@splodge: Again, nobody wants to take that right away. It's just that a black list made like that is an imperfect method, and if the author of that list went back on it himself it should say something, no?

The example about the girl was to tell others to unfriend her before the fact not after. I'll make it simpler: it's like if you put online a list of the 425 people you removed from fb, without giving a why, so others people can block them. They absolutely can, but they don't know the reason behind every removal (maybe you removed someone who was a dick and maybe you removed someone else because he/she's a fan of a rival sports team, who knows?) so they are bound to make mistakes.

If you think it's worth it, great, go ahed and block away; but you have to be conscious that you're gonna unknowingly block people who don't deserve to be blocked. It's just simple as that

Friend, let's not escalate what everyone says here so we can start a screaming match. I never said anything implying that they "want to be harassed". I said that they want the harassment to remain visible. That, if every last troll was blocked, they'd have no proof that they existed at all, and would therefore be less able to make any claim against them. So a way to completely stop them from seeing the harassment isn't specifically their goal. But again, as I also said twice, that is just my interpretation based on a small number of actions from folks who I don't know in real life so it's not the whole story if accurate at all.

The bigger point is your first sentence.

"the ones I do [see] often make comments about the bad reporting process and @twitter while doing."

That's the problem. Yes they complain on twitter about twitter and @twitter while doing so, but clearly... that has zero effect. That's when you say, "Well, nothing comes from this. I'll try something else." But that never happens.

Twitter is an international leviathan and it's just not a big enough problem in their eyes to devote resources to. Those folks who make constant comments about the reporting process know this. Horrible harassment online and on twitter specifically isn't anything new. But they have the power to do more. If all of these concerned games folks reached out to people in other fields and other celebrities and basically anyone who's been the victim of or just wants to curtail twitter harassment, and encouraged every one of their followers to email twitter every day, non-stop until something changed, it could work. If they printed out every awful tweet they received and mailed them to the home of the CEO, if they protested outside of twitter's offices, if they actually did anything at all, things might be better.

As it is, they complain about the service by using the service itself, expecting the thing that's never worked to suddenly do for no reason. They're doing it wrong.

I see your point. My example was not the best.

In the end though... I find it very, very difficult to care about it. Not that people shouldn't, just personally... It means nothing to me. I couldn't care less if I am blocked from someones feed, regardless of whether I deserve it or not. Or if others are blocked from mine. There are a myriad of ways to find out what people are up to and contact them if you really need to. If worst come to worst I can send them a letter (gasp!).

You are right, however. I guess I dont really have a horse in this race. My initial comment was not very helpful.

your'e essentially victim blaming duder

Wow.

Honestly, I'm shocked at that response.

Were the suffragettes "victim blaming" by encouraging women (who were victims) to unrelentlessly protest until they won the right to vote? Were Ghandi and MLK "victim blaming" by demanding that all of their protests (from victims) be non-violent?

How can activism to try and improve the use of a thing and avoid being harassed on it ever be anywhere close to blaming those who are the victims of it? Really, I'd like to know. Please elaborate.

It seems far more actively hurtful towards victims of online harassment to be content with nothing more than an occasional tweet about how things should be better.

@joshwent said:

It sounds like you're accusing them of dishonesty and playing the victims.

@joshwent said:

Should we all just sweep the harassment under a rug and forget it ever happened? They are taking a stand, it is a form of activism to raise the visibility of it.

...also, you totally did imply they want to be harassed.

@joshwent said:

It's almost as if he didn't spend a really long time cultivating a no-nonsense, "serious" persona and took it to an extreme.

Thank you for making sure I know I'm wrong. I get it. Let's move on.

I think you're still avoiding the point. Raising visibility is NOT taking a stand. It's not activism. It's what you do before you can take a stand about something. First you have to identify the injustice. We've done that already. We've been doing that for years now. The next step is to take action to try and prevent it, but that just isn't happening.

Blocking offensive people is not "sweeping the harassment under a rug", it's just a step to help stem the tide of shitty stuff while we work to fix the greater problem. Say I'm a person on twitter (which I'm not, actually) and someone sends me a lovely message saying "burn in hell jew!". All I'm saying is that it would help me in that situation if I could press one "block" button and I could be assured that that IP address could never send me messages again. It's not going to stop anti-semitism, but it's certainly not me denying it either. Just a beneficial tool to make folks' online lives a little less horrible while they attempt to curtail the bigger problems.

It's really sad to see my call for folks to try and actually help those that are suffering from hate is being dismissed as hate itself. Sometimes you just can't fucking win.

It appears that we have arrived at an impasse, as my opinion is quite the opposite.

I think you're a good person but you're approaching this from the wrong side, as far as I can tell. You are telling the victims of harassment that they need to change and simply shrug off the harassment by blocking it, when you should be going after the ones responsible for it in the first place.

@matiaz_tapia said:

I agree. It's really a cesspool. I can't really think of any practical benefits from such a platform.

I've been online for decades now, and I've never run across a community where the DEFAULT reaction to someone disagreeing with you is to block them outright. I'm not talking about harassment, either. Just disagreements. You can't have real conversations in 140 characters, and most people refuse to listen to any dissenting voices. Is it any surprise that it's become an echo chamber for various groups who plug their ears at the thought of real discourse?

@brodehouse: If we continue with the school analogy, Ideally you'd have teachers or school police or something to kick those jackasses out. That isn't being provided right now, so the kids need to fend for themselves.

Like I said, shared blocklists are not a perfect tool. I'm not even sure they help a lot in this particular instance, but I don't blame folks for using them to deal with the enormous amounts of hate speech and abuse being flung at them through Twitter. If that sounds too authoritarian for your tastes then take a look at the #burgersandfries IRC logs. Over 3700 pages of chat dedicated to making Zoe Quinn's life as miserable as possible. And that's mostly just her. One person dealing with all that crap targeted at her.