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This post will be off the cuff so forgive me if it's a little "raw".

The "Block" feature present on many social network sites is not a "stop harassment" feature. They're tools that help you control features on your account.

This goes for instance blocking as well.

Blocking an instance is not "stopping nazis" or "stopping harassment" or whatever you want to believe it is. It's just an option to prevent certain things from appearing. It's a mistake to assume it's anything else.

That's not to say you can't use these features to "stop nazis" and etc. but what I'm trying to say it there seems to be this belief that you MUST block to stop certain negative elements from bothering you.

A good example of what I'm trying to talk about was the whole "blocklist boom" that happened on twitter a couple a years ago. Most of these blocklists were billed as ways to prevent "trolls" (or who they believed to be trolls) from ever harassing you. I had a few friends get shocked when I told them I was on these lists. What my friends failed to understand that these lists weren't lists to block trolls but simply a list of people that someone believes you should block.

What I implore people to do is to actually think about what they're doing rather than just blindly follow what other people are saying.

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