I’m the same way… I don’t like to block people because I want to know what everybody’s saying… But I had to block hex bear. I normally just scroll all and they were everywhere all the time everyday and it just got too much.
I used to be quite proud of myself for never blocking anyone on Reddit, ever. Also I was a mod of a couple of gaming subs, so it wouldn’t have worked in those anyway:-). But eventually I realized… it wasn’t helping my state of mind, and rather it was affecting my irl relationships too. So I stepped back from modding, and finally blocked a particularly onerous troll account that I did not want to ban as a mod, but I sure did enjoy blocking him as a normal user.:-)
There’s a saying about the only thing we must not tolerate is intolerance, and it doesn’t quite go far enough imho as to state the consequences of failing to block intolerance - that they drag us down to become more like them:-(.
and finally blocked a particularly onerous troll account that I did not want to ban as a mod, but I sure did enjoy blocking him as a normal user.:-)
Just for curiosity, what was the troll doing?
I got a few of them from my Reddit mod times too, but since I was moderating smaller subs I had some freedom to tweak the rules towards their behaviour. (Because if I’m getting annoyed by the troll, odds are that other members are too.)
Standard troll (like toddler) stuff: pushing boundaries to see just exactly how far they could go, while stopping just inside the stated rules.
The reason I didn’t ban him is that his trolling was directed almost solely at me as the mod, but to the rest of the community he was actually quite helpful, and even somewhat kind 95% of the time. Some kind of problem with authority I suppose, even though I’d previously offered him my mod position but he turned it down.
We all have bad seasons in life, and I shudder to think what he went through during the pandemic. Not that it matters bc behavior is always a choice - Hitler’s home life surely wasn’t fantastic either - but by way of explanation, I do wonder how much the pandemic encouraged trolling on the internet world-wide (most likely: it simply became the latest in a very long like of reasons). And anyway, he was definitely this way before that started, so at best it would be an exaggerating factor.
He seemed good at masking behaviors, thus overall he was better for the community than he was annoying. And it was a small community (at least among regular posters) to begin with. And I was getting super annoyed by the game itself, and by Reddit, so rather than kick him out I stepped down as mod (I had been training someone already, and a prior mod returned from before the pandemic, so it was in good hands) and left the sub myself instead, and now there’s “peace” over there:-).
