Gradine
🏳️⚧️ (she/her) 🇵🇸
Spoken like a person who's never received any kind of targeted online harassment!
Thread block
- Thread starter Micah Sweet
- Start date
Generally speaking, the people who have a problem with blocking are the people who have been blocked by a lot of people. The correlation is remarkably high.
Micah Sweet
Level Up & OSR Enthusiast
But if you block the person you can't see anything they target you with. And in any case, does that have to be the default option for everyone?
Gradine
🏳️⚧️ (she/her) 🇵🇸
Yes. That is the point.
Not at all, but it does need to be an option.
Gradine
🏳️⚧️ (she/her) 🇵🇸
I've found, and have argued before in many of these threads, that there are few dogwhistles or other red flags that prove as ultimately correct as arguing against the existence of blocking.
SableWyvern
Cruel Despot
That doesn't seem at all remarkable to me -- it's just a logical outcome. I mean, I wouldn't even have clicked in this thread if I hadn't had someone implement two-way blocking on me and cause a thread to disappear. The more someone is blocked, the more likely this is to happen, and thus the more likely they are to comment on it. Conversely, if someone is never blocked, it's likely they don't even know this is a possibility, and they have little or no reason to comment or care.
cbwjm
Legend
The 3rd side is the people who do the blocking, we aren't going to complain either since the system is working for us. I checked my ignore list, around 21 people on there. Every now and then I'll remove prople from it but not long after I'm reminded why I blocked them in the first place.
Maxperson
Morkus from Orkus
Or just post that you created it because you can't see the other one. Hopefully they won't merge it then.Just create a new thread and hope the mods merge it with one you can read.
Maxperson
Morkus from Orkus
Except that nobody here is arguing that. It's the missing thread problem that is being discussed, not folks speaking out against blocking. And as for harassment, the mods here are good at shutting things like that down. The block feature Doesn't stop what isn't happening. This place isn't Reddit or other places on the net.
SableWyvern
Cruel Despot
Exactly. While I don't use the block feature, I have no problem with anyone else using it.
I do have a problem with two-way blocking, as it's disruptive, feels to me to be contrary to the point of posting on a public forum and doesn't necessarily work (it only prevents someone from seeing your posts if they're logged in).
If first discovered two-way blocking on here when I received a notification that I'd been quoted, went to have a look and found an unintelligible thread with no sign of this message. Someone had turned up, made a pretty silly comment, had numerous people (including me) dispute the point, then they stormed off. I assume they'd two-way blocked everyone who disagreed with them, although I have no way to know.
Notably (and this may or may not have been intentional), the two-way block was essentially weaponised -- they got in their last word, quoting me, then blocked, so I couldn't actually see or respond to what was said. It wasn't until I logged out and read through the thread that I worked out what had happened. You see this happen a bit on reddit, where people intentionally use blocking as weapon because of the two-way nature, and will finish with some counterpoint, insult or whatever, which their target is completely unable to see or respond to.
Other than that, having whole threads just vanish is also clearly an issue in it's own right and is why this thread exists in the first place.
And, again, I'm not expecting anything to change here. I'm not seeing any sign it's being abused here they way it is on reddit and it's caused me no more than a mild annoyance. But a calm, polite discussion on the topic such as we have here, seems like the right time to share some opinions.
