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?
I don’t tend to block anyone online unless I feel like they are harassing me. Haven’t blocked anyone on Lemmy so far. I think people can be too quick to block others who have different points of view these days.
Bad faith arguments and hatred of any minority. That covers about 99% of it
Beyond the obvious trolls and complete loons, I also block people who never contribute an original comment or post and only reply to other comments in order to “correct” other people or “call them out”. Their comment history makes it immediately obvious when they are this type of user.
They strike me as particularly cowardly and obnoxious, because they only want to attack / start something against, and never risk a simple original assertion of their own. Offense being the best defense, etc. They probably think of themselves as verbal judo masters.
IOW, they are basically using Lemmy as fodder for their pedantry. I’m not interested at all in engaging with this type of jackass. Unfortunately there are a lot of them on the internet. My block list is long.
Being unnecessarily rude, or arguing in bad faith. Got about a dozen people on my block list.
A demonstration that the person is not interested in a conversation, they just want to grandstand and use rhetoric tricks to feel like they are superior and are strictly aiming to used the conversation as a way to inflate their sense of self worth at the cost of treating you like a human being.
“No way I am reading all that” on a average sized post while expounding their opinion in an equally lengthy paragraph is usually the same start of the end. These people are generally not actively trolling they are just up their own ass. If they cannot demonstrate basic intellectual mutual respect after having this pointed out to them blocking them is both for best of us.
A particular pet peeve is people who quote every bit of a post in sections to refute it. It’s lazy and I have witnessed it from people in my life who are extremely narcissistic. Writing your own brief is respectful. Essentially writing over someone else’s entire post with red pen isn’t. It’s not a block, but it’s a contributing factor
If it’s someone using very bad faith rhetoric like moving goalposts or extreme cherrypicking - basically any stuff that demonstrates obvious trolling I don’t block, I counterpunch. My goal becomes making sure you do not leave the arguement with what you come there for.
All in all I have blocked about 3 people. I believe in second chances so someone has to show no signs of improvement after about an average of 7 replies.
Spam/scam mostly.
My blocklist is 30~40 users long. [For reference, my blocklist in Reddit reached 400 or so.]
To keep it short, I typically block people who, egregious or consistently:
- show lack of reasoning, even if I agree with the conclusion
- misrepresent what others say
- take things off context to judge them, even if I agree with the judgement
- vomit lots of “hard” certainty on things that they cannot reasonably know (e.g. the others’ emotional states over the internet)
- engage in passive aggressiveness (note that I tolerate some clear hostility, just not pass-aggro)
- show clear signs of sealioning (e.g. “I don’t understand” + misrepresentation of what someone else said)
- tell others shit like “trust me” = “I expect you to be a gullible piece of rubbish”
Note that “egregious or consistently” are key words here. Like, I’m not going out of my way to block someone out of a brainfart; this is not some sort of petty revenge, it’s just removing from my sight people who I believe to not contribute with my overall Lemmy experience. I also don’t take issue when people block me, for whatever reason they might have.
I’ll reply to myself to avoid editing the above. The other user made me realise that what I said about pass-aggro is unclear - since the expression is used with multiple meanings.
In this specific context, by passive aggressiveness, I mean “an utterance showing politeness as a disguise for rudeness”.
I’ll give you guys an example. Imagine that Alice says “I saw a potato tree today”. And Bob replies to Alice one of the following:
- “Potatoes do not grow on trees.”
- “Potato tree? Are you braindead or what?”
- “Yeah sure, and I saw some unicorns today. Because you know, potatoes totally grow on trees, right?”
- “Oh dear perhaps you’re a bit confused, so let me enlighten you. Potatoes do not grow on trees. I understand that this might be a bit too complex for you to understand, but put on some effort, okay?”
The first three are not pass-aggro. #1 is simply dry (no attempt at politeness or rudeness); #2 is simply rude (I’m typically OK with that within limits). #3 uses irony and sarcasm in such an obvious way that it comes off as simply rude, there’s no attempt to use the irony to disguise the insult. Only #4 is pass-aggro, as it calls Alice stupid and lazy in a disguised way.
I tend to block people who do this because they rub me off the wrong way - it shows a lack of dignity to be upfront that you don’t see in plain rudeness.
Tankies go straight to the Shadow Realm
I block assholes. It drives me up the wall when someone is disrespectful for no reason. I also dislike those who get unnecessarily aggressive on the first message because the previous comment doesn’t align with their views. I’ll usually set a boundary and let people correct their attitude. After that, I’ll block.
I’m also considering blocking those who make a hobby of subverting the previous comment by twisting people’s words and overloading them with something the person did not mean to say, but those are trickier.
I’m also considering blocking those who make a hobby
of subverting the previous comment by twisting people’s words and overloading them with something the person did not mean to say, but those are trickier.What do you have against hobbies? Why do you think that people should only eat, work and sleep? Do you loathe people that much??? /s
Serious now. I block this sort of people, and heavily recommend others to do the same. They’re a waste of time; even if you clarify what they’re distorting they’ll do it again, and again. It is a bit tricky because genuine miscommunication also happens, but I typically solve that by checking the profile for consistent behaviour. The “controversial” sorting works wonders here.
Pretty much my criteria exactly. An off remark is fine, we all fuck up once in awhile, but consistent rude or dishonest behaviour gets them a block. It’s not worth my time and emotional energy to deal with angry children. I get enough of that at work already.
What I think is funny is someone I blocked also responded to your comment.
Yeah, I have no patience for these types. Just dealt with one. They love to assume something weird and awful that no one would’ve meant and then harass you about it. I struggle not to be rude to dickheads like that.
I’ve blocked a few bots but I would only block an actual person if they’re harassing me. I’d rather downvote or report people that are saying hateful things.
People that are needlessly hostile, and persistent on continuing their hostility get blocked. I’ve only needed to do that 1 or 2 times on Lemmy since I already blocked the most overtly hostile instances.
Same. I probably won’t even notice if I keep running into them making the place toxic, but if they just want to argue or be offensive and won’t stop, yeah I’ve blocked a couple
I wish that more people would report the users who behave like this, that type of behavior is against many Community rules and also many instance rules.
In my opinion I’d rather report people than block them since when they get banned they get banned for everyone. Blocking is like pretending to ban them while letting them run wild, it’s a great idea for places like Nostr but it’s not a great idea for Lemmy since the whole idea of fediverse is interconnection with moderation.
I don’t block anyone because I do not like to shove other perspectives out of view and pretend they don’t exist. Also I grew up on old internet where having a thick skin was a necessity.
There are other reasons to block people than to hide differing viewpoints.
I understand this, but I think one of the prevailing uses for blocking has sadly become to shove away voices that one wishes not to hear.
If you’re talking about people who do illegal or objectively terrible things, this is a terrible use case. As Lemmy’s block system is really meant only as a feed curation tool. It’s for things that you “don’t wike and don’t wannna to see 👶”. So to use it on people who are actually bad actors is not a good idea, and certainly isn’t a good idea to encourage its use in that manner. After all if everybody ignores these people and nobody reports them then they are allowed to run wild for much longer if not indefinitely. That’s why reporting is encouraged, it helps take care of bad faith users.
I think a lot of people need to get used to the idea that it is partially their responsibility to deal with bad faith users by reporting. On big tech platforms it didn’t make much of a difference because they didn’t care, instance admins here do care though, and many don’t have the legal defenses that those companies have especially when it comes to illegal shit that might be posted by some of these awful depraved individuals. Let them know about it sooner rather than later, report the trolls.
Apologies if I came off as a bit harsh.
Most of the people I’ve blocked haven’t broken any rules. Reporting them would be pointless.
That’s fair, most of the people I’ve dealt with who I thought about blocking usually were, either they were directly harassing or attacking me, were blatantly alt-right trolls attacking other people for their presentation or they were simply being rude and hostile for no reason.
I guess those things might be different on lemm.ee but generally here those things earn people comment or post removal, community bans, and sometimes even site bans (account termination if this is their home server). Same is true for other servers I’m on. Including the Mastodon server I’m a part of.
I probably have way lower criteria for blocking than most other people. I deliberately go to threads about Elon Musk for example and block everyone making snide remarks about him. Not because I’m a fan of Musk but because I’m not interested in dealing with people who use social media to talk shit. The people I have had the most insightful conversations with don’t post replies like that. My blocklist is way over 500 users long already and I add several people to it every day. I’m simply just trying to improve the signal to noise ratio.
Agree with this perspective and this is also why I’ve not got anyone blocked on here. However it’s possible both of us are fortunate enough to have never encountered a stalker or some kind of determined harassment campaign.
I agree with this very much, I don’t really have any desire to hide opposing viewpoints either. Which is really the only reason why you would block somebody on Lemmy using its highly crippled blocking system.
On other platforms like Mastodon and Reddit most of the reason why I block people stems around bad behavior, like legitimately objectively harmful behavior. Things that are considered objectionable even by instance admins, and also these platforms allow you to view blocked users and their content after they have been blocked and also submit reports if they continue to behave badly. It’s more like a soft moderation tool than a content feed curation tool on those platforms.
When it comes to blocking on Lemmy blocking these types of people is actually a bad idea. These people need to be reported so that they can be dealt with and they don’t cause more harm to the community. What they don’t need is to be blocked and ignored so that they can continue perpetrating their evil shit without other people getting upset. This is especially true in the case of people who do illegal stuff, that stuff can get the instance in trouble.
Blocked bots or blatant ads
Mostly just tankies, they irritate the hell outta me.
Not tagging NSFW posts
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