There may be an age or generational explanation for this, but I especially notice this behavior on Reddit while not nearly as much here on Lemmy (though maybe that’s also a mater of implementation).
It seems many are so quick to assert overly-confident positions, but then hit-and-run with some smarmy remark at even the slightest challenge, then quickly block. Like, not even crazy stuff. Just basic, civil disagreements. I can pretty well predict when it will happen, and it always feels like such a petty ego-sparing fingers-in-ears denial thing to do, and to me if anything shows they were not very confident in their views being challenged.
I think I’ve only blocked a handful of people over a decade who were actively spamming, stalking, or spewing extremely hateful rhetoric and I just reported them simultaneously. You have to cross a pretty extreme and irrational line for me to do that.
The reason I ask is to see if I’m missing something; to better understand the mindset of those who do.
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I blocked pretty freely on Twitter till I left the site around when I got the Bluesky invite. I still block freely on there, but not Reddit or Lemmy. I didn’t on Reddit cause there was a cap on how many accounts you can have blocked and Lemmy doesn’t handle blocks in a way I like so I just don’t bother. I like being able to curate my experience and the experience others that interact with me have. I got no energy for shit stains so blocking is easier than constantly knowing they exist.
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).
next you’ll tell me you don’t like incredibly low effort political memes reposted from (social media site you specifically joined lemmy to avoid), smh
Why are you subscribed to them? No need to block just curate.
I subscribe to ones I’m interested in. But sometimes I browse all to stumble across new interesting communities. I block the ones I see repeatedly and aren’t interested in. I block mass posters, I block bots, I block tankies, I block mods/admins of larger communities. It just makes my all browsing time more efficient.
I’ve been online since BBS days. Never blocked anyone. Never could understand why people do that. Just ignore them, whatever.
So many people, later on down the road have something to say worthwhile that I wouldn’t have known if I just blocked them. Gotta give some leeway on the internet, no one really knows tone or intent most of the time.
Yeah I have a similar mindset. I honestly have a lot of people tagged on here from some pretty rough debates at times. But weeks, months, years later I still up vote some of their stuff.
I dunno I haven’t blocked anyone and I don’t know if anyone has blocked me.
If you want, I’ll block you so you can feel included.
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.
I have never blocked any one on the internet. And I probably have been in online conversations for longer than you have been alive.
I find it so strange that people do that. We learned in the 80’s that people are probably liars and there are trolls. So just ignore them.
Turns out a lot of people may have something that gets you annoyed while at the same time have something worthwhile to say about a different topic.
And how are we ever going to learn from each other if we just block each other all the time?
I think the only thing that has really changed is that way more people just talk about who and what they block instead of just blocking and moving on.
last I checked I had over 220 users blocked. now it’s probably 250.
I block people who are willfully ignorant or trolls.
I value my time, patience and sanity. There had been too many instances where I’ve poured way too much investment into things or people that just were not worth a single minute. The moment I feel someone gives me a snarky remark, wants to be a prick, wants to gaslight and whatever petty and bitter levels of engagement they want to bother me with. Fuck them, they’ll be blocked.
It does not make you weak or petty, that’s just them making up bullshit to excuse themselves when they knowingly were the problem.
Now in some cases it can be a little stupid to block people, like knowing you’re the one starting shit or deciding to get into debates you aren’t fitted to handle. Why would you do that to yourself? If you can’t handle it, don’t do anything. Lesson learned.
Damn if there was a function in real life where I can block someone and their existence disappears where other people can see them and I can’t? Fuck, dude, sign me up.
I use user notes for this - notes like “argues in bad faith,” “is knowledgeable about x,” etc. Then if I feel talking to someone is a waste, I still get their input if I want it but know whether or not to engage.
If someone isn’t convinced by a reasonable explanation, they aren’t worth engaging with.
You find this out pretty quick when trying to interact in good faith on the internet.
Because if you block someone who is annoying you, you won’t get annoyed by them anymore. It’s pretty great.
I block the moment I realize someone is a troll, or worse. No exception.
Like already mentioned, life is way too short to waste one more second of it with those people desire to be as harmful as they can be or with their constant need for attention and validation.
Edit: typos
Sometimes things are not as they seem due to language barriers or different people from neurotypicals.
Otherwise there’s also a lot of shit going around, so it’s understandable.
Sometimes things are not as they seem due to language barriers or different people from neurotypicals.
Completely agree (even more so, not being a native English speaker myself). If there was any doubt, ‘the moment I realize’ doesn’t mean I instantly block anyone not agreeing with me or publishing something I would consider rude, or useless. Only that, the moment I made up my mind on who the person is, there is no hesitation.
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
Agree with this. I don’t shout my opinion and then block, but I definitely block a lot of users who just have really intense views they want to share, and communities I have no interest in, and over the last couple years my curated space is a reasonable mix of memes, news, and not to extreme of views, and it’s nice.
I used to agree with you. Ever since I started just blocking anyone that was being annoying my experience on the web has been great.
If you are talking about banning people in debate, Then you are not being fair. Any criticism can cause annoyance to some people, even if criticism have pleasant wording
I never said anything about a debate
Honestly, turning inwardly to my family has been great. Especially given the political climate and my general disappointment. Finding “your people” is quite pleasant. Tribalism is sort of ingrained into us at a primate level, I suppose.
Still, I guess I try to strike a balance when all possible because I know the traps of building one’s own silo and the consequences that can have.
Im not advocating for you to turn away anyone that disagrees with you, just those that are annoying about it.
As I get older I value my time more and more, every second spent reading or talking to some asshole online is a second I’ll never get back.
People are trying to ‘win the argument’ for personal satisfaction. They’re not trying to self-correct or seek the truth.
I think I’ve only blocked a handful of people over a decade
I’m the opposite; I have hundreds of people blocked, mostly because they are bores.
Another aspect of this that I’ve found is that engaging in benevolent smalltalk with someone here on Lemmy somehow sometimes results in them treating it as an argument.
No, I will not concede to whatever point you’re trying to make; I was making conversation, you were trying to win an argument. I don’t care if you’re convinced your particular approach to a particular problem is better than mine.
And if they then don’t realize that I’m not interested in engaging, and keep the “debate me bro” attitude, they usually end up on my blocklist, or at the very least they end up with a red tag behind their name.
No, u’r wrong 😜
Your mom likes me anyway
She told me likes me more
That’s what she said!
Reddit made that change where if you blocked someone they couldn’t reply to you in a thread.
That was quickly weaponized so that you could ‘win’ an argument. Someone could write something and your reply would not appear, so it looked like you realized you were wrong.
Only way around this is editing your previous comment, though I’ve been told that can sometimes lead to a ban? Never happened to me though.
What really annoys me about that is that it prevents you from replying to anyone ELSE who replies to you in that thread, which is completely absurd.
I don’t know about this “winning” theory.
Generally, people feel like they’ve won when they get the last word in. If you block someone, you don’t see their replies and assuming they do reply to your last comment, they would get the last word.
Personally, I block people when I realize there’s no point in continuing the conversation. I’m not trying to win an argument, I’m just over it and don’t want to interact with their toxicity.
If you block someone, you don’t see their replies
On both Reddit and Lemmy, blocking someone prevents them from replying. It prevents them from even seeing your final word*
* sort of. Depending on exactly where and how they look.
I don’t believe they are blocked from replying on Lemmy. That’s the opposite of what I’ve heard, but I haven’t really experimented.
Pretty sure it doesn’t do that on lemmy. I definitely have comments with blocked responses (they show up a specific way in Jerboa) from people I blocked ages ago. If I open the thread in a browser where I’m not signed in I can see their response clearly.
So they can still see and reply to my comments, I just don’t have to see more than an error message that the comment couldn’t be loaded on my end.
I might be wrong, but I was under the assumption that Lemmy doesn’t stop them from replying. There was a recent conversation complaining because blocking people didn’t silence them.
If you want to test it, feel free to reply and block me, I’ll see if I can keep the conversation going. Unblock later tonight to see if it worked.
I guess Reddit does it that way, but I try not to think about that place anymore.
My experience is that on Reddit it replaces the comment with
[], similar to[]when a mod removes it, or[]when they delete it themselves.And that on Lemmy, it depends on client. On lemmy-ui (the default web client), it sometimes shows up as that “1 more reply” option, but when you click it, it never loads in. On Jerboa, it says something along the lines of “unable to retrieve this comment”.
Both of those are what happens when you come across a comment from a person who blocked you in the wild. It may or may not be different when it’s in your inbox.
I’ve been blocked by at least one person on Lemmy, for reasons that I honestly have no idea, and have come across this in the wild a couple of times, including opening something I originally found on my computer in Jerboa to double-check, as well as opening up incognito where I’m logged out and therefore not blocked.
Also replying to @MagicShel@lemmy.zip, @wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com
I’ve blocked a lot too. Mostly people who have closed minds and aren’t listening just waiting for their turn to reply. I don’t have patience for that shit anymore, find someone else. *Block
People are trying to ‘win the argument’ for personal satisfaction. They’re not trying to self-correct or seek the truth.
How do we promote more people to cooperate instead of compete in the mutual pursuit of truth while maintaining humility and introspection that their own views could be incorrect?
Different format of discussion.
Social media: people trying to win binary points 👍👎
Wikipedia, scientific discussion, or a deliberative assembly: slow process towards writing a statement of a position, with lots of study along the way
There’s such a massive disconnect there, though, isn’t there? I agree the slow deliberative process is key; but there is clearly a missing piece of the puzzle to bridge that gap between experts and laypeople that unfilled leads to well… All this.
Not everyone is seeking truth.
That’s the problem
I think there is a difference between different people - and maybe it has changed generationally too. I can think of some obvious potential reasons though:
- the number of people who are being horrible is increasing. The increasing division in society is reflected online. That means people have more reason to block people.
- the proliferation of social media bubbles makes people less used to encountering opinions that differ significantly from their own.
I usually find myself blocked by people who just disagree with me. I (increasingly) rarely lose my rag online, but people find it annoying to have someone reply to them who disagrees on certain things and who doesn’t just shut up and go away quickly.
I have a pretty high tolerance for that kind of irritation but after a few dozen replies back and forth I’ll also use the block button. It’s less about not seeing their posts in the future, more as a way to force myself to disengage and get annoyed again.
