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Comment by rsynnott | Hacker News Reader

See, the thing is, I do not wish to hear from idiots. Life is too bloody short.

This is how normal in-person social interaction works too, by the way. If you’re in a pub and someone comes up and starts ranting at you about how the pizza restaurant basements are turning the frogs gay, you’re probably not going to engage them. And if they keep at it, they’ll probably get kicked out.

The internet is full of people who (a) insane, and (b) insane in a very boring, same-y way. Filtering these people out is _fine_. There is no moral obligation to listen to every ranting idiot who comes along.

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Yeah this is the thing. I see the same here in Holland since the extreme-right won the elections.

People are constantly dragging up topics like transsexuality in completely unrelated discussions. I completely disagree with their opinion and I like challenging them on it (for example, what is it to them what other people do with their bodies?). They've never been able to give me a good answer to that so far. But they're constantly derailing topics about completely different things. They seem so obsessed with this topic. It's also getting so tediously repetitive. Always the same slurs without any kind of actual discussion.

The thing is, here in the Netherlands we used to have 'echo chambering' as the foundation for the country. We used to call it 'verzuiling' (literally translated "pillarification"). After the war the country was made up of several groups that didn't get along so well so each had their own newspapers, social circles, TV and radio broadcasters etc. There were the Catholics, the super-strict Calvinists, the Labour/progressive atheist crowd etc. They basically lived alongside without really interacting. And really, lately I'm starting to think this was not such a bad idea at all.

I appreciate that post-Twitter there has been a push on Bluesky (and maybe Mastodon) to block, block, block. Don't feed the trolls, as they used to say but we seem to have forgotten. Just block them and move on. It is definitely a mental health benefit.

Of course, I get it. You are so smart and everyone else is an idiot.

The thing is… if you had grown up in someone else’s life, you would be the one censored. Your intelligence has nothing to do with it. It’s a historical perspective.

But of course, you’re a genius and can’t nobody else tell you nothin. I believe John Stewart Mill wrote at least a volume on that topic!

> The thing is… if you had grown up in someone else’s life, you would be the one censored.

Choosing to ignore people is not censorship.

Also I would note that the lunatic-fringe far-right stuff I was referencing with the pizza restaurants turning the frogs gay did not _exist_ when I was growing up; it's quite new, really emerging in the past 15 years (of course, it does take a lot from older far-right concepts, but it is to some extent a thing onto itself). This isn't something that was forced upon people as kids because their great-grandparents were into dank Pepe memes, it is something that they have embraced themselves.

Except you aren’t choosing. You are having other people chose for you.

Defend it all you like. I think it is a move of people with weak character who aren’t actually so sure in their ideas that it makes them uncomfortable to be challenged.

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