Reply #285: I think the Block feature is a very bad idea, especially for LBN

[Ms. Clio]

FWIW, I just want to register my objections to this new Block feature – it seems baffling and ill-considered and the reasoning behind it appears to rely on a number of assumptions about human behavior and message board dynamics that strike me as specious and quite likely to be proven wrong in the long term. It is especially wrong for LBN, and that really concerns me, since that forum is one of my major starting points for daily news.

I don't understand why ignore or perhaps mutual ignores are not sufficient to deal with any problems some perceive themselves to have with what is, after all, just a message board. I have used ignore quite successfully; perhaps because once I decide for myself that a person is a troll or an asshole, I feel absolutely no compulsion to see who "Ignored" is when he or she shows up in a thread or read a single solitary further word. Before my Ignore list was cleaned out, at least half were already tombstoned. I never lobbied to have any of them 'stoned; I probably never even alerted on most of them. But I didn't want to read their stupid shit, blow a gasket, and post something that would get me 'stoned instead. It has worked for me -- I've never had a single moderator warning in all the time I've been here. So yeah, I will ignore people, but that doesn't stop them from posting, or stop anyone else from hearing their inane or hateful babble. I have always left that decision to the PTB here, even when I don’t agree with them on occasion.

I think that because I came here from Usenet newsgroups, where there was a strong culture against starting lots of new threads, I have just never been one for starting threads of my own. And since I mostly come here to read the news and others' informative posts, rather than pontificate publicly at length or idly discuss every single thing that crosses my mind, I find myself mostly reacting to what is already here instead of starting my own threads. Perhaps because my previous forum experiences did not include the type of visual representation one sees of a thread here, I guess I am still baffled by the notion that anyone “owns” a thread or needs to exercise so much control over other peoples' responses to what may be an important story or topic completely unrelated to your petty little personal issues.

I’ve only seen myself on one block list so far (surely there must be more!), and was honored to be in such fine company. I was far more disgusted when I opened another block list that was just a couple of names, but one of them was someone whose contributions to a thread I always read, although I don’t know the person at all. I appreciate being able to see the block lists, however, because I will probably just hide most of the threads with block lists, and focus on the high-quality, non-blocked discussions, instead.