and making them server site, while possible would introduce tremendous amounts of lag, and put that much more load on the servers. Imagine a server that has to handle playback of billions of users all at once. That’s probably quite a bit worse than most average, or even high-level DDoS attacks.
Totally no bias in these studies at all either, they totally wouldn’t try to skew these studies for personal gain and to try and justify the huge spending on ad money right?
Advertisers claim that it’ll work eventually which is how they can justify companies paying them to display ads, and how they can justify paying for ads on a service like YouTube or even a website. In a sense they are being hung out to dry, many of the big companies seen in ads these days don’t actually need to convince you to buy their product because they have an almost complete monopoly on the market, they’re only technically not monopolies, so you’re going to buy their products anyway or live without the convenience. This is why among other things Ad-funded internet is considered a bubble in a sense, because advertisers are spending money paying websites to show people things they don’t think or care about, but somehow this translates into profits? Seems like the only one profiting is the site being paid, and the creator on it.
I’m sure Nestle, Pepsi Co. P&G, CocaCola Bottling Co. Walmart, Amazon, and the other big boys really need to tell others about them or people wouldn’t know they exist and buy from them. Get real, these companies have their foot in the door, when it comes to the whole consumers buying from them. You can’t not buy from them and live as anyone else would, it takes effort to cut them out, and in many cases living without the convenience they bring.
If they do make it so you can speed up or skip the ad sections of a video, mission accomplished.
Mission failed sucessfully, if people can speed up or scroll through the ad, then it kind of defeats the point since people can skip ahead or increase the speed.
Probably would be a good idea, I’m guessing this type of thing could be problematic for google if the IP bans started stacking up, probably also if they can’t just look up what the site is using and banning it manually, which let’s be fair and not give them too much credit, is exactly what they’ve been doing. They look up that some invidious or downloader site is hosted on some IP address and block it manually, or blocking its whole range. Something that doesn’t cause many headaches for others outside of those services but would cause a lot of problems if those sites were run with reverse-proxying to dynamic IPs which caused YouTube blocks for legitimate users, including in public places.
I think this type of two way blocking makes it particularly clear when the person is blocked since it disallows replying and on Lemmy community bans are visible. So editing comments can help with that, as it would be apparent they have blocked you, the UI could be changed to reflect that either by highlighting the user who has blocked you or greying out the reply button. Of course that could be used as an abuse tactic but since it depends on existing replies which are finite it wouldn’t be as bad as them being able to continue making more.
Also since administration on Lemmy is much more in touch with the userbase (at least most of the time) it’s easier to get such abuse dealt with at the community or instance level.
It’s not about them seeing my posts it’s their ability to interact without my knowledge since different types of harassment can be quite harmful even if you don’t see it (i.e. lying, disinformation, accusations). So it’s not in my best interest to block people on a platform where the block system treats the threat of these people as non-legitimate by allowing their continued interaction and replies.
I hope they write me a lot of long and nasty messages that I never see.
I sincerely hope you never meet with any of the more elaborate trolls or bad-faith actors who use more aggressive tactics like accusations or disinformation against you. This can be very harmful, even more so if you cannot see it and respond to or report it, especially reporting it. Also a lack of reporting and substituting reporting for blocking can be harmful in the long run because when users are not reported, they may never be actioned by mods or admins. Which is awful for the health of the community, maybe you think others can report for you but bystander effect is real and the people who think this way eventually compound allowing trolls and bad-faith actors to operate longer if not indefinitely, so it doesn’t benefit anyone to hide them and pretend they don’t exist.
Yup it has no affect on whether other people can see them, and no bearing on their ability to reply. Which is mildly concerning when it comes to harassment and blocking as a defense for harassment.
I tried it and blocked users do not appear in my app or on the web, it totally hides them as if they don’t even exist.
Yeah I do think there needs to be confirmation since it is way too easy to just quickly mute a lot of people in rapid succession.
I’m not sure if making them public is a great idea, since people might be bad faith trolls but that might not be apparent to other people at first glance. I probably would have at least 50 on my list if it were a feature, to someone who doesn’t know it might seem like I’m abusing the system but almost all of those people were either harassing me or others. Many have been banned but not all of them. Maybe it could be visible to admins, but not general users.
I’m not even really sure how big of an issue blocking abuse really is in reality, since on Reddit many of the people who complain about it are trolls in and of themselves, some of the people complaining about the changes to the blocking system are actually suspended currently. So not really sure it is a real problem. Abuse of the muting feature though is a much more serious problem because if all or most people just do this all the time instead of reporting eventually instances and communities become overrun with trolls and bad faith actors because people are not reporting them, meaning the only ones who would get actioned are the ones caught explicitly by the mods and admins. Not good.
I think Lemmy’s devs seem to not understand this problem otherwise they would’ve kept a version of two way blocking in Lemmy and wouldn’t fight this idea so much:
Proper blocking systems for preventing harassment need to at a basic level stop people from replying to the user or their content. People can argue that this can be abused but not having it will be abused more in exactly the same way you said.
That’s fair, most of the people I’ve dealt with who I thought about blocking usually were, either they were directly harassing or attacking me, were blatantly alt-right trolls attacking other people for their presentation or they were simply being rude and hostile for no reason.
I guess those things might be different on lemm.ee but generally here those things earn people comment or post removal, community bans, and sometimes even site bans (account termination if this is their home server). Same is true for other servers I’m on. Including the Mastodon server I’m a part of.
You may want to try out scaled sort if your instance supports it, most of them do these days. Only a very small handful of archaic instances have not updated to 0.19.x yet.
I know that some apps and browser extensions do this, but I really think that it’s important for Lemmy itself to have an existing notes feature as part of the server software and backend, which allows your notes to be saved as part of your account.
Mastodon has this feature and lets you leave notes on users’ profiles. I do this a lot on there. I guess there isn’t any reason why you couldn’t use Mastodon’s version of it if you regularly post to Lemmy communities from Mastodon, but since I and many others are lemmy users, and post + read from here it’s good to have that feature available on this server’s software natively.
If you’re talking about people who do illegal or objectively terrible things, this is a terrible use case. As Lemmy’s block system is really meant only as a feed curation tool. It’s for things that you “don’t wike and don’t wannna to see 👶”. So to use it on people who are actually bad actors is not a good idea, and certainly isn’t a good idea to encourage its use in that manner. After all if everybody ignores these people and nobody reports them then they are allowed to run wild for much longer if not indefinitely. That’s why reporting is encouraged, it helps take care of bad faith users.
I think a lot of people need to get used to the idea that it is partially their responsibility to deal with bad faith users by reporting. On big tech platforms it didn’t make much of a difference because they didn’t care, instance admins here do care though, and many don’t have the legal defenses that those companies have especially when it comes to illegal shit that might be posted by some of these awful depraved individuals. Let them know about it sooner rather than later, report the trolls.
Apologies if I came off as a bit harsh.
I agree with this very much, I don’t really have any desire to hide opposing viewpoints either. Which is really the only reason why you would block somebody on Lemmy using its highly crippled blocking system.
On other platforms like Mastodon and Reddit most of the reason why I block people stems around bad behavior, like legitimately objectively harmful behavior. Things that are considered objectionable even by instance admins, and also these platforms allow you to view blocked users and their content after they have been blocked and also submit reports if they continue to behave badly. It’s more like a soft moderation tool than a content feed curation tool on those platforms.
When it comes to blocking on Lemmy blocking these types of people is actually a bad idea. These people need to be reported so that they can be dealt with and they don’t cause more harm to the community. What they don’t need is to be blocked and ignored so that they can continue perpetrating their evil shit without other people getting upset. This is especially true in the case of people who do illegal stuff, that stuff can get the instance in trouble.
If you see the first two things you need to report them, especially the second one. Honestly when it comes to the second one not reporting it is irresponsible. That shit is highly illegal and you need to report that to instance admins so that it can be taken care of ASAP.
Spam isn’t as much of a problem but you do need to report it as well, bystander effect is not an excuse either. When it comes to reporting content you need to think about it like you are the only one who ever saw it or the only one who will see it. That’s how it is sometimes.
Again if you report before you block that’s largely fine. I mainly say this because there are people who block without reporting, and that absolutely is not fine.
Yeah just hiding the content of people who harass you is really not a good practice. It’s the whole reason why Reddit introduced two-way blocking, they know that this type of harassment can’t actually be combated by simply ignoring it. Here on Lemmy we don’t have that, the next best thing though is to report to admins or Community moderators, but I would recommend admins since they can take care of the users more efficiently.
Yeah I agree these types of people really should not be in communities and instances. While it may be up to moderators and admins to ban people on the site and communities, it is us the users who are responsible for bringing these types of bad people to their attention, by reporting and reaching out.
Think of being a user on these sites as being like part of a neighborhood watch all the time. You are obligated to report people who are behaving suspicious or in ways that are harmful to the community. Maybe if one or two people ignore them it’s fine but if a majority of people do this it won’t be, and isn’t. It’s part of the reason why I think that there are so many trolls and bad faith actors here who never get banned from communities or instances despite the fact that they have zero restraint about where and when they lash out at someone. It’s because people just block those guys and never report them.
I wish that more people would report the users who behave like this, that type of behavior is against many Community rules and also many instance rules.
In my opinion I’d rather report people than block them since when they get banned they get banned for everyone. Blocking is like pretending to ban them while letting them run wild, it’s a great idea for places like Nostr but it’s not a great idea for Lemmy since the whole idea of fediverse is interconnection with moderation.
I think the main problem is that this type of reasoning can’t actually be proven scientifically, even if we have a study there’s not a guarantee it’s unbiased (who do you think funds research on advertising effectiveness). Then there is the problem that every product or brand in modern advertising is likely one of the handful of pseudo monopoly brands. One might argue that a person bought their product because they heard it in an ad, but in reality they might not have really had much choice, that makes it hard to say if people buy the products because they’re familiar or if they just don’t have much option.
The main point I’d like to make is that advertisers would like to believe they aren’t wasting money or time, they need people to believe it in some capacity, because if enough people don’t, eventually the dumb and blind companies who give them money will realize it too and stop giving them money. That’s why the ad-funded internet is considered a bubble, it’s not worth it, or necessary in a lot of cases, and the moment the dumb and blind corpos realize that, they’ll stop dumping money into a hole.