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.
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I have blocked more in the last year than I have in the last 20 combined. There are far, far too many people arguing to troll, arguing in bad faith, threatening, or insulting that will do everything they can to bait you, derail your argument, DM you with insults, etc.
It’s probably because I’ve become far more critical of anti-science, shitty politics, and shitty people, so I’m sure that’s part of the reason, but nonetheless I don’t have the time or patience anymore to waste on the pigeons knocking pieces over and shitting on the chessboard declaring victory, so I block them.
I also have been blocked outright when presenting any objectively factual rebuttal. Facts are often strictly disallowed in the narrative, particularly political and anti-science ones. People don’t want their flow of internet “likes” interrupted.
Same man.
I never used to block people on principle… but at the same time people never said horrible shit or harassed me so there really was no reason to.
People also were not posting all sorts of crazy nonsense 10 years ago in the same volume or lever of vitriolic hate they do now.
I need to start blocking people for my own sanity. You tell them the sky is blue, and they’ll demand a source. You send them a picture of the sky and they tell you its not a source. You dick about spending 5 minutes of your time finding an actual source because you obviously weren’t prepared to defend something so obvious, and they just tell you “pfft [source]. Actually trusting [source] in [thisyear].” It goes on.
Yeah I gave up ‘sourcing’ anything because nobody will believe sources anymore. They will just tell you the source is wrong.
And if you tell them to look up their own sources, they tell you to f yourself and how it isn’t their job its yours.
It’s stupidity and entitlement wrapped up into one neat package.
I also love people who tell you what you are staying is a ‘fallacy’ when it’s not. And they really do not care about learning what a fallacy actually is… they just want to use it to call other people wrong even if they totally misunderstand how fallacies work.
They simple do not want to admit fault or mistake or god forbid… learn something new.
There’s this streamer I sort of follow who did some reaction streams to proximitychat videos. If you don’t know, it’s basically this guy in VRchat who joins public lobbies and trolls the people in there - most of them crazily obsessed with the game and roleplay to the point of basically living in VR.
This guy will be in a public lobby for maybe hours, constantly trolling, and all they do is ask him to stop. Maybe they’ll threaten to remove him as a friend (which is such a common occurrence that it might almost seems like capital punishment to these terminally online dweebs), but they almost never kick or block him outright.
In the reaction streams the question is always, why not just kick and block the guy? Sure, don’t block everyone who makes an annoying remark outright, but as I said, this guy is in there for hours without seemingly any attempt to actually get him to stop. It seems that the easiest thing is to just talk a bit, find out he’s there in bad faith and then block him, but they never do.
What I’m getting at is, people should block more. Not that, again, you should block everyone who slightly annoys you or challenges your viewpoint, but as soon as you find out they are there in bad faith, just block and move on. I feel ancient for saying this but as they say: don’t feed the trolls.
Blocking is self-care. Just with the added teeth of “get tf out of my phone.”
That’s it.
It’s maintaining your personal peace, and frankly I find it weird that it’s even a conversation let alone as stigmatized as it is. People still have a litany of ways to reconnect outside digital. It’s literally what people had to do before blocking was a thing.
Blocking is a VERY GOOD THING.
The internet is a cesspool. You need to curate it.
Only issue I take with this is that the last year has shown us the internet represents living people, even if we put them out of sight.
That said, I don’t exactly know how we “solve” that cesspool.
You don’t. It’s on other people to fix themselves.
Sadly, they think you’re a cesspool too for not agreeing with them. I’ve noticed my opinions have become super controversial now because I’m not a polarized person. And non-polarized viewpoints are EVIL to anyone who is an extremist, and all the extremists think they are moderates are the only ones who see ‘the truth’.
They never said otherwise. They’re just talking about a relatively recent cultural shift towards blocking people for no real reason
Trolls have no right to any of my time.
Personally, I block people who espouse things I believe are genuinely spiteful, hateful, or shitty. Generally, I use the block button to “curate” my experience with the intention that I can use Lemmy as brief escapism when I’m in the bathroom or on the train without having my mood affected by somebody posting something shitty.
I don’t block anyone for normal disagreements, because I’m a relatively normal adult and as such that sort of thing doesn’t bother me.
Why would you read someone you don’t want to? Why would you use a feature of the platform?
People don’t like being forced to engage with belligerent reactionaries.
I’ve got better things to do than read a load of horseshit from bad-faith weirdos, so I block them. No point engaging with them and reading their opinions makes my day measurably worse.
I constantly block both users and communities on Lemmy. Mostly because they are spouting doomer nonsense, and I ain’t got no time for their bullshit.
There’s definitely an addicting trend to making people more scared than they should be. News falls to it, individuals seeking attention fall to it too.
Quake is better anyway.
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.
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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.
People are trying to ‘win the argument’ for personal satisfaction. They’re not trying to self-correct or seek the truth.
I think I’ve only blocked a handful of people over a decade
I’m the opposite; I have hundreds of people blocked, mostly because they are bores.
Another aspect of this that I’ve found is that engaging in benevolent smalltalk with someone here on Lemmy somehow sometimes results in them treating it as an argument.
No, I will not concede to whatever point you’re trying to make; I was making conversation, you were trying to win an argument. I don’t care if you’re convinced your particular approach to a particular problem is better than mine.
And if they then don’t realize that I’m not interested in engaging, and keep the “debate me bro” attitude, they usually end up on my blocklist, or at the very least they end up with a red tag behind their name.
No, u’r wrong 😜
Your mom likes me anyway
She told me likes me more
Reddit made that change where if you blocked someone they couldn’t reply to you in a thread.
That was quickly weaponized so that you could ‘win’ an argument. Someone could write something and your reply would not appear, so it looked like you realized you were wrong.
Only way around this is editing your previous comment, though I’ve been told that can sometimes lead to a ban? Never happened to me though.
What really annoys me about that is that it prevents you from replying to anyone ELSE who replies to you in that thread, which is completely absurd.
for some reason ‘editing’ comments is considered horrible and awful.
i never understood that myself.
I’ve blocked a lot too. Mostly people who have closed minds and aren’t listening just waiting for their turn to reply. I don’t have patience for that shit anymore, find someone else. *Block
I don’t know about this “winning” theory.
Generally, people feel like they’ve won when they get the last word in. If you block someone, you don’t see their replies and assuming they do reply to your last comment, they would get the last word.
Personally, I block people when I realize there’s no point in continuing the conversation. I’m not trying to win an argument, I’m just over it and don’t want to interact with their toxicity.
People are trying to ‘win the argument’ for personal satisfaction. They’re not trying to self-correct or seek the truth.
How do we promote more people to cooperate instead of compete in the mutual pursuit of truth while maintaining humility and introspection that their own views could be incorrect?
Different format of discussion.
Social media: people trying to win binary points 👍👎
Wikipedia, scientific discussion, or a deliberative assembly: slow process towards writing a statement of a position, with lots of study along the way
There’s such a massive disconnect there, though, isn’t there? I agree the slow deliberative process is key; but there is clearly a missing piece of the puzzle to bridge that gap between experts and laypeople that unfilled leads to well… All this.
I’ve not blocked anyone here or on Reddit. I have on Mastodon but only becase the 3 people I have blocked are fucking interminably boring not because of any philsophival difference of opinion or they were rude or some shit.
I tend not to engage too much, it is some random on the internet after all. I am old, I’ve been doing this shit from IRL meetups of computer clubs, to BBS’s where I actually personally knew just about everyone from meet ups, then Usenet and IRC opened the world, then fora, then reddit (because Usenet died) now here and Mastodon…
