Do you have a criteria for what qualifies as block-worthy offence or are you just doing it when you feel like it?
Bonus question: how long is your block list?
Do you have a criteria for what qualifies as block-worthy offence or are you just doing it when you feel like it?
Bonus question: how long is your block list?
Yeah just hiding the content of people who harass you is really not a good practice. It’s the whole reason why Reddit introduced two-way blocking, they know that this type of harassment can’t actually be combated by simply ignoring it. Here on Lemmy we don’t have that, the next best thing though is to report to admins or Community moderators, but I would recommend admins since they can take care of the users more efficiently.
Yeah I agree these types of people really should not be in communities and instances. While it may be up to moderators and admins to ban people on the site and communities, it is us the users who are responsible for bringing these types of bad people to their attention, by reporting and reaching out.
Think of being a user on these sites as being like part of a neighborhood watch all the time. You are obligated to report people who are behaving suspicious or in ways that are harmful to the community. Maybe if one or two people ignore them it’s fine but if a majority of people do this it won’t be, and isn’t. It’s part of the reason why I think that there are so many trolls and bad faith actors here who never get banned from communities or instances despite the fact that they have zero restraint about where and when they lash out at someone. It’s because people just block those guys and never report them.
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I think Lemmy’s devs seem to not understand this problem otherwise they would’ve kept a version of two way blocking in Lemmy and wouldn’t fight this idea so much:
Proper blocking systems for preventing harassment need to at a basic level stop people from replying to the user or their content. People can argue that this can be abused but not having it will be abused more in exactly the same way you said.
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Yeah I do think there needs to be confirmation since it is way too easy to just quickly mute a lot of people in rapid succession.
I’m not sure if making them public is a great idea, since people might be bad faith trolls but that might not be apparent to other people at first glance. I probably would have at least 50 on my list if it were a feature, to someone who doesn’t know it might seem like I’m abusing the system but almost all of those people were either harassing me or others. Many have been banned but not all of them. Maybe it could be visible to admins, but not general users.
I’m not even really sure how big of an issue blocking abuse really is in reality, since on Reddit many of the people who complain about it are trolls in and of themselves, some of the people complaining about the changes to the blocking system are actually suspended currently. So not really sure it is a real problem. Abuse of the muting feature though is a much more serious problem because if all or most people just do this all the time instead of reporting eventually instances and communities become overrun with trolls and bad faith actors because people are not reporting them, meaning the only ones who would get actioned are the ones caught explicitly by the mods and admins. Not good.
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I think this type of two way blocking makes it particularly clear when the person is blocked since it disallows replying and on Lemmy community bans are visible. So editing comments can help with that, as it would be apparent they have blocked you, the UI could be changed to reflect that either by highlighting the user who has blocked you or greying out the reply button. Of course that could be used as an abuse tactic but since it depends on existing replies which are finite it wouldn’t be as bad as them being able to continue making more.
Also since administration on Lemmy is much more in touch with the userbase (at least most of the time) it’s easier to get such abuse dealt with at the community or instance level.