Ask Lemmy
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If someone is harassing you, IMO the best approach is not blocking but contacting the admins; either of your instance or the person's instance. If you simply block the person they'll keep harassing you, but now on your back as you won't see their comments.
I block people for my own peace of mind. If they want to follow behind me and be public assholes, they are just showing everyone else who they are.
A bunch of my innocuous posts wind up with a single lonely downvote. It makes me laugh because someone out there is really fucking butthurt over something I don't even remember any more.
When it's just for your own peace of mind, or just some muppet downvoting you all the time, that's fine. However, harassment strictu sensu often causes social repercussions that harm the person being harassed, even if they're oblivious to that. And often harassers don't just stop at one person, they pick multiple targets; it is not the sort of people who you want in a community.
So often it's simply better for you and everyone else to report them instead.
Yeah just hiding the content of people who harass you is really not a good practice. It's the whole reason why Reddit introduced two-way blocking, they know that this type of harassment can't actually be combated by simply ignoring it. Here on Lemmy we don't have that, the next best thing though is to report to admins or Community moderators, but I would recommend admins since they can take care of the users more efficiently.
Yeah I agree these types of people really should not be in communities and instances. While it may be up to moderators and admins to ban people on the site and communities, it is us the users who are responsible for bringing these types of bad people to their attention, by reporting and reaching out.
Think of being a user on these sites as being like part of a neighborhood watch all the time. You are obligated to report people who are behaving suspicious or in ways that are harmful to the community. Maybe if one or two people ignore them it's fine but if a majority of people do this it won't be, and isn't. It's part of the reason why I think that there are so many trolls and bad faith actors here who never get banned from communities or instances despite the fact that they have zero restraint about where and when they lash out at someone. It's because people just block those guys and never report them.
Well said.