*Sigh*
(The following text is assuming real life identity is not involved)
I’m gonna get hated for repeating this once again (that is if anybody really reads my text):
All these buttons (“block”, “ignore”, “kick”, “blacklist”…) sourcing out important abilities your brain should have don’t do anything good to people using them in the long term.
Yes, I’ve encountered, also very recently bad behavior here. One of the few times it happened. Tried politely telling somebody to be more friendly and accept the existence of different opinions… and got… poorly disguised insults, semi-intelligent hidden by indirect aggressiveness. Happened on two occasions with the same user. Consequence? I will ignore them from now on (NOT with that button) and not reply to anything they say anymore if I ever see something from that user again. That is not something hard. Actually I’m always quite entertained when somebody tells me in condescending way that I must be suffering badly from their (and other) text on the screen.
I’ve yet to even understand the concept of – let’s say –
“cyberbullying”. How should someone on the internet be remotely able to harm another person? What is commonly known nowadays under words like
“toxic” or
“[…]phob” is in the end just text. Either it is a real insult or even criminal (and therefore a reason for the site moderators of any site to delete it) or not (and therefore a reason for not dealing with the person anymore – like they say “just move on”). Our machines do still have a button for turning them off if it becomes too intense in a moment.
Nobody is fully protected in real life from unpleasant people. And they can do much, much more to you than write something you don’t want to read.
Believe me, it can get threatening for your life!
As for stop interaction with the own content:
I’ve blocked my profile for comments since it happened a few times too often that stupid/condescending/low quality comments came in. My tolerance level for this lowered because of personal stress so I pulled the plug for now. A sad step. On the own profile such a possibility makes sense since it has no impact on anybody else.
On the forum on the other side… rather not. Things like
this one could get problematic. This boils down to “I’ve not asked for a beginner’s lecture”. The ability to block (or even delete) things one doesn’t want to read could lead to important information to be suppressed. “I don’t want a beginner’s lecture” → block+delete → no visitor will see the warnings another person wanted to add.
If users could block, or even delete, (essentially moderate) in their own threads this can and will get abused.
that apparently in the EU it's a legal requirement for social media websites to have such a function.
If that is true, that's horrible over-regulation. It might be helpful against spambots wildly throwing garbage at people or for idiots demanding "Send nudes!" but a missing block button is not the end of the world.
