lines-and-edges:

shinelikethunder:

elfwreck:

freedom-of-fanfic:

luckyladylily:

freedom-of-fanfic:

luckyladylily:

freedom-of-fanfic:

freedom-of-fanfic:

First of all: wow, I’m so sorry!? That’s incredibly fucked up. Hang in there, anon. If there’s anything that would help you out don’t hesitate to mention.

Second: im so fascinated!? By this choice…??? Entitled is right.

I’d be curious to know: are they telling you to block them based on your relative ages? Or are all of the antis attacking you with this demand 21 and younger? Because I can see that fitting a certain ‘adults (that is: anyone older than me) have to look out for my safety even if they’ve never met me’ attitude that I find lines up with the increase in ‘trust authorities to protect you’ culture shift that followed 9/11 in the US.

Either way: isn’t it interesting how antis are insisting you are dangerous to them, and yet trusting you to block them instead of try to harm them if they put themselves in contact with you?

It’s almost like they know you’re not actually dangerous to them and this is all performative outrage and playing at activism.

Wild.

[image ID: anonymous says:

• I’m the DMMD thread person who said the very controversial statement that kids shouldn’t be playing DMMD since it’s meant for adults. That really rustled their jimmies. I’ve honestly not looked at their profiles, just reported the really offensive ones and muted the others. But everyone demands I block them, and from friends who been curious, apparently there is an anti culture precedent of refusing to block people they consider bad because they think that means they lose.

End ID] (emphasis mine)

Blocking people who ship things they hate means they lose?

Well that’s the most 4chan thing I’ve ever heard.

I’ve said before that I think anti-shipper circles have learned their argument style by watching people from the alt-right argue on YouTube comments and twitter chains, b/c their ‘argument’ method is an extremely effective trolling and harassment style. This seems to reinforce it.

Bless you for your maturity in dealing with them.

The reason why this precedent exists is because internet bullies need a way to declare victory when people ignore them. Here is the thing: Bullies need a rise out of their target in order to get their satisfaction from bullying, proof that they have hurt their target. If the immediate response to a bully is block and ignore then the bully has usually put effort into their bullying and gotten nothing out of it – objectively, at best, they can hope that they hurt their target, but they will never get the actual satisfaction of knowing they did.

So they have redefined blocking people is a sign of deficiency – cowardice, moral inferiority, and most importantly trying to equate it to admitting defeat. This way they can still get their violence thrill when someone ignores them. They know they won, they know they hurt their target, because they have defined blocking to be irrefutable proof of such.

But it only works if they believe it. They have to convince themselves, not their target. Which is why people go in other’s inbox and demand that they be blocked. They have built up their world view so that they are unable to block or it is actively admitting that they are cowards, morally deficient, and are and always were wrong.

And, unfortunately, because anti culture is based on bullying and abuse they have managed to convinced a lot of younger people that this is the case, so now lots of people are unable to block people because it makes them feel that they are cowards and morally deficient.

This is yet another way in which anti culture actively harms minors. It has rendered many minors incapable of using the tools that allow them to protect themselves in online spaces.

This is an incredible analysis! Thank you.

Unfortunately it is not just analysis. I know a girl who is being stalked and harassed by a man on social media but she refuses to block him because “blocking is cowardly”.

I figured out all this by talking to her, trying to address her concerns about blocking people, and trying to convince her it is ok to block this guy. This has been going on for 4 months and still she refuses because people have drilled it into her head so much that blocking people makes her a bad person. I finally got her to turn off anon asks though, so progress is being made.

I’m really glad you went to that effort. You’re a good friend. Unfortunately, I know it’s not just theory to think over … it’s seriously screwing up a lot of lives. That’s why I think it’s so important to understand the mindsets of the people doing it, so you can see it in yourself and others before you hurt yourself or anyone else, and before you get tangled up with people who are spouting that rhetoric before you meet them.

Also: thinking back to when I was younger, blocking was considered the ‘cowardly’ thing to do even before antis were shitting things up in a particular way. On LJ, on FB, on MySpace … only assholes blocked people, at least in the geeky spaces I hung out in. Which makes me think that maybe the Geek Social Fallacies also play a part in this? ‘If you exclude people you’re a dick.’ ‘You’re a coward who won’t confront people. You just avoid them.’ Which of course, feeds into an environment where even people who don’t buy into anti-shipper rhetoric are set up to be afraid of blocking people, lest they be seen as the ‘real’ problem for failing to negotiate a ceasefire and excluding other nerds from their nerd experience.

It’s all just conveniently feeding into a space where abusers have full time access to victims and denying that access makes the victim equally abusive. 😦 I hate it.

I hope your friend ends up okay.

Blocking is not cowardly. Blocking is taking control of your time and attention, and refusing to give energy to the people who want you to waste it on them.

If you are entertained by antis, you are under no obligation to block them – if they don’t want to read your words, they can block you.  If someone is bothering you, feel free to block them – your time and attention are limited; don’t waste them on people who only detract from the enjoyment you get out of life.

(Originally posted this as a reply, but I’m copying it into a reblog for safekeeping and expanding on it slightly.)

This is making me wonder if we need to revive another Old Internet term: signal-to-noise ratio. Blocking mindless hate and copypasta’d harassment is usually less about threat than about nuisance. Removing useless, irrelevant, foul-smelling garbage from your local slice of internet so you can spend your finite time and attention on the stuff you’re actually there for. This was less true on platforms like LJ that made it easier to maintain a high signal-to-noise ratio. But on Tumblr and Twitter, with high posting volume, feeds clogged with reblogs/retweets, sitewide tags instead of moderated communities as the only common spaces, and extremely limited filtering capabilities, blocking becomes a vital tool for junk control. In some ways it’s a replacement for basic mod functions like “clean up the mess if a troll starts shouting insults, baiting participants into flamewars, or otherwise interrupting useful conversations to draw dongs all over everything.” Or spam/off-topic control–my blocklist is mostly bots and blogs that post stuff I’m not interested in to a tag I’m browsing.

Related: I suspect the motivation for content-less harassment comments like “tl;dr”/“bad post op”/etc isn’t just signaling allegiance or demoralizing the OP, it’s also shitting up the signal-to-noise ratio of the post notes and inviting your followers to join in. It’s why long substantive posts are more likely to get the Tumblr-hate equivalent of a dong scrawled in sharpie–the *existence* of signal in the “enemy” camp is what’s being targeted, and trolls don’t fight signal with counter-signal. They fight it with noise.

Noise attacks are some real shit right now, too. Information bombardment is one of the cornerstones of information distortion (which was literally how 4chan and Russia drop-kicked Trump into office.)

Of course 4channers would say that blocking is cowardly – they depend on the unchecked ability to generate noise.

I encourage blocking those who maliciously generate noise.

Interesting discussion.

I come from Usenet, and still tend to approach things more in terms of signal-to-noise. Someone keeps getting on your nerves, or you’re just not interested for whatever reason? No moderation, no problem. Plonk them. That’s what killfiles are for.

So I keep getting surprised at this apparent shift toward “blocking is the same as admitting you’re in the wrong”. Besides the influence of certain trollish corners of the net, I do have to wonder if the Geek Social Fallacies factor might have been reinforced by the fact that on a lot of platforms it is way more obvious when you have blocked somebody. I know I prefer the option to just quietly automatically shitcan anything certain aggravating people post, and the only thing they’ll know about it is that you’re not engaging.

No idea how much of a role that may have been playing, but yeah. Some bizarre patterns there.