those posts (and presumably not the replies to them, either), and can’t defend yourself.
What problem have we solved?
The problem you’ve solved is that they’re not harassing you in your spaces, and your communities.
If they wanna cry about me in their basement with their own friends, that’s ok. But I want to put hurdles, at least some inconveniences, between myself and their ability to harass me in my communities. Force them to manage 30 accounts, etc.Well multi accounting is the next problem… Just live an unpeacefull live then…
Go back to Reddit? This system stops witch hunts, effectively stops echo chambers from gaining traction, and helps protect against power tripping mods.
Much like someone else told you, you can control what you see. If you don’t see the trolls do they really exist for you? If you don’t go looking for their “ghost” you won’t find it
How is it not fair? You get to decide what you can see and say. You don’t get to decide what I can see and say.
Blocks work the way you want them to on Reddit. And all it did was allow people with fringe political beliefs and misinformation fetishes to stop decent people from refuting them. This is for the best.
It also makes Lemmy objectively less safe because it’s much less effective at limiting stalking and harassment. Especially since way blocks work on Lemmy isn’t clearly communicated to the user.
If you block someone you will never see their harassment.
I get the feeling that some of those blocking people can’t suppress the urge to check what others are commenting to them, defeating the point of the block lol
Don’t make me tap the sign.
if the “Cyberbullying” stays online that is the correct solution, if the cyberbully starts influencing the real world you failed opsec and should bring it up with admins (/police depending on what it is)
The solution here is obvious - creating an instance and/or community with stricter moderation rules, much like blåhaj.zone.
Each instance/community has the ability to set their own general rules and whilst (yes) this means that an individual person can’t guarantee their “safety” everywhere it does mean anyone can create their own little bubble and then pick & choose which parts of the fediverse to connect with.
The fediverse is at its core a free speech project, which is why I like it. There are many other platforms out there that focus on safety.
Because it would allow people to push narratives and not get called out if they block everyone against them.
Imagine a civil transphobe pushing some narrative that flies below the radar of whatever mods are moderating that comm. If they block all the trans users they cannot get called out on their stuff anymore.
I think there was some discourse on this on black mastodon?
Excellent point tbh
I think the way it works is good.
-
If the blocked user browses on another account (or not logged in at all), they can’t tell that you have blocked them.
-
Bot/spam accounts can’t use the blocking system to stop users who target these accounts to call them out on their disguised malicious behavior. This became a problem on Reddit when they changed their blocking system away from what we have here.
Edit: I guess there is a downside of if so many of the sane users block the same nutjobs, then there won’t be anybody to downvote or refute those nutjobs
I guess there is a downside of if so many of the sane users block the same nutjobs, then there won’t be anybody to downvote or refute those nutjobs
This has nothing to do with the block system. No matter how it worked, this would be the case. What you’re describing isn’t a block system, it’s moderation, which we still have (though it’s obviously up to the moderators of any given community). That is to say, blocking only affects what you see. Moderation affects what everyone sees, which is what you’re talking about here.
if so many of the sane users block the same nutjobs, then there won’t be anybody to downvote or refute those nutjobs
Don’t worry, a lot of us never block anybody, specifically so we can do exactly that.
i used to do that, but my sanity suffered, now i block liberally
But the nut job will be stuck in his own bubble unable to talk to everyone, which is more sane than engaging them
True…
-
A lot of people here never had a stalker and it shows.
If you’re concerned about someone being able to see your activity, no blacklisting-based system — which is what OP is talking about in terms of “blocking” would be – on a system without expensive identifiers (which the Threadiverse is not and Reddit is not — both let you make new accounts at zero cost) will do much of anything. All someone has to do is to just make a new account to monitor your activity. Or, hell, Reddit and a ton of Threadiverse instances provide anonymous access. Not to mention that on the Threadiverse, anyone who sets up an instance can see all the data being exchanged anyway.
In practice, if your concern is your activity being monitored, then you’re going to have to use a whitelisting-based system. Like, the Fediverse would need to have something like invite-only communities, and the whole protocol would have to be changed in a major way.
You can choose to federate with a specific server. I believe some mastodon servers would honour requests to only share with specific accounts, but that’s it.
You could possibly have some encryption key shenanigans go on at the client side and build it ontop of the fediverse. It might be possible.
Some stalkers might notice and circumvent, but most won’t because in their mind they aren’t doing anything wrong so why would they check if they got blocked. But apparently if the solution is not perfect it’s not worth doing anything to deter it seems.
I don’t think blocking is an effective measure.
Precisely because blocking here doesn’t do anything really. On a different platform the feature made me invisible to the person and it helped reduce their obsession with me massively. Out of sight out of mind is true for a lot of people.
That style of blocking makes sense for more personal social media, but I don’t think it fits a public forum like the Threadiverse. On Reddit, bad actors were able to weaponize blocking to hide from anyone who would disagree with them, anyone who would push back against misinformation. That did a lot more harm than good.
Everything you post here is public, and you should expect that anyone can see it, even people you do not like. If you don’t want to see someone you don’t like, that’s what blocking is for, but you shouldn’t expect to be able control who can see your posts when they’re all public to begin with.
If something is so sensitive that you think you need to hide it from someone you don’t like, then this probably isn’t the platform to post it on at all.
For anyone wondering how the blocking feature has been weaponized to spread misinformation, in 2022 a redditor did an experiment: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/sdcsx3/testing_reddits_new_block_feature_and_its_effects/
Afaik, the blocking feature is still in the same state as in 2022, which makes modern reddit a heaven for spreading misinformation.
My main experience with blocking is when people use it to “get the last word” in an argument. They’ll write up a response - often containing questions and challenges to my position - and then immediately block me after posting it so that it will look like I gave up in the face of their arguments.
I usually just edit my previous comment with whatever responses seem necessary, playing an Uno Reverse on them since they’ll be the ones who never see it.
It’s still rather annoying, though, because if other people also respond Reddit’s brain-dead implementation prevents me from responding to other people who have responded to someone who blocked me.
I am glad that the Fediverse has a much more sane approach to blocking that doesn’t let it be weaponized like that.
The worst part IMO is that if they commented anywhere in the chain you’re blocked from that entire chain. Say you’re having a nice conversation back and forth about something, then they reply to the original comment (not even seeing you) now you’re blocked from the entire thread of comments.
At the time when I became inactive on Reddit, Azerbaijan was building up to finish the Nagarno Karrabach conflict once and for all. There was a lot of blatant anti Armenian, pro Azerbaijani misinformation being posted in relevant discussions (that they were tolerant, only wanting peace, there was never any ethnic cleansing, …), and most of those comments went without anyone posting a simple fact check to debunk it.
I suspected that they had been sharing a blocklist and had blocked most of those who would call them out on their bullshit. I didn’t bother either since I just expected to be blocked as well and I had basically given up on the platform anyhow. I found swapping accounts to read threads annoying as hell, so it was easier to not comment and just be silently disappointed in humanity.
The fact checks that I did see at the time, were mostly posted as a reply to the top comment of the chain, hoping to go unnoticed by the one spreading misinformation, but that will only work for so long. Reddit is fucked when it comes to discussing political news or gauging public opinion (imo), it’s now designed for spreading misinformation (imo again).
Some users would write their reply and then quickly block the other person so their points couldn’t be contested.
This has happened to me multiple times. And yes, I did consider it to be a serious issue. It’s too abusive of a feature
I’d call what you’re describing “muting” rather than blocking.
I used to agree with you, but then I spoke with some people from persecuted minorities, and this style of blocking just gives power to their abusers rather than keeping their communities and themselves safe.
Yes they can get a new account, but it’s another hurdle, and if we erect enough hurdles then it’ll catch enough of them. Defense in depth.
We’ve seen the problems with Reddit’s style of blocking already.
If someone’s being truly abusive, that’s something you should report to moderators or instance admins.
I agree it has problems, but that doesn’t mean that anything is better.
Reporting someone is good, but isn’t that subject to the exact same reasons why “it won’t work”? If reddit style blocking someone isn’t effective anyways, why would admin bans be effective?
This assumes that admins and mods even have the capacity to deal with all this shit, which seems to be very uncertain.I don’t understand what you mean. Moderator bans do work, that’s a moderator’s job.
a common response I’ve been getting is “blocking doesn’t work, they just need to make a new account”
but then they say “if its really a problem, then they just need to report the user”
but if making a new account would defeat blocking, then making a new account would defeat reporting a user. its either effective in both places or neither place.That isn’t what I said. You’re replying to me to talk about somebody else’s argument, while completely ignoring mine.
sorry i was getting it mixed up, i’ve had a very similar conversations a few times and that rebuttal came up multiple times.
mods and admins are overworked, and they can’t always be expected to keep up to date with dogwhistles along with everything else they have to manage. besides, harassment doesn’t always appear to break ToS - starting rumours and spreading lies about someone can be very difficult to prove to a mod, but can have huge repercussions in some communities.
and besides, it can take a while before mods/admins are able to take action.IMO I think a few things should exist.
I should be able to prevent someone from replying to my content even if I can’t prevent them from seeing it.
Additionally, I think there should be a best effort to make invite-only/private communities. I know that the fediverse makes this technically difficult, but having something is better than having nothing.
Thank you for explaining to me why I didn’t like blocking but couldn’t express why.
Two sides of the medal…
Why not, exactly? I think with the way the fediverse works, this would be a needless hassle for them to program this in. IIRC, posts are all separate and are just referring to another post. I think it’ll be up to their server on whether or not to honour that block (your server could possibly sever the link on it’s frontend, but that won’t change that the person linked your post to theirs)
And even if you could, they could still post a screenshot locally or write stuff about you.
How the Threadiverse works today — blocking hides content from blocked users, but doesn’t affect their ability to comment — is how Reddit originally worked, and I think that it was by far a better system.
Reddit only adopted the “you can’t reply to a comment from someone who has blocked you” system later. What it produced was people getting into fights, adding one more comment, and then blocking the other person so that they’d be unable to respond, so it looked like the other person had conceded the point.
A thousand percent this.
Reddit’s new system makes a ton of sense until you see it in action in a cat fight with the blocked user having to edit their previous comment to clarify they’re now unable to respond to anything the other user is saying and everything turns into a mess.While I could totally agree neither method is perfect, it only takes one heated thread on Reddit to see why (IMO) this new method is much worse than the previous.
I’m not totally sure about the chronology, but I think that the “old->new” block change on Reddit may have been due to calls from Twitter users. Most of the people I saw back on Reddit complaining about the old behavior prior to the change were saying “on Twitter, blocked users can’t respond”.
On Reddit, the site is basically split up into a series of forums, subreddits. On the Threadiverse, same idea, but the term is communities. And that’s the basic unit of moderation — that is, people set up a set of rules for how what is permitted on a given community, and most restrictions arise from that. There are Reddit sitewide restrictions (and here, instancewide), but those don’t usually play a huge role compared to the community-level things.
So, on Twitter — and I’ve never made a Twitter account, and don’t spend much time using it, but I believe I’ve got a reasonable handle on how it works — there’s no concept of a topic-specific forum. The entire site is user-centric. Comments don’t live in forums talking about a topic; they only are associated with the text in them and with the parent comment. So if you’re on Twitter, there has to be some level of content moderation unless you want to only have sitewide restrictions. On Twitter, having a user be able to act as “moderator” for responses makes a lot more sense than on Reddit, because Twitter lacks an analog to subreddit moderators.
So Twitter users, who were accustomed to having a “block” feature, naturally found Reddit’s “block” feature, which did something different from what they were used to, to be confusing. They click “block”, and what it actually does is not what they expect — and worse, at a surface glance, the behavior is the same. They think that they’re acting as a moderator, but they’re just controlling visibility of comments to themselves. Then they have an unpleasant surprise when they realize that what they’ve been doing isn’t what they think that they’ve been doing.
Yeah, looking through a Twitter’s user lens I can see why they’re confused. What on Reddit was a block, on Twitter would be a Mute. Maybe they should call it that.
I’d also add, for people who feel that they don’t have a good way to “hang up” on a conversation that they don’t want to be participating any further without making it look like they agree with the other user, the convention is to comment something like this:
“I don’t think that we’re likely to agree on this point, so I’m afraid that we’re going to have to agree to disagree.”
That way, it’s clear to everyone else reading the thread that the breaking-off user isn’t simply conceding the point, but it also doesn’t prevent the other user from responding (or, for that matter, other users from taking up the thread).
EDIT: Also, on Reddit, I remember a lot of users who had been subjected to the “one more comment and a block” stuff then going to try to find random other comments in the thread where other users might see their comment, responding to those comments complaining that the other user had blocked them, and then posting their comment there, which tended to turn the whole thread into an ugly soup.
Also, with Reddit’s new system, at least with some clients and if I remember correctly, the old Web UI, there was no clear indication as to why the comment didn’t take effect — it looked like some sort of internal error, which tended to frustrate users. Obviously, that’s not a fundamental problem with a “blocking a user also prevents responding” system, but it was a pretty frustrating aspect of Reddit’s implementation of it.
This is like putting up a tall fence to obscure the view of your neighbors and being surprised they don’t cease existing on the other side
You don’t want to just block users, you want to unilaterally ban them
There’s a difference between fair and just
I want to stop them from engaging with me. I don’t want to let them keep engaging with me without my ability to see what they’re saying.
Edit: Give persecuted minorities a way to protect themselves.
This comes from discussions I’ve had with minorities about the harassment they face on Lemmy and mastodon, and the currentblockmute feature is more harmful than helpful.If you’re using “block” to curate your content, then it works great. If you’re trying to prevent harassment, then it’s counterproductive
Engagement is a two-way street. By blocking them you have stopped engaging with them.
The fact that you’re upset by what other people are doing somewhere that you can’t see and that doesn’t affect you seems like a you problem, frankly. Just forget about them.
This isn’t about me, this is about what people from persecuted minorities have told me they need, when I bought this exact argument to them.
I used to say what you’re saying them they described to be the harassment that they face
In that case substitute “they” for “you” in my comment. The meaning remains the same, as does my position.
Oh god, did Lemmy turn into a libertarian hellscape while I wasn’t looking?
What are your opinions on community bans, since all your arguments apply equally to those. Let me see you rectify those positions.
When did an appreciation for free speech become the exclusive domain of the Libertarians? I don’t want you to be able to unilaterally silence me, therefore I’m a Libertarian?
What are your opinions on community bans, since all your arguments apply equally to those. Let me see you rectify those positions.
Community bans are the domain of a select few individuals who are responsible for maintaining the overall state of the community. If they abuse their power then the community suffers and people should go elsewhere.
Personally, I’d rather a system where one could “subscribe” to specific moderators so that if one goes rogue people could choose to unsubscribe from their moderation actions, that would IMO be the best combination of freedom and control. But I can understand that being rather complicated to implement well and perhaps a little confusing for the users, so I’m okay with the current setup as a compromise.
When did an appreciation for free speech become the exclusive domain of the Libertarians? I don’t want you to be able to unilaterally silence me, therefore I’m a Libertarian?
Minor nitpick with your comment: there’s a semantic difference between “Libertarian” and “libertarian”, and I suspect you want the latter.
Small-l “libertarian” is used to refer to the political ideology.
Big-L “Libertarian” is used to refer to the Libertarian Party.
The same sort of convention also shows up elsewhere, like “democrat” and “Democrat”, “republican” and “Republican”, etc.
How is “not letting you see what I personally wrote” consider to be “unilaterally silencing you” ?
What a mind bogglingly disingenuous response.I’m not saying that the reddit style block is good.
I’m saying that the current “mute” style block hangs vulnerable people out to dry.I’m ok trying something else, like maybe what you suggested.
Ah… Would reporting them rather than blocking be more appropriate, then? I recognize reporting isn’t always effective, but the right answer seems to be getting the community to police it rather than hiding your commentary from them.
And I recognize I’m speaking from a dearth of experience, here - this isn’t something I’ve dealt with, so I’m genuinely asking!
I’m generally trying to go off of a conversation I had with someone 2 years ago in lemmy. I was generally of the opposite opinion to my current stance, and they explained how the current “everything is public, dont even try to hide it from people” stance is problematic to persecuted minorities. It was 2 years ago so I’m a bit fuzzy on the details - I had to go look it up because someone didnt believe that the conversation even existed, but i didnt re-read the whole comment section.
their point was that, while total privacy in a federated service is likely impossible, you want to make it non-trivial for harassers to do harassment.
reporting is absolutely more appropriate than blocking, but blocking has a few advantages:
- its immediate, you dont need to wait for mods/admin.
- you don’t need to prove to an admin that something that the harasser said about you is actually a lie.
- mods/admins don’t need to be up-to-date on all the current dogwhistles
- it doesn’t need to actually affect the harasser beyond you. they dont need to get banned from the whole community or instance, unless the community or instance feels like they should be. its lower impact. This is important for lemmy communities that represent real communities, like classes or teams or neighborhoods.
If you can’t see the replies how can you possibly be harassed by it?
This isn’t about me, this is about what people from persecuted minorities have told me they need, when I bought this exact argument to them.
The same arguments apply, though.
Your version of blocking doesn’t exactly handle the problem you’re describing well, either, as someone wishing to spread hate or “off-screen harassment” can block their direct target which, under the model, will mean they can’t see it, and then post.
But they’re not being harassed because they can’t see it……
thats not the entire extent of harassment. harassment extends far beyond insulting someone to their face.
You can’t stop other people from badmouthing you behind your back. That’s just life. Accept it and move on. Trying to censor people because you don’t like what they’re saying is peak liberal fascism.
here, let me link you to the paradox of tolerance, you absolute mudcake.
try learning something.
If you care what they are saying, you shouldn’t block them. If you don’t care, you shouldn’t care they are commenting on you.
I don’t want other people being able to hide criticism of their posts/comments they don’t like from me. Allowing you to completely block engagement with your posts would just strengthen echo chambers and bolster misinformation IMO.
What I’m saying also protects vulnerable communities at least a little, and what you’re saying leaves them vulnerable.
If they’re able to comment on my content I’m my communities, then I need to be able to see if they’re spreading misinformation about me to my friends and acquaintances. Rather than just blind myself to that, I’d rather put barriers between my content and their ability to do that.
Imo protecting people from harassment is more important than protecting my ability to combat misinformation on some strangers’ posts.
You might be better served using the “report” button if you are indeed dealing with harassment. That would be the appropriate tool for such things.
But I am going to go out on a limb and guess that you want to be able to just unilaterally punish anyone you don’t like.
That’s a limb that wouldn’t support your weight.
I used to support your concept of block, until I was in a thread like this one, and someone from a minority community explained to me the consequences of these design decisions
You want to at the click of a button stop everyone from reading something you don’t want to see. If you dislike reading a persons comments, then you can block them and no longer see what they write. If you are being harassed you can report it, but what you want to do is police other users as a regular user.
You are also making the “won’t someone think of the children” argument as your (so far) only point.
This is a place of public discourse, what you want can be achieved using a txt editor and a friend.
“won’t someone think of the children” isn’t always wrong.
What’s absolutely crazy to me is that you say “blocking won’t work because they can get a new account” and then in the very same breath suggest that reporting is a viable strategy. Either it is or it isn’t, which is it?
Public/private discourse is a false dichotomy. What are your thoughts on a community’s ability to ban someone? Should groups lose that ability, since apparently it’s both ineffective and toxic, apparently?
Then go to a private platform. This is a platform for public discourse, not private communities.
PS: You could even make a community on lemmy and ban people as it’s moderator. Although a different platform may still be a better fit.
Yeah, fuck those minorities, amirite? They don’t deserve to use Lemmy anyways\
- you, a couple min ago
Please go make your own place where those minorities (whoever they are) can do whatever they want.
- Them before you put words in their mouth to make a terrible argument.
i mean, i’ve linked you to the conversation I had.
have you tried to talk to anyone about it? or are you just some white dude confidently saying that nobody should change anything because it works for you, so it should work for everyone else?
because you really sound like that.
I had a feeling playing the victim and name calling was coming next after your last message.
But just in case anyone arguing in good faith needs it spelled out: Not every thing has to cater to every audience. Lemmy, at least for me, is primarily for sharing information, whether news, opinions or just memes. On such a site, I believe it is more important to avoid echo chambers and misinformation. So it requires a moderator or an admin to ban people. It’s not as if Lemmy is an unmoderated hellscape, it just leans more towards free speech over creating perfectly safe spaces than you may like. Avoiding echo chambers and misinformation benefits all users, including minorities. Therefore, every site hast to find a balance for it’s use-case. I would expect many people, whether minorities or otherwise, can handle occasional mean words or words they disagree with on their screens. But it is also alright if you are more sensitive or not in a good place psychologically and don’t want to deal with this. There are other places on the internet you can go, that do have the kind of blocking you want. Some places will lean towards free speech, some towards heavy moderation. That’s the great thing about the internet, not every place has to be the same.
It’s not your content when you’re posting it in public forums. It’s public content.
If you want to be able to see when people spread “misinformation” about you, don’t block people.
the fact that there are only public forums on lemmy is a problem itself.
If you want to be able to see when people spread “misinformation” about you, don’t block people.
what are you even talking about here?
I’m sorry, but I feel like you need to support the statement “This comes from discussions I’ve had with minorities about the harassment they face on Lemmy and mastodon” a bit more. Your whole argument for limiting the speech of others is predicated on this statement.
I’m not saying that minorities couldn’t face harassment on Lemmy, but Lemmy is by far the most liberal and minority supportive online forum I have ever experienced. Part of the reason Lemmy is so niche is because it doesn’t have the mainstream attention other platforms have and is heavily moderated.
If you are engaging in an instance where harassment is occurring the moderators generally ban the person quickly. If the moderators of that instance aren’t doing their job people generally leave and the instance dies from lack of content (there just aren’t that many people on Lemmy). If someone follows you from a different instance to another the current instance moderators will likely ban them even if the one you met them on doesn’t. Finally, if they are direct messaging you you can block them, they can continue to message you but you won’t see their messages and neither will anyone else.
What minority group have you talked with that are receiving harassment and what extra protections were needed that aren’t already here?
the discussion was 2 years old, so I’m a bit fuzzy - it looks like it was only 1 person. but it was enough to convince me from basically saying what yall are saying here “don’t expect privacy on a public site” to “there should be an attempt at privacy, and people facing harassment should have some measure of control to protect themselves”
I didnt feel the need to make the provide their credentials as a minority and prove to me that they’re being harassed and that muting the harasser wasn’t enough. What they said made sense.
Looking at the post you reference the person you talked to is a transgender person who moderates both LGBTQ+ and Transfem in Lemmy.blahaj.zone, they provide more than enough evidence of their minority status, but that wasn’t really needed. The question was what group was being harassed and thus this interaction would imply that the LGBTQ community is being harassed on Lemmy.
What I feel like you missed in your previous discussion is that the other person was talking about privacy in the context of being outed in the real world. The harassment being referred to was in the context of your real life identity being revealed or connected to your online conversation.
Under this context they are looking for a feature similar to how Facebook (at least previously) allowed you to pick who could see your post as you were posting it. That way you could individually disallow specific people or groups from seeing them.
This doesn’t imply that the issue is that someone is being harassed on Lemmy and thus we need better blocking options. It’s really only an issue for someone who wants to dox themselves and still have private conversations, in which case Lemmy and most online forums can’t accomplish that natively across all instances/subreddits/groups. The only solution is to have a private instance with vetting and heavy moderation. If you don’t dox yourself you can generally avoid the whole issue here.
Based on this I think you’re making a different argument than what the block feature is or ever could be.
But if you don’t see what they’re saying, why do you care? How does it affect you?
What you want is to be able to silence them because you don’t like what they’re saying, ie censorship.
me personally? I don’t particularly care. i rarely use mute/block features.
but I understand that for some people, its a problem, because harassment doesn’t just end at insults, it can also be spreading rumours and talking shit.
its not going to be obvious to onlookers that one person has muted another, so if the harasser goes all over the victim’s posts saying terrible lies and rumours, then the victim should be able to know that and take action to stop it, even if the rumours aren’t against the community/instance ToS, and the victim can’t prove to the mods that the rumours are lies.
OK so you do want censorship.
yes, we all want some censorship.
defederation is censorship.
instance bans are censorship.
community bans are censorship.\is your position that none of those should be allowed?
if so, thats a wild position to take, but you should say it with your full chest at least.
if thats not your position, why are you drawing the line here? and why are you willing to die on this arbitrary hill?yes, we all want some censorship.
Speak for yourself.
defederation is censorship.
instance bans are censorship.
community bans are censorship.\
And I disagree with them.
is your position that none of those should be allowed?
My position is that it should all be up to the user. Let me block instances and communities if I don’t want to see them. Let me choose what content I want to see. I don’t need some mods deciding what is and isn’t acceptable based on their ideologies and beliefs, because as we all know and see every day, most abuse that power almost all the time.
if so, thats a wild position to take, but you should say it with your full chest at least.
It’s not wild at all, and I have never tried to hide it. I’ve said it openly many, many times on Lemmy. I think all censorship is bad. Only weak minded people want or need censorship.
Nice attempted “gotcha” though.
