Ask Lemmy

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 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.

Blocking someone is not a tool to silence them. It's a tool to ignore them.

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.

I think the way it works is good.

1. If the blocked user browses on another account (or not logged in at all), they can’t tell that you have blocked them.

2. 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

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.

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.

It... Makes perfect sense?

YOU blocked them. They didn't block you.

It's like when you were a kid and told to ignore the kid bullying you; except that it actually works.

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

Out of sight out of mind. 😊

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.

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?

A lot of people here never had a stalker and it shows.

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.

If I block someone, and one of their posts or comments gets reported for moderation, it won't allow the moderation tools to work. I have to un-block them to moderate them.

The way Reddit does is abusive. I called out a guy for spamming, he blocked me, he's the one who creates TV discussion threads, I can't participate anymore.

Because the alternative is easily abused, see all the issues Reddit has with this type of block mechanism.

The core of the problem as I see it is, this gives every user limited moderation powers in every sub, the extent of that power is determined mainly just by how much they post and comment (blocked users can't comment under their posts, and can't reply to any comment in a chain started by the blocker), and the extent to which it is happening is invisible to most users. People advocating for this seem to assume it will be used mostly defensively, to prevent harassment, but the feature has way more utility offensively, and it's totally unaccountable. If there is something someone is saying (not even necessarily to you) that you don't like for whatever reason, whether or not it's against the rules and regardless of what anyone else thinks about it, you can partially silence them by blocking and then working to get engagement in the same spaces they comment in. Think about if this was implemented on Lemmy, lots of communities have only one or a few people making all the posts, if one or more of them blocked you that's almost the same as a ban. It doesn't make it better that the people making those posts are often also moderators, because it would be a way to pseudo ban people without it showing up in the mod log.

Moderation of online discussion spaces should be transparent and accountable, it shouldn't be a covert arms race between users.

I'm more annoyed by losing the "Block Community" button when a sub's admin blocks me.

From a technical standpoint, doing it in another way requires your blocks to be public.

He and you are both publishing individual comments with metadata telling which thread and where in it that these entries go. The instance hosting the community simply pull all these entries together. To cut off that response then your instance must tell that hosting instance to detach that reply from the blocked user. Currently Lemmy doesn't support any such thing.

My only gripe is that the blocked comment’s replies are also not visible. I want to see what everyone else is saying, even if they’re replying to a blocked user. I just don’t care what the blocked user says.

I don't mind it, but if the devs change it I hope they don't take the Reddit route that prevents you from replying to any comment chain the user is in, especially with how small Lemmy is. Direct replies I can understand.

Agreed. It’s a flaw in the system