politics
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How exactly does blocking them amplify their voice, especially when loudly calling for others to do the same?
Blocking them doesn't silence them. It just means that you, specifically, can no longer see them. Which means you can no longer downvote them or call them out.
Blocking someone is not winning an argument, it's ceding the floor to them.
Unfortunately, you can't call them out like they should be called out because we handcuff ourselves with rules about 'civility' when they have none. Thus we only can try to call their arguments out, which of course leads to a circular argument where you lay out the counterpoints to their nonsense and they repeat it, just more fervently. Within the context of both the rules and the mods choice to enforce them more on our side than the dishonest people who come here, ESPECIALLY with the prohibitions of calling a spade a spade (no calling shills, no calling trolls, no calling Russian plants, no calling out as a bot or a sock puppet, even if it's clear the account in question is what's being called). When you're basically told 'be nice to people who are not being nice to you', the only real answer is to block and move on.
Hard disagree. There's usually more of us than them, and as we can see from lemmy.ml, when mods/admins blatantly and obviously go against the will of the people, then people abandon them. Seeing 15 upvotes and 136 downvotes is a powerful indicator. Seeing a series of people ridiculing a tankie or fascist or "bothsides" troll is powerful. Mods get afraid to be obviously partisan because people will leave.
But when people avoid testy conversations, it gives power to those trolls and partisan mods.
Good point.
I still think we handcuff ourselves too much with Rule 3, especially if the comments put up by the trolls are left up by the mod team while removing our comments. I'm not going to go so far as to call the mods here partisan, just unintentionally handicapping the community against paid actors. I am absolutely certain the account I was replying to was disingenuous and not here to have an honest debate. That we can't accuse users of being bots or paid actors or trolls when they most clearly are definitely is ceding the floor to them. We then have to engage them like they are honest and open debaters, when they are most definitely not. Some of us get frustrated with the same old bullshit going unchallenged and unchecked, so I can see why those people would like to block, but you make a good point about ceding the floor to them.
I agree that rule 3 (and similar community rules) are a big handicap, and I think you're more generous than I am regarding mods. It's tough to keep seeing obvious propaganda left up while counter points are removed.
When it gets to be too much for me, I disengage for a couple of days. Just stop reading for a bit.
Heh, true. Still, a few days is a few days the bad actors can operate without being called out, so it's hard. It's not the community that has me down. It's the bad actors, and the fact I can't call 'em out as what they are. Because 'civility'...