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If someone is harassing you, IMO the best approach is not blocking but contacting the admins; either of your instance or the person's instance. If you simply block the person they'll keep harassing you, but now on your back as you won't see their comments.
I block people for my own peace of mind. If they want to follow behind me and be public assholes, they are just showing everyone else who they are.
A bunch of my innocuous posts wind up with a single lonely downvote. It makes me laugh because someone out there is really fucking butthurt over something I don't even remember any more.
When it's just for your own peace of mind, or just some muppet downvoting you all the time, that's fine. However, harassment strictu sensu often causes social repercussions that harm the person being harassed, even if they're oblivious to that. And often harassers don't just stop at one person, they pick multiple targets; it is not the sort of people who you want in a community.
So often it's simply better for you and everyone else to report them instead.
Yeah just hiding the content of people who harass you is really not a good practice. It's the whole reason why Reddit introduced two-way blocking, they know that this type of harassment can't actually be combated by simply ignoring it. Here on Lemmy we don't have that, the next best thing though is to report to admins or Community moderators, but I would recommend admins since they can take care of the users more efficiently.
Yeah I agree these types of people really should not be in communities and instances. While it may be up to moderators and admins to ban people on the site and communities, it is us the users who are responsible for bringing these types of bad people to their attention, by reporting and reaching out.
Think of being a user on these sites as being like part of a neighborhood watch all the time. You are obligated to report people who are behaving suspicious or in ways that are harmful to the community. Maybe if one or two people ignore them it's fine but if a majority of people do this it won't be, and isn't. It's part of the reason why I think that there are so many trolls and bad faith actors here who never get banned from communities or instances despite the fact that they have zero restraint about where and when they lash out at someone. It's because people just block those guys and never report them.
Well said.
I think Lemmy's devs seem to not understand this problem otherwise they would've kept a version of two way blocking in Lemmy and wouldn't fight this idea so much:
Proper blocking systems for preventing harassment need to at a basic level stop people from replying to the user or their content. People can argue that this can be abused but not having it will be abused more in exactly the same way you said.
I think that it would be possible to implement true/two-way blocking while minimising the amount of abuse, if the blocklist is public. As in, if Alice simply mutes Bob, nobody knows it; but if Alice blocks Bob, you can see in Alice's profile "blocking: Bob".
I also think that the mute / block user option needs to have a confirmation window. From this thread it's obvious that a lot of people are muting bad faith users, instead of reporting them. That's bad because the problems never reach the ears of those who can act on them.
(I'm just throwing ideas around, mind you. Take them with a grain of salt, there might be some catch that I didn't realise.)
Yeah I do think there needs to be confirmation since it is way too easy to just quickly mute a lot of people in rapid succession.
I'm not sure if making them public is a great idea, since people might be bad faith trolls but that might not be apparent to other people at first glance. I probably would have at least 50 on my list if it were a feature, to someone who doesn't know it might seem like I'm abusing the system but almost all of those people were either harassing me or others. Many have been banned but not all of them. Maybe it could be visible to admins, but not general users.
I'm not even really sure how big of an issue blocking abuse really is in reality, since on Reddit many of the people who complain about it are trolls in and of themselves, some of the people complaining about the changes to the blocking system are actually suspended currently. So not really sure it is a real problem. Abuse of the muting feature though is a much more serious problem because if all or most people just do this all the time instead of reporting eventually instances and communities become overrun with trolls and bad faith actors because people are not reporting them, meaning the only ones who would get actioned are the ones caught explicitly by the mods and admins. Not good.
I think that making blocks visible only for admins could work. At least the admins of the instances of both users.
I'd say it's concerning, specially due to hit-and-run tactics - replying to someone and blocking them before they have the chance to counter-reply. I used this a fair bit for shitposting and taunting circlejerks*, but it could be easily used also to make the other side look like lacking arguments (i.e. for public manipulation of views) or also for individual harassment.
One of the counter-strategies that I've seen was people editing their comments and highlighting that they were blocked. That only works when the person knows that they were blocked.
*my last years in Reddit weren't exactly "contributing" with that place.
I think this type of two way blocking makes it particularly clear when the person is blocked since it disallows replying and on Lemmy community bans are visible. So editing comments can help with that, as it would be apparent they have blocked you, the UI could be changed to reflect that either by highlighting the user who has blocked you or greying out the reply button. Of course that could be used as an abuse tactic but since it depends on existing replies which are finite it wouldn't be as bad as them being able to continue making more.
Also since administration on Lemmy is much more in touch with the userbase (at least most of the time) it's easier to get such abuse dealt with at the community or instance level.