Reddit Launches New Block Tools To Help Temper Harassment (mashable.com) 221
An anonymous reader writes: Reddit users can now use the new "block user" feature to better deal with harassment. The new feature was announced Wednesday and while the site has had [a "block user"] feature for quite some time now, the new tool allows users to block other users from replies and comments in addition to private messages, which was what the old tool was limited to previously. If users click the "Block User" button when viewing a reply in their inbox, it will remove replies, comments, messages and posts from that user from your view. Admins will however still see all the messages and replies, and if you're a moderator, you can still see content from users who are blocked on the subreddits you moderate.
Slashdot needs this (Score:2, Funny)
To stop all the abusive AC posts!
The apps guy *TRIGGERS* my bad memories of using an Android phone 5 years ago!
Re:Slashdot needs this (Score:5, Funny)
All Brazilian sites shoud have this too (Score:2)
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Truth be told, the majority of my fellow Brazilians have shit between the ears (is the origin of the "HUEHUEBR"), so a tool that allows me to take no notice of their comments is an absolute must.
They can't be any worse than the majority of my fellow Americans.
Typical Response from Mental Midgets (Score:4, Insightful)
"Lalala, I can't hear you, lalalalalala, I can't hear you!"
People who can't defend their positions usually try to shut you up, and when that doesn't work they stick their fingers in their ears. You know, like a 5-year old would do.
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The headline could just as easily have been "Reddit Launches New Block Tools To Help Reinforce Echo Chamber".
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Why is it an echo chamber reinforcement, when it is only a personal block filter, you're not blocking anyone else from seeing their posts. You're just filtering out their posts and preventing them from contacting you directly.
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In the degenerate case, the echo camber is between ones ears.
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What I foresee coming from this is exactly what Twitter has enabled through the same functionality: publicized block lists used to silence dissent.
Twitter went further than that, giving a group of people like and including Anita Sarkeesian--self-identified social justice activists--the right to ban people they don't like. Within a couple weeks, most prominent critics of their beliefs were banned. Badthought right down the memory hole.
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No death threat here. These were very public figures, not anonymous, and their "harassment" was only disagreement.
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That's funny. I was expecting that clonehappy would get Frist Psot on this thread with some trollish comment about "Mental Midgets". I wonder whatever happened to that clown.
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Although there is a facsimile of technical sub-reddits, most of that site is just mindless garbage so there really isn't a position to defend with any real facts. There used to be a very different definition for the "Reddit Effect"; it was that the fastest to digest and most pedestrian content would be promoted to the front page the fastest whereas any technically involved content will taper off into obscurity. Someone appears to have hijacked the term, but this hasn't changed at all. People on that site do
Re:Typical Response from Mental Midgets (Score:5, Informative)
"it was that the fastest to digest and most pedestrian content would be promoted to the front page the fastest whereas any technically involved content will taper off into obscurity."
Also the fact that you can't sort by lowest rated comment, and are artificially restricted to the first 500 comments (on top of the fact that when you 'load more' it only loads like the next 20, so you can't even navigate to the downvoted comments quickly) adds to that hive mentality. It makes seeing dissenting or unpopular comments next to impossible, by design.
Re:Typical Response from Mental Midgets (Score:5, Insightful)
Although there is a facsimile of technical sub-reddits, most of that site is just mindless garbage so there really isn't a position to defend with any real facts.
Oh please, that's a bunch of crap. There's over a quarter-million subreddits last I heard, and most of *every* site is just mindless garbage, this site included. But with that many subreddits, it's easy to find interesting conversation, and about specialized topics. There's a subreddit about my car, for instance, if I just want to chat with people about that; a lot of posts are fairly useless, but there's some real gems here and there. It's just like anyplace else: "95% of everything is crap." (Sturgeon's Law)
People on that site don't want to "discuss" anything, they want a place where they can go to feel popular or accepted, regardless of any actual social ability.
Oh, BS. You're looking in the wrong place. Maybe you were browsing /r/HillaryClinton. Yeah, if you say anything negative about her on there, you'll be banned immediately. Go someplace else like /r/politics and you'll see all kinds of debate (and frequently not friendly...).
Every subreddit is different. They have different mods, different topics, different rules. Some are complete drivel (like Hillary's fan club subreddit), some are full of nasty arguing (/r/politics, but that's understandable given the topic and what's at stake), some are just places where people post pictures of stuff, some are really silly (like /r/PhotoshopBattles) but fun if you're into that kind of thing.
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"95% of everything is crap." (Sturgeon's Law)
Sturgeon was an optimist. :-)
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I don't have any experience with Reddit so I don't really know what they'll consider harassment or whatnot but I don't see anything particularly egregious about this tool. Not really, at least not in my current thinking - someone's welcome to try to change that. I don't see why this has to be an echo chamber.
It's possible to hold dissenting opinions and to discuss any topic without being offensive. It's possible to have a conversation that remains civil, regardless of the positions held. I know this is true
Re:Typical Response from Mental Midgets (Score:5, Interesting)
Exactly. The block feature wouldn't be for "I disagree with you and here are my reasons why." It would be for "you're an idiot if you believe X and just to reinforce this I'll track down every post of yours and make and insulting reply." There's a small, but vocal, group in pretty much any forum who thinks that the way to win an argument is to make threats and insults until the other side is driven out of the forum. Then they win. The best tactic against these people is to ignore them. This tool simply makes ignoring them easier.
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Yeah, it doesn't *have* to be turning it into an echo chamber. There's no reason that it has to end that way - at least not in the majority of cases. For those who want one, well... Let 'em have it.
I don't block anyone here. I read at -1. There are other sites where I'd consider it but I usually don't. I could understand blocking the idiots that don't contribute anything but that doesn't mean that you'll be stuck in an echo chamber. How you use it is up to you.
I'm not sure that I'd block anyone here. I do h
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yes.. because mormons, as a people, are known to be raving lunatics.
as a people, they're belief system is mad as hell, but they're all so amiable it's maddening.
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I don't even mind systemd
Blocked. We don't take kindly to your type around here. Why don't you just move along sir. *Block intensifying*
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It's just a personal block filter, you're not preventing anyone else from reading posts by the user you've blocked.
I have a few people blocked on Facebook, because they've repeatedly reduced themselves to name-calling and outright harassment. Now that I've blocked them, I don't have to view their insulting posts, but others are free to view them, if they please. And of course, they cannot contact me directly either, which is a necessity for an anti-harassment block filter.
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"Lalala, I can't hear you, lalalalalala, I can't hear you!"
People who can't defend their positions usually try to shut you up, and when that doesn't work they stick their fingers in their ears. You know, like a 5-year old would do.
So, in the real world, if a drunk hobo starts talking to you about being Jesus Christ Reborn, you feel it's your responsibility, as an adult, to hear him out and respond with clear and well constructed counter arguments until, under the accumulated evidence you've presented, he understands the wrongness in his assertion?
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Yep, and not only that, if another drunk hobo starts telling you how he was abducted by aliens, you have a responsibility to hear him out and determine if you think he's telling the truth too!
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you ignorate racist cis scum.
HA! You showed your true colors! A True Feminist would know that raCISt already implies CIS!
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What a stupid post. Basically, you're saying that I should read all of APK's drivel, as well as all the other countless trolls, such as the loser AC on here who keeps posting about "n****rs". No, I don't need to waste my time reading such garbage.
Slashdot desperately needs this feature, as well as banning ACs.
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I don't need to technically disprove it. I can dismiss it as drivel and move on; it's my right, just as I don't need to technically disprove that the drunk hobo on the corner wasn't really abducted by aliens.
Fuck off, APK.
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You're not fooling anyone, APK. You really should seek mental help.
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Conversely, there's plenty of mental midgets who won't listen to any sort of reason, so you have no recourse but stick your fingers into your ears when you're near them. Elsewhere, we call it hearing protection, and I'll be damned if it doesn't work wonderfully.
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Though it can be abused to block anyone with a different opinion than you, the real purpose of this would be if someone is being abusive or who is entering a forum for the sole purpose of annoying as many people as possible. Someone who is acting abusive won't care about your carefully crafted arguments. He'll hurl insults and vague threats back at you, ignoring all of your points. If an abusive user does it right, they can stay just inside of the site's acceptable use guidelines and be abusive while not
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No, this is a lot more like being able to prevent somebody who wants to join your soccer game from just kicking the ball out into the street out of spite.
Having standards doesn't make you 5 years old. There are plenty of people who deserve to be filtered out of a discussion, especially in so far as it's clear that often time the goal of a person is to simply derail or make discussion impossible in the first place.
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Good (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Good (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Good (Score:5, Insightful)
And they never notice how labeling something as a micro-aggression is itself a micro-aggression. As are "safe spaces" (saying that whole classes of people can't be trusted with other classes of people) and "trigger warnings" (about as useless as writing ***SPOILER ALERT***, it just makes people more curious).
Political correctness needs to die.
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Well, Slashdot doesn't have an "edit" button, so them's the breaks.
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Coylehd t agree more.
Re:Good (Score:4, Interesting)
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Brilliant idea, given that the cardinality between users and IPs is m:n.
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However, not everyone is emotionally mature enough to handle situations like that. I imag
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I sure hope so otherwise you'd be the worst stalker ever.
Re:Good (Score:5, Interesting)
You know, you can use the Slashdot friend/foe system to do something similar. Just mark someone as your foe, set foes to -6 here [slashdot.org] and you won't even see them unless you browse at -1.
It's a pretty basic feature for discussion forums. Personally I don't use it though. Imagine if someone doxed you but you had them on the ignore list, you wouldn't even know it happened. I'd prefer to know so I can do something about it.
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Good. Maybe this will limit the microaggressive behavior some cisgender white males and help keep Reddit a safe place so everyone else can express their more valid opinions. They also need to add a hugcircle feature.
You seem to have a really intense fixation [slashdot.org] on the terms "hugcircle" and "microaggression". I'm not sure what the problem is with a feature that allows you to hide comments from idiots. Killfiles have been around for ages for usenet and email (long before those words ever were a thing), so why should it be different for a random web based forum?
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Yeah, I already figured that was the kind of non-answer I'd get. You might want to figure out why you are so obsessed with it though (or maybe you already know, and this is your way of dealing with it).
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Ban the Block (Score:4, Insightful)
Nobody has the right to not pay attention to me, so I am against this tyrannical form of Reddit sensor sheep.
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Pointing out bad grammer and spelling aggresses me.
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It's only bad grammar if it's not what you meant.
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Your use of double negatives is a perfect example of microaggressive behavior. Off to the reeducation camps for you!
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Muh safe spaces!
While this WILL be used to reinforce hugboxes... (Score:2)
It is a local solution, which means it can't be actually used for censorship, but just isolating snowflakes from the community.
It would be dangerous if for example reddit banned people in too many lists or assigned people to put people on block for you, and this block was not removable.
Re:While this WILL be used to reinforce hugboxes.. (Score:4, Funny)
"Welcome to the kill file" (Score:2)
No, seriously. [wikipedia.org]
I hope Reddit doesn't pretend this is something new and innovative, since it's been around since the 1980s [wikipedia.org].
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What did you expect from a site that basically re-implemented the Usenet on a WWW platform replacing the '.'s with '/'s?
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*plonk*
Symmetric blocking for asymmetric friendship (Score:2)
Looks like the same mistake, that twitter made.
Good thing: You do not need to follow your followers
Mistake: When somebody blocks you, you cannot read his tweets, either. Which is strange, because blocking in an asymmetric medium should just be an ignore list.
Translation (Score:2, Funny)
"Reddit users can now use the new "block user" feature to better deal with harassment."
TRANSLATION:
"Reddit social justice warriors can now use the new "block user" feature to better shut down disagreement or speech they don't like."
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Yup.
Reddit is an awful, awful place.
Digg 4.1 (Score:2)
It's not about the users, it's about the appeasing the leftists in the name of "civility". Modbombing doesn't change that a bit =)
Let the alt-creation begin!
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In other words, Reddit is now nothing more than a poor imitation of Facebook.
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That's already happened.
If you post in a few certain subreddits, you get blocked from OffMyChest, me_irl, and others that subscribe to the same style of automatic blocking - well before the "block user" feature was added.
Also, abusive moderators are a greater threat to reddit than abusive users, as just one moderator can cripple a community by the simplest of changes (whether perform
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The worst abusers of this are the powermods, those are the ones that moderate hundreds of subs. There's no shortage of them, and there's no shortage of subs that they've taken over either. It's very rare that a sub that gets someone like that in a position of power is able to recover from it either. The only one off the top of my head that has is /r/canada, and even at that it's still suffering from when DavidReiss666 [reddit.com] was there.
What's funny is that the users that follow these power mods around have a hug
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I guarantee you that it will quickly spiral into a bunch of dingbats talking to themselves
Isn't that better then said dingbats talking to everyone else?
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Actually Reddit has always tended to be that, other than a few little niches of sanity and openness.
Re:A more efficient solution? (Score:4, Insightful)
I think a "Block Anyone Who Disagrees With Me" button would be a lot simpler.
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With this tool, it sounds as though users would need to manually block each offending user.
Indeed. The best-case scenario is that the feature is only used against the trolls, but that creates a situation where new users will need to block all the same people as the 'community' before they can get value out of the forum.
So I propose blocking-collectives. Users can agree to group up and adopt each others block lists. They are free to join and leave these collectives at any time. Anyone can create a collective, and collectives themselves can adopt other collectives block lists.
The consequences
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In Soviet Union, hugbox circles you!
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Unless Reddit explicitly stated that it was a platform for free speech, then I guess it has some sort of (moral) obligation to stand by that. Has Reddit ever said anything like that?
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Has Reddit ever said anything like that?
Yes, up until Pao became CEO. Last year, when they suddenly decided that they'd ban people and subs to protect users feelings, even if the content wasn't illegal. Then they fully double down on the "reddit isn't about free speech." Even though it has self-styled ads to create your own subrredit like "....because everyone wants a voice" "...and for free speech" those are still out there to this day. Roughly two years ago they were shadowbanning users if they didn't believe in global warming.
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Reddit is a private entity and has no obligation to maintain anyone's freedom of expression.
Nobody is making the argument that private companies have a legal obligation to maintain everyone's freedom of expression. They are simply making the argument that it's bad practice for a forum built on public discussing to start limiting the public's ability to discuss. This falls into the "just because you have the right to do something doesn't make it right" category.
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Can this be used for people to ignore opposition and differing opinions? Yes- but by that token, so can "just not reading the post." Don't need a block feature built in for that. However, "not reading the post" isn't so useful when someone starts following and harassing you online. That's where the bloc
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As it should be.
I fucking hate it when I go somewhere and get shit service or else have the cops called on me after I've fucking paid. Your friend is doing it right. Of course, I'm free to give the response, "If you're a delusional idiot who doesn't want my money, that's fine. But as a private individual, I'm not obligated to give you any money. I'll even tell everyone I know you don't want LGBT customers just because I'm such a nice person. Have a nice fucking day."
It would be even better if he posted
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Interesting analogy. But, restaurants have to serve everyone
This is only true in states with public accommodation laws. Under federal law, a private secular institution may discriminate on the basis of race, creed, or color (or anything at all, for that matter). But under Colorado law (of the famous gay wedding cake), they may not. So it depends on your state.
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Hmm... Are you sure about that?
I guess, it might be different as they're a business but I'm not entirely sure that it is. I don't think it's been tested anywhere and things default to legal and not illegal?
I'm almost completely certain that I can start a site that bans anyone who discloses they're gay - and only bans those who discloses they're gay. Obviously, I'd have no way of telling if they're gay. I guess I could have a 'real name' and 'sworn affidavit' policy. But yeah, I'm pretty sure I don't have to
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Who picks the keywords?
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Indeed. It is surprisingly how only a few few dedicated malcontents can completely poison a community. By being able to ignore them completely, the total level of idiocy is significantly reduced.
Of course, some people will just block everyone they disagree with, but then it becomes a self-sustaining solution. The one-track fuckwits block everyone else, which in turn has the effect of blocking themselves off from the majority of the community. It's beautiful in its elegance.
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produce that the current generation needs protection from that which makes us stronger and better adjusted?
If it weren't for being harassed, made fun of, and being generally dragged through the mud I'm not sure I would have ever toughened up and become so well adjusted. It's like they want to make sure the next generation is even worse crop of spineless jellyfish than the current.
Well as somebody who has been on Usenet since before "Eternal September" [wikipedia.org], this is no different Usenet kill-files. In any forum you get people who contribute to the debate in a civil and constructive manner (though you may not agree with them). And then you get people who are neither constructive nor civil, who just shout their own narrow opinions and shower gratuitous abuse on anybody who disagrees with them.
Kill-files are a very effective way screening out the jerks while still seeing posts from people w
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Are you saying that trolls don't teach "sticks and stones will break my bones but names will never hurt me?" And that people don't need to learn this lesson? And it's not better to learn it on-line where you can't get your face busted for retaliating?
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Every generation thinks the next generation are spineless.
Every generation makes stupid generalizations as they get old, and lose control of the future.
Go ask one of the few surviving WWII vets if their parents thought they were spineless.
Go ask one of the few surviving WWII vets about anything, and see if they're making "stupid generalizations" or not.
Go ask yourself about making stupid generalizations about every generation.
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I have the privileged of having two WWII vets as in-laws. I will make certain I ask one in particular (the one who really likes to talk) those questions this summer.
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