Think about it: you try reasoning with them, then get tired and block their noise from your feed, but all that does is reduces the presence of the ‘readonable minority’, allowing them to spew their rethoric to a more receptive audience. Socmed sucks.
You would think engagement would work better, and IRL it does. Online you’re just feeding the trolls.
Yea my mental health is too important to worry about stuff like that
There’s no changing their minds anyway, they’ll just be less angry, so overall, it’s progress.
This is honestly the biggest reason. I’ve gotten in so many debates and arguments online and it only ends with me having wasted my time and being less happy. This is even the case when the person has seemed reasonable at first but it always devolves from there.
The only problem with blocking people early and often is that it produces no signal for everyone else, downvote style.
Think about it: “shithead42088 (blocked by 83 people)”. Or more subtly just downgrade the relative sorting of their posts for everyone else if you don’t want to reveal the number.
Our world is a network of networks, just like these apps are. In the real world, echo chambers are highly desirable. We carefully shape them. My neighborhood, my city, all of it is a narrower set of people that I’ve chosen. Beyond that, my crowds are echo chambers. My family.
Being forced to listen to the abhorrent is the unnatural state. Drinking from the firehose of repulsive opinion is something that never occurs in the real world without conflict. Sometimes violent.
I don’t have to listen to something I don’t want to listen to, and that, too, is freedom.
It is good for my mental health
Part of what makes Lemmy interesting is that so many people here disagree with me. I only block the profane ranting sort. I do, however, sometimes just stick to lighthearted topics for a while when I already have enough stress in my life.
I’m going to copy-paste a relevant post I made recently in response to a discussion about being baited by trolls:
My own rule is simple: I should only interact with another person online for as long as I enjoy doing so. Often I have a hard time letting someone else have the last word, especially when I feel insulted, but I’m getting good at it.
It helps to remember that many arguments are actually performances: the other guy isn’t really trying to learn anything or even to change your mind. He’s acting for an audience of people who already agree with him. When he repeats the things they want to hear, they praise him for owning the libs or something along those lines. There is never anything to be gained by being the patsy for that circle-jerk.
many arguments are actually performances: the other guy isn’t really trying to learn anything or even to change your mind. He’s acting for an audience of people who already agree with him
100%
Look at this asshats interactions with me over the israel genocide before agreeing with this stupid fucking troll
You deserve to be blocked you pro genocide troll
Oh it’s the pro troll again. Let’s goooooo! Biden says ‘you’re welcome!’
Ugh. This old argument again.
If you’ll remember, that’s how social media used to work. If you are old enough to remember OG Facebook, back when it required a
.eduemail address to sign up (and for a brief while after it was opened to the public), you only saw posts, and other people only saw your posts, if you both accepted friend requests. No randos were spewing nonsense in your feed; if Becky or Brandon started spewing conspiracy theories, you just un-friend them and they’re gone from your digital life.It was just a place for people you already know to connect online and maybe meet some friends-of-friends in the process. The feed (“wall” I think it was called?) was reverse chronological and nothing was boosted or demoted; likes only indicated you liked it.
That model seemed to work pretty damn well by not allowing toxic people, bad actors, conspiracy nuts (unless your friends were all conspiracy nuts), and dis-/misinformation to permeate every freaking interaction.
