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Comment by Kiro | Hacker News Reader

A common discussion "technique" on reddit is to block the person you're arguing with right after your last message, when you feel you're done with the conversation. That way they will never be able to reply and you always get the last word. Unfortunately this feels like an amplification of that. However, I guess the dynamics will prevent the frustrating feeling when that's the game you're singing up for.

Intriguing idea anyway. Looking forward to seeing how it pans out.

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This technique is not possible on Radiopaper. Once a conversation is published — which happens as soon it has messages from both parties — neither party can block the other party or unpublish the conversation (though you can edit your own posts, including deleting them).

Either party can keep adding messages to the conversation in any order, but only a back-and-forth is considered an update to the conversation as a whole, for the purposes of sending it to the top of the feed. That way, if a conversation turns sour, one person only needs to stop replying, and the conversation will gradually sink down the list into oblivion, even if new messages continue to be added by the ignored party.

> That way, if a conversation turns sour, one person only needs to stop replying,

Without actually trying it, this seems like a solid design choice.

How is that different from the parent-comment's point?

I mean, the parent-comment was saying that folks could get the last-word by replying-then-blocking. It sounds like folks on your platform could get the last-word by simply not approving the other-side's response.

To avoid one side getting a last-word in a feud, it'd seem like you'd need to ensure that both sides could eliminate the entire conversation should they not be satisfied with its ultimate conclusion, such that there'd be no last-words in any feuds as there wouldn't be any (published) feuds. Short of that, it'd seem like one party could end up getting in a last-word.

The difference seems to be that the other person gets the last word and anybody who actively seeks out the conversation will see it, it just isn't promoted? Because if I understand correctly, once someone has been approved once in a RadioPaper conversation, their subsequent posts in that conversation cannot be hidden.

The mods there love doing this. "Banned. Reason: Hate speech"

"Why was I banned? I didn't say any hate speech. I just stated my favorite movie."

"I hate that movie, thus it is hate speech because it promotes hate (something that I hate)." or "Read the rules, figure it out"

Sometimes then the mods ironically send actual hate speech in their reply, then block you. Or you reply to them, and replies to mods automatically unlock the nuclear admin ban missiles "for harassment." God forbid you quote their literal message in a report which then triggers the automated word filter bans which are disabled for some reason when it's mod messages.

I'm not really surprised though, since

Why does redit leave this anti-social loophole exploit open? Is it good for engagement? Seems like a win for the trolls and a net loss in terms of QoL for the good actors.

Blocking is sometimes necessary when someone is behaving as an abusive troll, or switches from normal conversation to hurling personal abuse.

Yes, it can be abused by people who think that having the last word is "winning". One way to address that might be to add "Fred blocked Sam" to a thread in which both Fred and Sam previously posted, so everyone knows what happened.

The downvotes on this comment (at least at the moment) are astounding.

How about only a silent mute but no block? Then you can protect yourself if you don't want to see it, but to use it as a weapon, you have to convince them you've really muted them - and they might not believe you, so it's weaker. Just like old Usenet and mailing list's *PLONK* message.

The feature is more commonly abused (on reddit) as an aggressive tactic by abusers. The person being "blocked" tends to be the target of abuse. This is because of some really bizarre oversights in how the feature was implemented:

Once you have been blocked, you cannot block back (because reddit no longer shows the user who blocked you as existing, while you're logged in). So if you want to harass someone, the best thing to do is to create an account and block them immediately.

Not only can a blocked person not respond to a blocker's comment or post, but they also cannot respond to any descendent of said post. Thus, on a small subreddit, or on popular posts in a large one, it's possible for a blocking peer to essentially "ban" you from the conversation at large.

By repeating this technique in the same subreddit, it's possible to gradually manufacture false consensus by preemptively silencing folks who would disagree with you. This user did an excellent study/proof when the new feature was launched:

https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/sdcsx3/test...

It's not a "loophole exploit", reddit simply gives the user arbitrary control of who they want to block.

It used to be Reddit would let users block trolls, and then the user would never have to deal with seeing the troll posts ever again, even if they continued to reply.

The new way - blocking someone and restricting that person's ability to reply - is an aggressive UX.

Blocking could be filtering out the replies rather than preventing a reply.

I would argue that it is, in fact, an exploit. Here's a proof in the wild:

https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/sdcsx3/test...

Blocking is fine. Nobody should be forced to read anyone else's comments.

However, if a block also prevents the blocked person from replying to the blocker's replies, that creates terrible incentives for abuse. Whoever implemented it was only thinking about blocks used against genuine bad actors, with disregard to how blocks could be (and empirically are) used by bad actors.

The same thing happens all the time on Twitter, which implemented the same "feature".

As strix_varius pointed out in a parallel subthread, this creates a perception of false consensus. It may be, more than any other thing, what's contributed to the hyper-politicization of those platforms. The platforms themselves enforce that any sufficiently engaged user, through enough defensive and offensive blocking, will end up in an echo chamber.

Allowing people to decide who they're going to engage with is freedom of association. Platforms which allow unlimited brigading prevent unpopular subcommunities from holding conversations amongst themselves.

Hyper-polarization is not diminished when those who disapprove of a community descend en masse to interject and disrupt. Platforms which don't allow subcommunities to wall themselves off degrade the ability of those subcommunities to use the platform, and if the volume of disruptive posts is high enough, essentially deny them use of the platform by allowing them to be shouted down.

This applies no matter who the subcommunities are or what politics they espouse.

Communities can wall themselves off and be very selective in who they let in. That's not the problem.

Block-prevents-replies allows bad actors to unilaterally silence opposition so that nobody else can see what the opposition's arguments are. *In a community that appears to be public.*

daenz's system is interesting (anyone can ban anyone, but to ban them you must reply to the comment you're banning them for, and others can ban you in return), and it might converge to stability, but each new troll will disrupt some discussions until they lose interest in being repeatedly counter-banned.

I think any system to exclude bad actors and prevent brigading needs to be designed some other way, so that silencing dissenters requires some consensus and can't be done unilaterally or by a small cabal.

Also, this forces the target of abuse to decide between publishing the message - giving the abuser a platform - versus not publishing it, suffering the abuse privately, and nobody knowing the person is being abusive (aka Missing Stair.)

It's worse than that, because you an block an unlimited amount of people, in advance. So you just identify a group of people that would likely respond negatively to your point, and make a post that can't be responded to by that group of people.

When this first happened to me I assumed it was a reddit error until I looked at the response code.

Same. It was extremely frustrating because I had written a long response with several references to support my argument and I was just unable to post it, getting a generic "Something went wrong" error message. I thought it was a temporary error and saved the comment but after trying several hours later getting the same thing I realized they had actually blocked me.

Maybe it’s worth creating a throwaway account and posting the message that way to make sure your point has been made.

I've honestly considering it but I'm afraid they will just say "lol you created a new account just to say that? pathetic" or something.

I think if you address the coward blockage from the get go you’ll keep the upper hand.

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