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.
You must log in or register to comment.
It depends what you’re on (social media) for.
If you’re there to get some positive social interaction and read some articles or funny pictures, it completely makes sense to block agitators or regular shitposters.
If you’re there to have political arguments and engage with rage bait then you leave everyone unblocked.
Its really not that complicated.
For me personally, I just don’t feel like dealing with yet another source of garbage that I don’t want to read.
In happier times, I felt a different way about blocking. Nowadays, the fucking potus forces the country to match some phony fucking Fox News image, and I don’t really care about reading some dumb assholes dumb rant anymore. Not blocking people and “dialog” and “debate bro” shit isn’t fixing this crap anyway, so I’m going to go ahead and make my own life contain a little less hassle.
That’s also why I’m only really here and on mastodon. I know they’re basically left wing safe spaces. I frankly don’t give a fuck.
Cognitive dissonance.
Even when someone says some stupidly egregious shit, or uses thorns instead of th, its way easier to block them than try to understand that however stupid and misguided they may be that there is a person on the other side who may actually have a point somewhere u Herbert the radicalization and between the five brainless they have.
I think blocking is justified when someone actually means you personal physical harm in some way, but that so rarely ever happens.
I never block anyone but I do get blocked a lot by both hardcore right wingers and hardcore left wingers. I’ve also gotten blocked by scammers by being such an incredible pain in the ass.
It’s baffling how quick people are to do it. A while ago, I sold an old electronic thing on Marketplace to someone. A day later, they sent me an angry message saying that it didn’t work and how I scammed them, then proceeded to block me. I would’ve liked the opportunity to troubleshoot with them or even refund the item if it turned out to actually be broken, but… blocking me precludes all that. What exactly did they hope to achieve?
I guess believing you were a scammer, they assumed there would be no happy resolution and you’d simply block them, so they wanted at least to have the satisfaction of venting at you and blocking you first before you had the opportunity.
That whole “I blocked you before you blocked me!” behaviour is very childish, but I can understand it, psychologically.
If you’ve previously had the experience of reaching out to someone politely in good faith about a problem with your purchase, and they really were a scammer and responded “haha get fucked loser” and blocked you, that’s a mentally damaging interaction. You made yourself vulnerable and got taken advantage of. And that feels awful - as if the scammer “won”, and you are a sucker who didn’t even see it coming.
That is why people are quick to go on the offensive when they suspect they’ve been wronged, because they’ve been hurt before and want to try and claw back some small measure of pride.
I would be so much nicer if things weren’t this way, and we could assume the best in people. With honest sellers such as yourself, it would even lead to the problem getting fixed! But there are a lot of scammers out there, so I understand the “why”, even if I don’t like it and try to never behave that way myself.
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.
they’re just clogging up my ALL feed with things I dont care about
They aren’t subscribed to them.
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.
What’s the purpose of blocking mods/admins of larger communities?
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.
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 dunno I haven’t blocked anyone and I don’t know if anyone has blocked me.
Yeah how do you even know when someone has blocked you?
If you want, I’ll block you so you can feel included.
last I checked I had over 220 users blocked. now it’s probably 250.
I block people who are willfully ignorant or trolls.
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.
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.
Because if you block someone who is annoying you, you won’t get annoyed by them anymore. It’s pretty great.
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.
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.
