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Comment by mikeryan | Hacker News Reader

Serious question. The issue of public block lists comes up quite a bit. I’m not sure why this is a problem?

This could be me. I’ve always used social networks with an assumption that everything I did was public.

https://mosquitocapital.substack.com/p/bluesky-is-not-ready

> 2) Blocking: Your list of blocked users is public. Anyone can see it through the API. Someone harassing you? They, and all of their buddies, will know as soon as you block them. People can build profiles of who's ripe for harassment just by searching for large blocklists.

>Someone harassing you? They, and all of their buddies, will know as soon as you block them.

But Twitter has a huge "This person has blocked you" page? This doesn't sound like a massive upset to the status quo.

But this is not a "discoverable" thing, and only the person who was blocked can see it. I (or more contextually appropriate, a bad actor/harasser) can't trivially check if someone else has been blocked by another user on Twitter.

Imagine you were a touchy person with a big audience. Also imagine you had a tool where you could find all the people who blocked you, and you noticed someone important on that list. You could make that person's life (at best) quite annoying if you wanted to know why they blocked you.

It's a harassment vector that has even been the topic of a lot of controversy in Mastodon already. Some instances got harassed for their public instance block lists. It wasn't even personal blocks, but instance-wide and instance-to-instance blocks (and then in-fighting). A lot of instances like the transparency of public instance blocks, especially as that can be a helpful tool for evaluating an instance's admin policies from the outside if you are looking for an instance to join. However, the same helpful tool also gives trolls ammunition when they are looking for "fun" fights to pick and suggests who might be "weak" to their attack.

It could be seen as defamation. If the block list is titled “nazis” or “antisemetics”, two of the worst labels you can be assigned in modern western society, then you can be publicly described that way with no context or recourse.

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