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0 pointsstale20023y ago0 comments

That is what the block button is for.

Most people who are in favor of free speech, are perfectly fine with you personally clicking the block button.

Instead, what they don't want, is a centralized platform preventing consenting parties from engaging with each other.

See the difference?

0 comments

What exactly is the difference, again? A block button is prone to breaking thru numerical power. If enough people are responding to you and or harassing you there is no manageable way to block all of them, especially without first passively engaging with their posts in the first place.

So instead people build addons and blocklists to manage all of that for them. Now you have a separate centralized platform for dealing with a certain subset of users.

And if that doesn't work or if they don't want to put in that effort they just leave the platform instead. They go to somewhere else where the social agreement with the platform is to automatically filter out or remove those users. Hence why few people actually use the free speech platforms like Gab, Parker etc.

stale2002OP3y ago

> What exactly is the difference, again?

Think about 2 situations. Person A, wants to see the content of Person B. So person A voluntarily chooses to see the content.

And the other situation is Person C, does not want to see the content of person B, so chooses not to do so.

> there is no manageable way to block all of them

Yes there is. Someone could choose to allow an automated method of blocking people that they don't want to see.

As long as nobody is forced to use this automated moderation, or can change it, while still having access to that platform, then it is fine.

> Now you have a separate centralized platform for dealing with a certain subset of users.

No actually, it is quite a bit different. The difference being that a person could chose to modify this blocking authority. It is all fine and well to have blocking authorities, as long as I, the user can turn it off, if I choose to do so, on that platform, or otherwise modify my own blocklist, or add a white list.

So that is the solution. Feel free to have blocklists. Just let me change the blocklist, for myself, if I disagree with it.

There, everyone gets what they want.

x86_64Ubuntu3y ago

>...Instead, what they don't want, is a centralized platform preventing consenting parties from engaging with each other

Who doesn't want that? The billions of people that interact with Twitter and Facebook, or the people who are sympathetic to the fringe racist beliefs that dominate "free speech" sites?

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