You may have noticed a distinct lack of return2ozma. This is due to their admitting, in a public comment, that their engagement here is in bad faith:
I’m sure there will be questions, let me see if I can address the most obvious ones:
- Can I still post negative stuff about Biden?
Absolutely! We have zero interest in running an echo chamber. However, if ALL you’re posting is negative, you may want to re-think your priorities. You get out of the world what you put into it and all that.
- Why now?
Presumption of innocence. It may be my own fault, but I do try to think the best of people, and even though they were posting negative articles, they weren’t necessarily WRONG. Biden’s poll numbers, particularly in minority demographics ARE in the shitter. They are starting to get better, but he still has a hell of a hill to climb.
- Why a 30 day temp ban and not a permanent ban?
The articles return2ozma shared weren’t bad, faked, or from some wing-nut bias site like “beforeitsnews.com”, they were legitimate articles from established and respected news agencies, pointing out the valid problems Biden faces.
The problem was ONLY posting the negatives, over and over and then openly admitting that dishonest enagement is their purpose.
Had they all been bullshit articles? It would not have taken anywhere near this much time to lay the ban and it would have been permanent.
30 days seems enough time for them to re-think their strategery and come back to engage honestly.
My point is that your hypothetical is bullshit because it literally never happens. It’s the same reason boycotts are bullshit: the amount of cooperation and participation they require is fundamentally contrary to human nature.
Because of that, there’s no point in indulging in the rest of your thought experiment.
Boycotts are not bullshit.
Cite one that’s actually worked.
Edit: to be clear, I’m not saying a person shouldn’t engage in a boycott on moral grounds (in contrast to my stance on the use of the block button, as explained in another comment – this is an aspect where those two actions differ). What I’m saying is that we shouldn’t have any illusions about boycotts’ actual effectiveness or delude ourselves into thinking that boycotting is somehow a replacement for proper government regulation, because it’s not.
Remember when black people could only sit in the back of buses? Guess how that ended.
Yup. By boycotting.
Wrong. That ended with anti-discrimination laws.
🙄🙄
Well, now you’re moving goalposts.
Think whatever you want, then.
I am doing no such thing.
The boycotts led to legislation, but did not themselves solve the problem.
Analogously – getting back to the point of this thread – blocking (and more importantly, reporting) the problem user here on Lemmy did not itself solve the problem; mod action did.
please don’t take this as me trolling. But…
Well then. You’re free to indulge in the block button. Cuz that’s exactly what it’s there for.
Further, it doesn’t take a lot of people blocking him to remove the value in posting. there’s a diminished return the less engagement he gets. Unless he’s just a bot spamming shit everywhere, somebody is behind that account and is wasting time and energy on it. They’re going to find something else, somewhere else, or some other way, to spread their crap when they stop getting sufficient engagement.
I blocked him simply because I found myself recognizing his name and scrolling past. at that point, it’s just simpler to actually block a person.
No, fuck that. This is a platform for discussion – rebutting arguments instead of sticking your fingers in your ears is the entire point of being here. Why are you trying to discourage that?
Frankly, I consider the block button harmful: if a user is a problem, then they are a problem for everyone and mod intervention, as we’re discussing here, is the correct solution. The block button never is.