No Stupid Questions
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
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Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
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Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
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Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
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If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
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I think when it comes to blocking, the best approach is when a blocked user is still able to reply but those are hidden from the person that blocked them. While this does basically lead to "harrassment behind their back," it also prevents users from stifling conversation intentionally by preventing those users from blocking others that may disagree with them so that there is no real discussion or conversation on a comment or topic.
Its a shiniest of two turds option, as the ideal situation is that everyone can be nice and not nasty when someone has a different opinion, thus a block feature not needing to exist. But since we can't be having any "wrongthink," (whatever that may mean to each user is different) and anonymity brings out the worst in people, a block feature the way it currently works is necessary.
One annoying feature is that all replies to a blocked user are also automatically hidden regardless of if those people are blocked or not, which I wish wouldn't happen. Even if the client loaded a dummy comment in place of a blocked user it would be better IMO.
But at the end of the day, there is not really anything anyone can do to prevent other people from reading or interacting with your Lemmy account. They can just not log in, or they can create a new account. They could even create a whole new instance just to keep making accounts. Its like playing whackamole, you just hope the ones you block dont go that far.
Maybe make blocking a public thing, so when you respond to someone you get a warning "this user has blocked you, they will not see your reply" and then show to others that a comment is responding to someone that blocked them? This may help prevent a lot of confusion. Though I see the increased risk of harassment that comes with it... I guess you really can't win this
I remember on Reddit, during the height of astroturfing and such during the pandemic, people would post stupid shit and block anyone who called them out for spreading misinformation.
At first I thought it was just people who had stupid ideas and didn't want to change their minds, until I started seeing some of them saying things like "You know I'm right, which is why you won't reply to this"...and the original commenter would never see it.
It was an effective tool for people who wanted to try to control narratives or otherwise spread misinformation.
Which is how I THOUGHT Lemmy would be when I signed up. It's definitely not that way. I still love Lemmy, but oy, the user base here do not like opinions that go against the norm/majority. They seek revenge. Follow you around to downvote comments, etc. It's crazy.
This is unfortunately very true in my experience as well. In my opinion it is actually worse than when I was on Reddit. Nothing can be done about it, sadly.