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I've always fundamentally disagreed with the idea of being able to block individuals from seeing the things you broadcast to the world.

Imagine if TV or radio or newspapers could do this because they didn't like something you said or did.

This is touched on in the Black Mirror episode "White Christmas". It's just creepy and an abuse of technology.

If you want to communicate privately, then do so.

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I also thought that it was weird but I still remain neutral about it. Pros could be that it helps to psychologically dislodge toxic people from you if you can make them unable to read your replies. It also moves the power a bit more to the content writer versus the reader, suddenly the reader has an extra incentive not to spam or annoy the writer. On the other hand it seems like a lot of people used this feature mostly just on people they personally disagree with and this might have been a huge reason why people became so isolated in their social bubbles. We do have a real problem in our society which is that we increasingly have differing morals and ignoring those differences isn't really a good thing, it's more like a ceasefire situation.

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