Ask Lemmy

I have blocked more in the last year than I have in the last 20 combined. There are far, far too many people arguing to troll, arguing in bad faith, threatening, or insulting that will do everything they can to bait you, derail your argument, DM you with insults, etc.

It’s probably because I’ve become far more critical of anti-science, shitty politics, and shitty people, so I’m sure that’s part of the reason, but nonetheless I don’t have the time or patience anymore to waste on the pigeons knocking pieces over and shitting on the chessboard declaring victory, so I block them.

I also have been blocked outright when presenting any objectively factual rebuttal. Facts are often strictly disallowed in the narrative, particularly political and anti-science ones. People don’t want their flow of internet “likes” interrupted.

Blocking is self-care. Just with the added teeth of "get tf out of my phone."

That's it.

It's maintaining your personal peace, and frankly I find it weird that it's even a conversation let alone as stigmatized as it is. People still have a litany of ways to reconnect outside digital. It's literally what people had to do before blocking was a thing.

Why would you read someone you don't want to? Why would you use a feature of the platform?

There's this streamer I sort of follow who did some reaction streams to proximitychat videos. If you don't know, it's basically this guy in VRchat who joins public lobbies and trolls the people in there - most of them crazily obsessed with the game and roleplay to the point of basically living in VR.

This guy will be in a public lobby for maybe hours, constantly trolling, and all they do is ask him to stop. Maybe they'll threaten to remove him as a friend (which is such a common occurrence that it might almost seems like capital punishment to these terminally online dweebs), but they almost never kick or block him outright.

In the reaction streams the question is always, why not just kick and block the guy? Sure, don't block everyone who makes an annoying remark outright, but as I said, this guy is in there for hours without seemingly any attempt to actually get him to stop. It seems that the easiest thing is to just talk a bit, find out he's there in bad faith and then block him, but they never do.

What I'm getting at is, people should block more. Not that, again, you should block everyone who slightly annoys you or challenges your viewpoint, but as soon as you find out they are there in bad faith, just block and move on. I feel ancient for saying this but as they say: don't feed the trolls.

Blocking is a VERY GOOD THING.

The internet is a cesspool. You need to curate it.

Personally, I block people who espouse things I believe are genuinely spiteful, hateful, or shitty. Generally, I use the block button to "curate" my experience with the intention that I can use Lemmy as brief escapism when I'm in the bathroom or on the train without having my mood affected by somebody posting something shitty.

I don't block anyone for normal disagreements, because I'm a relatively normal adult and as such that sort of thing doesn't bother me.

Trolls have no right to any of my time.

People don't like being forced to engage with belligerent reactionaries.

I've got better things to do than read a load of horseshit from bad-faith weirdos, so I block them. No point engaging with them and reading their opinions makes my day measurably worse.

hmm, blocked! /j

I constantly block both users and communities on Lemmy. Mostly because they are spouting doomer nonsense, and I ain't got no time for their bullshit.

I'm 31 now but I've always been pretty quick with a block button, i don't mind people disagreeing with me, but some people are just overly aggressive and I find life's better to just not care about them and block.

I also block trolls because you know don't feed the trolls.

Im very pro block. I prefer that users can do stuff themselves over moderation honestly. I would like blocking to be reciprical and I have to do a lot of it for communities because the language thing often either seems to not work or my suspicion is the person making the community did not set it. That being said I block few users but tons of communities. The fediverse is not really large enough to subscribe to some stuff and ignore the rest. I block anything I have no interest in or sometimes just because its to niche for me. Things like sports, memes, and communities about like one specific thing like a tv series or video game.

For me personally, I just don't feel like dealing with yet another source of garbage that I don't want to read.

In happier times, I felt a different way about blocking. Nowadays, the fucking potus forces the country to match some phony fucking Fox News image, and I don't really care about reading some dumb assholes dumb rant anymore. Not blocking people and "dialog" and "debate bro" shit isn't fixing this crap anyway, so I'm going to go ahead and make my own life contain a little less hassle.

That's also why I'm only really here and on mastodon. I know they're basically left wing safe spaces. I frankly don't give a fuck.

It depends what you're on (social media) for.

If you're there to get some positive social interaction and read some articles or funny pictures, it completely makes sense to block agitators or regular shitposters.

If you're there to have political arguments and engage with rage bait then you leave everyone unblocked.

Its really not that complicated.

Life is too short to deal with weirdos treating lemmy as their blog. Some are overzealous but you have to curate your own space on federated platforms

I use it to curate my lemmy experiance. 99% of the users/communities I block aren't for anything personal, they're just clogging up my ALL feed with things I dont care about (for example, sports ball or foreign language comms).

Counterpoint- why hasn't blocking been more common?

I'm a millennial, so I've basically grown up with the internet. Blocking has been a feature on basically any website, app, etc. that lets you interact with other people for as long as I can remember.

And I've never been afraid to use it. I've blocked probably hundreds of people across countless platforms over the last 2 decades or so, and I think my Internet experience has been better for it.

When I was in school, and I assume still to this day, one of the big things that always seemed to have people's feathers ruffled was "cyberbullying" and other sorts of online harassment.

Now I'll admit, somehow I ended up a reasonably well-liked, maybe even popular dude, (no idea how my weird, antisocial, probably-autistic ass pulled that off) so I was never really the target of it myself.

But it always baffled me how people let it be a thing. A whole lot of those problems always seemed like they could have been solved by just hitting the block button.

Not all of them of course, but a lot of them. Blocking someone of course doesn't stop them from talking about you to someone else, but at that point a lot of it can just be out of sight and out of mind.

Back when I still had a Facebook, I had probably half of my town blocked because they were always posting dumb shit in the local groups. I had a bunch of businesses blocked because they spammed advertisements everywhere. I had actual friends who I hung out with IRL blocked or at least unfollowed because they flooded my feed with shitposts. Half of my family was blocked because I just didn't want to deal with them on social media. I preemptively blocked people I work with or otherwise knew casually because they don't need to see what I'm doing online.