Insomniathought: blocking people in social media can be a positive thing
Most social media sites have options for muting and blocking people. As we know, muting is one-way (they see me, I don't see them) and blocking is two-way (neither see each other).
Recently, while having too much caffeine in my system way too late, I had the thought that "blocking" is a far more negative term than what it should be. Sometimes it's done in spite, absolutely. You wanna slap somebody for being how they are.
But sometimes you just recognize that there's someone who you have nothing against, whom you might even like if you met them in real life, but in this context of limited human connect, you understand that the only possible communication between you and them would be toxic. That your opinions, your way of speaking, perhaps your whole existence offends them. Or vice versa.
So you protect them from yourself by blocking them, in lieu of a better word. I think there should be a better word but I haven't figured out what it should be yet. "Spare"?
(P.S. I think tildes should perhaps have such a functionality)
I'm of the opinion that you should mute and block people liberally. I have personally only found it to improve my experience on the internet. I suppose it depends what you are looking to do. I know that I won't be changing anyone's mind, so I have no interest in arguing with people on the internet. I don't know who they are, where they are or if they are a bot. Maybe in my 20s, but I have better things to do.
I love the ignore feature on Tildes and use it liberally. I find it helps reduce the likelihood that I'll end up scrolling Tildes for an extended period of time. I think this reduces the chances that I will end up interacting with someone on Tildes I would normally just have blocked.
That all said, I don't owe anyone on the internet my time and I have no problem blocking them for any reason.
This is how I operate now. I used to operate differently but I've found this to provide the best online experience for me. I do not hesitate to mute, ignore, block, unfriend, etc (and honestly wish more options were available on Tildes for this but I understand why they're not- or at least aren't yet).
Honestly, I think people should consider this in the offline world (or in dealing with those in a circle closer than just "an online forum") a bit more often too. Acquaintances, iffy friendships, toxic family, etc. Of course, far more consideration needs to go into stopping interactions with someone closer, lots of nuance there, but I think sometimes it's good to just cease some interactions and relationships and situations if they reach a certain threshold rather than trying to keep them around out of some toxic sense of obligation
But back to more general online interaction- being liberal with mutes/blocks/etc is better for my mental health, prevents me from doomscrolling, helps prevent some neurodivergent behavioral patterns, protects me from getting into long pointless discussions because my brain felt the need at that point in time to involve myself, ignoring entire topics of discussion helps my mood, etc.
I get that people will try to make efforts to protect some supposed noble goal of "preventing echo chambers" or "being in a bubble" or whatever and use this as an argument for muting/blocking/ignoring being something not to be done liberally, but when it comes to online interactions I'm not interested in that at all- other than if I want to view or get into difficult discussions I want to have to purposely seek them out, and would rather have the level of control that keeps me out of it the rest of the time. I get there are benefits to having some level of variety to what I see, but I'm all for having more levers I can pull at any given time to affect that balance (and others can feel free to simply not pull those same levers if they don't think muting/blocking/ignoring should be done as often).
I also agree with OP that sometimes there are people who one could get along with offline that just in the online world are interactions you want to treat differently. There are people that face-to-face I can get along with to some extent that I would never want to be connected with online, this is why I absolutely no longer ever friend any coworkers on social media that I'm not ALSO friend with outside of work, as a rule. It's never turned out well and is awkward when still employed at the workplace too
I get that fear, but also I am not going to social media/forums and random people for my facts/information. Sure, it is significantly harder to find good journalism and sources today, but that's what I am looking for if I care to find "the other side". However, our world likes to pretend there are two sides to a lot of things when in reality there is settled science on one side and crackpot/pseudoscience on the other. It is not being in a bubble to dismiss crackpot/pseudoscience. Quite the contrary.
Exactly. I think the fear is overblown, the idea of those things is misused, and I think a lot of the times, the supposed echo chamber or bubble being created is actually just a quality space free of BS instead. Not all "bubbles" or "echo chambers" are equal
Sure, one can flip that on its head and say- what about people trapped in their own bubble of misinformation or otherwise content we find conspiratorial or really bad- and I get that- but I also think they should have the same tools to control what they want to see- I still think what they personally experience in terms of online interaction should be up to them even if they make choices that cause them to avoid arguments or content we'd want them to see with the hopes that it somehow changes them.
I completely agree. And to your second point, I think that argument is often made in bad faith. If those people didn't have the same tools does that mean they are suddenly going to engage with facts more often? Seems unlikely to me.
We have destroyed or weakened the actual tools to help those people and social media is not going to be the solution.
It's there already? Couldn't find it under a user. Oh, I guess you mean the "ignored topics" feature.
Yes, sorry. Probably should have clarified. I do indeed mean the ignore threads feature.
I just wish we had an "ignore/block user" feature here on tildes...
It would be nice. I wonder if it is hard to implement or was something Deimos didn't worry about due to the small nature of what he was creating.
To me blocking is a “last recourse” kind of thing. I don’t block people just because I disagree with them. Usually I’m pretty good at just ignoring and “scroll by”.
But as with every rule, there are exceptions.
There used to be this asswipe in a discord server that would defend Russia at every turn, and would always defend himself that “propaganda is heavily biased towards the west, I’m just here to give the counterbalance”.
A reasonable position at first glance - I am under no illusions that that one guy is 100% in the right and the other is 100% in the wrong - but there’s a fine line between trying to be neutral, and defending one side while pretending to be neutral; he was the latter.
One thing I never let him live down was how quick he was to dismiss the Bucha massacre. At first he was trying to say that it was fake news; then as reports started to make it clear that it was real, he was starting to say bullshit like the civilians were ordered by the troops to stay quiet and not call anyone but they were disobeying (like WTF!?); and then when it was crystal clear that the massacre did happen, he stayed quiet as a lamb.
Then whenever Russia struck residential buildings, hospitals, schools, etc, they were all “valid targets”, he said. That the ucranian military used them as HQs so they were fair game.
He also had this obsession with transgender people. Whenever the topic was about political correctness, he would link articles that said stupid shit that aren’t worth repeating. From what I remember, in these moments the discussion was never about transgender people, but he linked those articles anyway as some kinda of “gotcha” moments
Eventually I just couldn’t take it anymore and blocked the idiot. I would like to say that he was a troll, but he wasn’t. He was a known user in the server and was there with us since before the war started, he seemed like a pretty chill guy. But then it’s like something switched in his head and he became insufferable.
Anyway, I don’t think he made many friends. Eventually he quit the server by himself, and good riddance
Spare is awful, it's condescending.
It implies you're doing someone a favor whilst you're the one opting out.
I think a "let's agree to disagree" would be a way more fun mechanic, requiring both sides to agree to indefinitely mute each other. If all else fails, block them. :P
Those two conditions seem mutually exclusive to me.
Yeah, exactly. The other words I had in mind were even more condescending.
I like your post and think you make a good point. Framing matters, and I have blocked people in the past bc I knew I wouldn’t be able to suffer through more of their
harebrainedtakes without making the world a worse place for both of us. This is, under entry, a Me problem, and blocking makes it easier for me to keep my Me problem to myself.That being said, I’m always on the fence about blocking. I do wonder if the ease of blocking has made us less able to deal with conflict (which is not abuse). Obviously blocking is good for safety and privacy reasons which i need not expound upon, but by being able to flick away any and every annoyance, do we become weaker, less resilient, more echo-chambered?
This is literally only one anecdote, but I want to share it somewhere because it happened yesterday and I'm still bitter about it (for other reasons too). It's about a conflict in a local hackerspace that I've been a long time member of, and with some dissatisfaction I followed the change of atmosphere as most of the old guard quit or stepped down from their positions (including me, to be fair) and were replaced by new people. I think it's relevant because obviously most of the members are nerds who spend unhealthy amounts of time on the internet, often communicating online more than irl.
Anyway, we were voting about kicking out a member, which is a rare and unpleasant thing, and before the vote a discussion took place. I noticed that almost none of the other members who fought for kicking the problem member out had the balls to be specific about their accusations, some of them rather serious. It was all just (serious but) vague accusations like "he does xxx all the time", and even several times said by a different person on behalf of the actual (anonymous) accuser.
This is a significant shift from the "old guard", dudes who are 10-12 years older and grew up mostly on IRC, capable of directly arguing (sometimes rather aggressively) both online and in real life. The separation by age was not 100%, but it applied to a majority.
I think this cultural shift has multiple causes - but then again, the blocking feature of almost all social media surely has multiple causes as well, it may both just be the result of some larger trend.
If you don't train your algorithm, your algorithm will train you.
I try to look at likes, shares, favorites, upvotes, comments, mutes, blocks and the ilk as switches that will help me curate the content that social media feeds me.
I've moved from barely touching these buttons to using them liberally. Generally speaking, I feel like my feeds are better. My creators have expertise, the news isn't commentary, the cats are cuter.
Am I in a bubble of my own design? Maybe. But if I don't do it, they'll do it for me. I'd prefer to have control over the things that are going to enrage me.