danhakimi

danhakimi, 7 months ago

I'm not aware of any other platform where a blocked user can reply to a blocking user, but it certainly isn't possible on Reddit.

danhakimi, 7 months ago

Blocking is not a moderator-level function, it is quite personal. You're welcome to continue chatting in the community, just don't reply to me with any more of your hate speech. I don't want it anywhere in my comment thread, I don't have to put up with that shit. Hiding it from me is not a block feature at all, it's a mute feature. I don't want to mute them, I don't want to close my eyes, and pretend I can't see their hate. I want to stop them from pretending to interact with me, I want them to stop posting bigotry in response to my comments, I want them to go the fuck away.

If they invade some other comment thread, there is no risk that anybody will think, "oh, he just couldn't come up with a reply to that last bit of bigotry, I guess the bigot won!" If they annoy others, they'll get downvoted, or the mods will act, whatever—not my business, I'm not looking for a moderation function, I'm looking for a personal function.

I'm not worried about the last word anywhere in the comment section, I'm worried about the last word in my comment thread, where they're directly harassing me. If they have something worth saying, if they have a narrative worth continuing, it'll be worth continuing in some other thread, rather than in direct response to me.

And if every user in the community blocks them, they earned it.

This is not moderation. It's personal.

danhakimi, 7 months ago

To clarify, a few years ago, the blocked user could not see the message either. The logic behind the change was, "you can just log out and see it anyway, so what's the difference?" Most people spend most of their time logged in. The difference is significant.

danhakimi, 7 months ago

A blocked user could never respond to a blocking user on Reddit, to my knowledge. I believe you're confused.

danhakimi, 7 months ago

I've never been blocked, so I might be wrong there. But the last word problem was the main reason I've seen people hate the move to the current blocking system, so I assumed it didn't exist before.

Yes, it's very annoying when the person you're harassing stops you from harassing them, I'm sure. You have all the steam of somebody being wrong on the internet and it just ends, without you being able to vent over four more days as you go back and forth pestering each other with thousand-word comments nobody will read. Trolls must hate it when they get cut off from that.

Reddit's official announcement for the new system does explicitly mention they're changing it so you can't interact with users that blocked you anymore. Which implies you could before.

What I recall is this:

https://www.reddit.com/r/changelog/comments/p2ezy4/bringing_more_visibility_to_comments_from_blocked/

The comments are all complaining about how blocking people doesn't block them, explicitly complaining that this change doesn't do the thing that blocking is, which is not to mute, but to block.

Looking through the history of changes, it seems you're referencing this:

https://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/s71g03/announcing_blocking_updates/

And the comment section there is much more mixed, although I do see more people complaining. I suppose people complain to reddit announcements no matter what, but to be fair, they are almost always bad.

danhakimi, 7 months ago

Like I said in the other thread, I was thinking of this:

https://www.reddit.com/r/changelog/comments/p2ezy4/bringing_more_visibility_to_comments_from_blocked/

danhakimi, 7 months ago

People expect to see replies in a comment chain because people expect the user to be notified. Nobody expects the user to follow down a totally different comment chain they weren't notified of to see every single insult anybody levies at them. And people recognize the extreme pettiness of baselessly insulting a user in a different comment chain where they aren't notified of the comment.

Whereas, if it's actually an informed response to misinformation, nobody sees it as petty, and it doesn't need to be in the same comment chain to have its effect, and it really doesn't need to be a back and forth.

Long comment chains really don't benefit anybody but the trolls who bait reasonable people into them, tbh.

danhakimi, 7 months ago

Well, aside from the fact that people expect the "block" function to block the blocked user, and not merely mute the blocked user...

"People dislike change." Coming from any other platform, they expect the "block" feature to work the same way it did all their lives. When they find out it doesn't, they will feel that kbin breaks the established norm of reddit, mastodon, twitter, instagram, facebook, every messaging client, and every other site with a "block" feature, constitutes an unannounced and unwelcomed change from every other service, and not only leave, but carry and share strong negative opinions about the fediverse.

Maybe having the fediverse not being janky garbage software would be better?

danhakimi, 7 months ago

What you're saying makes sense, but I think the big issue here is that blocking as it currently works on Reddit is harmful because it's too easy to abuse.

This is really not a problem on reddit, especially in the face of rogue moderators doing the same thing, except on the scale of a subreddit. Nobody

So, why does any platform even need this, besides familiarity?

I explained it many, many times throughout this thread. Harassment is bad. People's expectation to be able to block harassers is not just familiar, it's good. People should be able to free themselves from harassment—not just from knowing they're being harassed.

Right now, the assholes I blocked could, for all I know, be chasing me around the fediverse commenting on everything I say. They could be stalking me. They could be doxxing me. This is too easy to abuse.

On top of that, these threats make it dangerous to even use the muting feature against those real assholes. Muting only makes sense for people you find mildly annoying. I'm afraid when I mute a harasser, afraid that their harassment will continue, that I won't be able to reply to it, and that people will believe every nasty, bigoted thing they say about me. My only chance at safety comes from blocking them.

Shutting down an argument or badmouthing someone without giving them a means to respond or defend themselves.

Muting serves the same function, only punishing the person who uses the mute function instead. Thereby discouraging use of the mute function and perpetuating toxic debate. Toxic debates need to end, they should be shut down—not for a winner or a loser, but because they make everybody's lives worse and really don't enhance access to the truth. Insults should be shut down, rather than going back and forth ad infinitum. Harassment should be shut down. These are not free speech—you can speak freely anywhere. Persistently talking to somebody who doesn't want to hear your bullshit is harassment.

Like, if it's to avoid stalkers, this would do literally nothing to achieve that. They can just log out and continue doing what they were doing.

This will do a lot to prevent stalkers, because even if the stalkers realize they need to log out to stalk the user, they now lose every "follow" function, every logged-in function, and have to stalk the user manually. Most stalkers will never do that—they will lose steam the second they realize they've been blocked, and go worry about something else.

I don't think kbin should be blindly adopting bad ideas even if everyone else does them.

"blindly" while I've explained the issue throughout the thread? This is exhausting.

danhakimi, 7 months ago

Yeah, Mastodon has separate block and mute functions. Somebody just accused me of "playing the underdog card" for saying that babies should have their heads attached to their necks, in a whole long chain of comments where he frequently mischaracterized my points, so yes, I blocked him.

If you actually believe this, you're a bit shortsighted. This is the fediverse, people can just jump onto a different instance. And even on Reddit multiple accounts for the same person were allowed.

well, multiple reddit accounts to get around a block or ban were specifically forbidden, but you're right, it's possible.

the thing you're still confused about is thinking that it's something everybody does the second they get banned. There is a limit to the amount of work people actually end up doing to troll others on the internet. Some trolls have an iron will and are stubborn to no end; the vast majority will lose steam eventually and just go do something else.

If you set up your own instance just to troll people more effectively, and somehow manage to stay federated with your victims' servers, you might just be a corner case.

danhakimi, 7 months ago

ah, that sucks. feels like it shouldn't be too hard to honor blocks across instances, but idk.

and, yeah, theres' something super janky about the way kbin handles federation...

danhakimi, 7 months ago

This article is really not convincing.

like, fuck terfs, fuck the anti-trans movement, but the connection between the anti-trans movement and fascism is framed in this suuuuper abstract way that no meaningful definition of fascism would allow. It kind of just makes fascism sound like "statism."

There are plenty of terfs (again, fuck terfs) who are not calling for government action, but trying to exclude trans women from feminist spaces on non-governmental levels, arguing for a limiting social or academic definition of feminism or of a woman and holding exclusionary events. Fascism is an incorrect label for that behavior.

Furthermore, to call terfs fascists implies that they are generally for other things fascists are for, like a command economy, which I don't think is common.

And to be clear, there is an overlap between terfs and fascists, and an even bigger overlap between anti-trans people in general and fascists. We all know the Nazis fucked up a lot of good gender research, but they were never pretending to be feminists.

danhakimi, 7 months ago

I don't think @mishmashenjoyer implied that at all. Like, not even close. On any level.

danhakimi, 7 months ago

... did you link to the wrong article by mistake? that article doesn't really have anything to do with fascism, except insofar as most fascists also happen to be racists.

danhakimi, 7 months ago

that's literally the first article you linked to. Do you have a point at all? You can link to articles all day, but only two of them, and only one that argues for your point at all, which I've already addressed?

I'm not advocating for terfs or fascists, they're both villains, but to say they're the same is like saying the KKK and the muslim brotherhood are the same. Just because they're both evil and there are some common threads between their ideas doesn't mean they're the same. I think we should learn how to talk about the terrible groups out there instead of just equating all of them and dancing around our own ignorance. I'm not advocating them, I'm advocating against them as strongly as I can, and you're promoting ignorance instead of responding to the one damn point I've made.

danhakimi, 7 months ago

I read it, and responded to it. You've been ignoring my response because you don't have an answer to it. So again. The core argument that terfs are fascists is:

To that end, Butler does a good job of laying out that the anti-trans movement ultimately is about strengthening government oversight — restricting access to medical care and generally seeking to ban LGBTQ+ people from the public sphere, which fits pretty neatly into just about every standard definition of fascism. That includes gender critical feminists, the self-professed “leftist” equivalent of the more extreme right-wing fundamentalists.

Which, again:

• Pretends the entire social-focused aspect of the anti-trans movement doesn't exist, when it obviously does, and there are obviously many, many terfs focused on non-governmental oppression. The article itself describes governmental forms of oppression, but this does nothing to imply that the anti-trans movement is actually all about focusing on government oppression
• identifies an extremely superficial relationship between two positions as both being statist and therefore being the same. The police state is also about increasing government oversight. A command economy is about increasing government oversight. The founding of the CFPB was about increasing government oversight. Having courts is about increasing government oversight. These are not all forms of fascism.
• fails to describe fascism at all. Fascism is a specific thing with a specific definition, it's not just the idea of having an active government. Fascism is a form of nationalism with a dictatorial government, a strong military focus, a hard command economy that exists to support the state and the military, expansionist policies, suppression of opposition to the government, denigration of the individual in favor of the collective in the form of the state... Now, the terf movement, overall, is doing some of those things, but the article doesn't reference any of them.
• fails to establish that most terfs, or the core proponents of the terf movement, or terfs in general, are fascists, let alone that a terf is categorically a type of fascists.

If you have a point, then instead of linking to the same article again or linking article that isn't about fascism, please make your point.

danhakimi, 7 months ago

who gains from making up a new definition of fascism? why do you want people to be ignorant?

know thy enemy.

I'm not nitpicking here, I'm not being pedantic, your article didn't even vaguely touch on what fascism is. Maybe the underlying article did, but I'm having trouble imagining what the point is.

danhakimi, 7 months ago

where the fuck do you see me defednding fascists?

does it piss you off that you don't have any response to anything I've actually said? does it piss you off to discover that this publication you like just published a point it didn't understand at all? does it piss you off to see a person argue that we should attack terfs for being terfs and fascists for being fascists and not just assume that all bad people are the same kind of bad person?

is that why you're afraid to read any of my comments?

danhakimi, 7 months ago

"lol, I hate the main conservative group in the US because they're not the right kind of Scotsman conservative. Instead, I love the guy who been pushing the most extreme book-banning policy in the US."

did you forget that this was a conversation about fascism when you brought DeSantis up, or do you not know who he is?

(rightly or wrongly)

lol no

But at the same time, I recognize that for someone who truly did believe there was election fraud

who do you think tricked them into believing that? or do you think it was all one massive coincidence?

danhakimi, 7 months ago

stop saying that I'm defending fascists, asshole.

you didn't read any of my replies, and you kept accusing me of shit I'm not doing, because you are, in fact, not interested in defending your bullshit. Blaming me for that is sad.

also... I just found this thread today, how did that happen?

danhakimi, 7 months ago

Why are you advocating for the KKK?

show me a place where I implied that Fascists might not be complete pieces of shit. Show me one place.

You admitted to not reading my comments, you're nothing but a troll. This is serious. Go fuck yourself.

danhakimi, 7 months ago

I'm upset that you're promoting the Westboro Baptist Church!

I'm upset that decent people are being tricked into a stupid opinion about bad people. Just because fascists are evil and terfs are evil doesn't mean we should be making up confused bullshit about them, we should make coherent arguments and insult them for what they actually are. Making fun of terfs for being fascists is not effective because intelligent people will see that they're not fascists, and then not understand the actual issues with terfs. This is doubly problematic if your argument that terfs are fascists is as superficial and weak as the Them article you posted. You'll alienate people that absolutely want to be on our side.

Why are you so cut up about arguing in a thread you're not reading?

danhakimi, 7 months ago

I'll be here for as long as you keep defending Tucker Carlson.

I'm not doing this for the fascists. The fascists love it when people get confused about who they are.

I'm doing this for your benefit, and for the benefit of any other decent people reading. Decent people don't like being lied to, decent people don't benefit when you tell them that cake is a type of potato, decent people don't suddenly get smarter when you tell them that Rush Limbaugh is a Scientologist. Labels have meanings and degrading those meanings is not a progressive act.

danhakimi, 7 months ago

I spend my cis-ass time helping progressives avoid ignorant people like you who are helping terfs and fascists recruit. I spend my cis-ass time attacking terfs and fascists.

the worst thing you can do to a terf is tell the truth. The worst thing you can do to a fascist is tell the truth. They have no defense against the truth. Their ideas are genuinely that bad.

But when you lie, they party in the streets—that's their whole recruitment model. They say "look, libtards call us fascists just because we don't believe (insert some strawman version of the lies terfs tell)," and they laugh about how many "moderate" votes you gained them in their swing states.

I hope my fellow progressives don't think your ignorance is the norm among progressives.

danhakimi, 7 months ago

Why are you using the N word?

I'm not talking to a group, I'm talking to a dumbass.

As a Jew, I feel fairly entitled to talk about fascism, and fairly entitled to be upset when people say insert group of assholes are Fascists without any understanding whatsoever of any definition of Fascism beyond "government." I do, in fact, have a stake in how you lie about my oppressors.

But it's also perfectly reasonable for me to be upset when you lie about your oppressors and try to trick trans people and allies like me into believing your lies. Why are you so strongly opposed to the truth?

danhakimi, 7 months ago

Keep trolling trans allies and drawing false equivalencies, that'll stop the terfs.

Why did you shoot JFK?