Would it ever be possible to not see certain people's posts on your threads?

Questions about a blocking feature have been asked over and over again and the general concensus is always against it. Learn to ignore the posts from the people you don’t care for and if it gets out of hand to where you feel attacked or harassed just contact a moderator.
These sites are about diversity and censoring people you don’t agree with is an irresponsible way to handle your own personal self-control to not be able to simply ignore words on your computer screen.

We’ve tried the block feature on wis.dm – it was an uber fail. Besides, people’s answers (annoying as they must be) aren’t just for you, they’re for others as well. So, if you block someone’s responses, they’d have to be somehow collapsible with all the other responses to them and then you’d miss out on other people’s contributions. OTOH, if they will not be collapsible, you’ll read people’s responses to something the person says and still be mad.

The official answer is: maybe. It’s something we were thinking about, but not actively working on when the Twitter deal happened. If it ever does happen, it will be in the least intrusive way possible, and will probably be a good while from now.

@troubleinharlem I honestly don’t know what the race thing feels like but fluther is pretty tame in terms of flaming and trolling as far as I can tell. The mods take care of that. If your skin isn’t thick enough for fluther maybe your skin isn’t thick enough for this kind of interaction at all. And a PM on is on the way.

I don’t think this is censoring. If I’m understanding properly what @troubleinharlem wants is a way to ignore a user, not stop them from being seeing by other people.

So, if I were blocking or “ignoring” StupidPerson, SupidPerson would be able to post questions or answers and everyone, except me would be able to see them.

Personally, I’m in favor of this.

And I’m going to filibuster here for a minute and say that I think it would be a swell idea to be able to ignore topics so that questions with certain topics in them won’t ever show up.

If I was in such a situation, I would copy and paste a standard response: “Dear @IgnorantPerson, I’ve tried to engage you in a civilized discussion. You’ve repeatedly said _______ (whatever has been posted). I find it offensive. Your unwillingness to converse with civility and respect leaves me no other choice than to ignore all of you future posts.”

Every time the person posts something in your threads, if warranted, I’d copy and paste the standard response. Then, completely ignore anything else the person posts in the thread.

This tactic seems to be proactive, in the sense of acknowledging the situation and addressing it. Plus, it’s a measure of self-care.

@prolificus : Okay.

@mrentropy Wouldn’t seeing everyone else’s responses to the person you were ignoring still defeat the purpose though? If the person you were ignoring made a rude statement and someone addressed it saying ”@Rudeperson, you are wrong to say all ____ do ____ because…..” wouldn’t you still end up seeing what the person was saying by default? Even if it wasn’t that exact and instead it was just a discussion, couldn’t one part of it be enough to give you an idea of what they are saying anyway?

I used to think it was a good idea, but sometimes on other topics a user I can’t stand has something good to say. If I had blocked that individual, I’d have missed something useful. While I used to be more susceptible to getting irritated into arguing over the same stuff, I’ve worked it out of my system and can just ignore the irritation without wasting time getting drawn into some bullshit.

So I think it is of greater value to learn to move past the bullshit and arguing, leaving the opportunity to see something useful from that person later, than to block.

But I do think having the option to block would be better than not. I would probably seldom if ever use it, but people that tend to constantly butt heads on threads would block each other and do it less.

Besides, if I had blocked one user but not a “friend”, and I saw many combative posts from the friend targeting a blocked user, my curiosity could get the better of me and I’d unblock that person to see what bullshit he/she is saying.

@Seaofclouds Maybe, maybe not. And that ‘maybe’ makes the difference. I don’t see it happening all that much, anyway, if I’m going to be honest. I rarely see someone quote someone else verbatim or recap what was said. Maybe I’m just lucky that way. It wouldn’t matter to anyone else, anyway because there’s no reason for anyone else to know that one person is being ‘ignored’ by another. In fact, it would be best if nobody, especially the person being ‘ignored’, knew who was being ‘ignored’.

The worst case scenario is that the ignored person is quoted in full and somehow became less annoying and worthy of being un-ignored.

@mrentropy : Actually, that was exactly what I was saying. I don’t care if I see other people’s responses, but the person’s that were directed at me – if that made sense.