Hacker News Reader

Comment by root_axis | Hacker News Reader

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

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.

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...

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com