ShalomEveryone is a full of shit enemy of humanity, and I ask for them to be banned for perpetually sealioning, shilling, lying, and dragging down discussions (only the last is ban-worthy by site rules).

submitted by JasonCarswell from self.AskSaidIt

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[–]magnora7 6 insightful - 3 fun6 insightful - 2 fun7 insightful - 3 fun -  (3 children)

We do ban spam accounts, so if he's spamming a lot that would warrant banning.

I understand your frustration, believe me I do. But if we banned everyone who I thought was deliberately sabotaging this forum but not breaking any rules, we'd lose a portion of our users. Those users would very likely stir up a revolt in the saidit userbase by making new user accounts and posting to "expose the censorship and rule changes" that would cause another larger portion of users to leave. Which is exactly what caused the failure of ruqqus, and voat, and many more. So that's obviously not what we want.

And furthermore, banning these users who are not actually technically breaking any rules functionally accomplishes nothing, as they immediately create another account and start another "personality" and then they'd have to be banned again after they create enough of a mess on the new account. It's never-ending whack-a-mole with them deliberately being annoying as possible without technically breaking any rules. And it is with the intent of driving away other users, I agree.

And also please realize many of them want to be banned (without technically breaking any rules) so they can make a stink on reddit and saidit about how bad saidit is and how corrupt and broken it is, because they weren't breaking any rules. And some of these people apparently have functionally infinite IP addresses, because they apparently have military-grade VPNs or can completely spoof IPs. So that's fun. It's probably paid operators, since it's been happening for hours a day for 3 years straight, and they have all this intense IP spoofing software. Same thing affected ruqqus, voat, poal, etc

This is just how the internet is now, unfortunately. But we think our solutions for these problems are pretty good compared to most sites, generally speaking. But I could also see the use for an additional new website that has slightly more strict rules. But it also requires a level of trust in the admins from the users, to judge what is "harmful trolling" and what isn't. It's a tightrope.

If blocking instead removed the ability of trolls to interact with your posts and comments in any way, that would be a tremendous improvement.

So in addition to you not seeing their activity, they would also not see your activity? I think this makes sense, I would support this upgrade. I can't really see any downsides.

[–]AXXA 9 insightful - 4 fun9 insightful - 3 fun10 insightful - 4 fun -  (2 children)

So in addition to you not seeing their activity, they would also not see your activity? I think this makes sense, I would support this upgrade. I can't really see any downsides.

This is how Reddit does it now and it will end up killing them. It's a horrible idea that enables intellectual cowards. Saidit is about challenging your thinking with different perspectives. It would be an absolute goldmine for shills and trolls. All they would need to do is block everybody that ever dared disagree with their narrative. Then they could spew whatever lies they wished without ever being challenged or corrected. The strength of Saidit is that we CAN disagree. That freedom to be able to disagree exists hardly anyplace else right now. Saidit is already perfect exactly as it is. Please don't give in to the intellectual cowards. Any idea that can't stand up to scrutiny is a worthless intellectual dead-end.

[–]magnora7 4 insightful - 3 fun4 insightful - 2 fun5 insightful - 3 fun -  (1 child)

Hm interesting points. But, I don't think people getting blocked are going to intellectually engage in an honest way anyway, that's rather the point of point of the block function isn't it? To remove from sight people you think are not acting in good faith.

If a troll blocked all people who disagreed with them, and then those people couldn't see it, then they're basically quarantining themselves off from the rest of the website, right? So then the trolling isn't as effective because it doesn't have as broad of reach.

I'm more undecided on it now because of your good points, but I think it's still a good idea despite the potential downsides.