What Tracy Chou learned about online harassment while building app to solve it

It had text filtering, obviously, which could be applied to name/tripcode/subject/filename fields as well as the body text, but would also take regexes. This is much more useful in practice, assuming you can write a regex.

You could give it a list of image hashes to automatically filter. Once smartasses started perturbing images to change the hash, someone made a fork based on perceptual hashing.

Recursive filtering (I don't want to see this, nor any conversation it spawned) works better with imageboard-style DAGs of posts because the mechanism is trivial, but is a powerful concept if it could be implemented more generally.

I'm probably forgetting a lot more examples but the point is that the ideas are out there and that powerful tools of that sort are definitely possible - it's just that, for various reasons, the big social media players today don't see value in building something like that for their users. It doesn't help that modern social media's general antipathy to adversarial interop prevents a lot of the easier third-party implementations of tools like this.

And for people who genuinely don't want to learn things, they have no trouble rejecting true things regardless of how they are written. People in filter bubbles always have been exposed to the truth at least once; they simply reject it.

So I don't find any problems with blocking rude people. The author here wrote the Block button on Quora, and I use it vigorously. I would be unable to use the site otherwise, because it attracts a lot of very hostile people. It also has many smart people with a wide variety of perspectives, and they'll inform me when I'm missing something. All I lose out on is hostility.