There was an issue on Reddit a while back where people would post some hateful stuff, and of course lots of people blocked them.
After a while, anti-trans, racist, and far-right-wing stuff were only seen by non-logged in users, other bigots, or new people, and they weren’t getting the downvotes they deserved.
Is this going to be a problem on Lemmy too? I’m worried that if we’re all blocking shitty users that we’re just hiding the problem from ourselves, not fixing it.
So far I’ve only blocked users whose names and posts indicate they’re just here to post porn. Nothing against them, I just want to look at All once in awhile without accidentally (clumsy old-lady fingers) opening someone’s vulva or ass. Nazis I downvote and/or report and/or yell at.
I’ve been blocking everyone with a stupid argument, and it feels great. If we’re really worried about this, just quarantine anyone with a high block rate.
I like having better control over what content people can push at me. An issue on other platforms is they all want to force things on me – things that they make money from, or things they think will annoy me (to keep me “engaged”). This makes them really annoying for me to use, and generally results in me giving up on the idea of sharing the things I study with others, and maybe also helping people with their projects.
I’m really mostly here to share science and engineering stuff, and maybe help other immigrants to Vietnam (I mean, there will probably be another one eventually…).
So really, I don’t think it’s a problem. I’m already painfully aware of the various weird things people think about me in daily life (yay, being an immigrant!). I don’t need that to define every single thing I do. Sometimes I just want to log on and post some nice words about optimizing assembly language, without having to deal with a bunch of strange and often inappropriate requests from strangers.
