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Comment by friend_and_foe | Hacker News Reader

I hang out on the free speech side, and I mostly avoid the JQ and edgelord types. It's not hard, you curate your own feed, and the block button is merely a click away. You run into them in threads and just ignore them, just like in real life (and up until like 6 years ago, on the internet in general).

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I have never used Twitter, just never saw the appeal. But I have a question, does it also have a method to block people and conversations/topics/keywords or are you just forced to have to have algorithmically chosen tweets pushed on you?

If you host your own instance, you can have arbitrary filtering policies. In particular Pleroma has a modular and flexible system here.

https://docs-develop.pleroma.social/backend/configuration/mr...

You can block users on Twitter, yes. In fact, in some circles, "block chains" (no relation to the crypto-related tech) are popular; the idea being that you use a script to not only block one person, but subsequently block everyone that follows or is followed by that person, then block those that follow or are followed by those people, and so on to a certain level of depth - kind of a "curse you and your offspring for ten generations" sort of vibe. I suppose in a way this is functionally similar to blocking an entire instance on the fediverse.

Not sure if you can block hashtags or something like that on Twitter.

Holy shit! That is interesting. So then would one still be bombarded with all the info that they don't want to see from those that they haven't been able to block yet but are topic-similar to those blocked, or can you more or less effectively make your own "silo". If the second point is true, what are people upset about if they can easily "chain block" entire sub-graphs of people that they don't want to hear from? That people other than them might be exposed to it?

Yes, I have found in previous discussions about Internet moderation that while many people talk about not wanting to see certain content themselves, the actual thing they want is to control what everyone else sees.

Yes, on Twitter, the fediverse ("Mastodon"), and other social networking services, it's typically quite trivial to build an echo chamber such that you rarely see opinions you don't want to see.

"But nazis exist on the fediverse!" Yes, they do, just as they do in real life. But if you don't intentionally attend their rallies or whatever it is nazis do nowadays and instead stick to whatever non-nazi-aligned places and activities you feel comfortable with, you're probably not going to encounter any of them.

Believe it or not “just ignore them“ doesn’t work for many people.

There’s a reason 4chan is only popular with a certain demographic.

Yah "just ignore them" really means "it doesnt effect me and I am uninterested in hearing how it actually effects you"

It doesn't affect anyone except people who want it to. It's literally some random person whispering into the wind on the internet. I'm uninterested in hearing how it actually affects you because it doesn't actually affect you, you just want to cry about something.

"You" in the proverbial sense of course, the way you used it above.

Good for you if you're not affected, I guess. For many people, Internet trolls can cause psychological harm. This is not some obscure thing. Teens have been committing suicide due to bullying on the Internet for decades.

Not going to 4chan is the same thing as just ignoring them. It works perfect.

It doesn't work, because they don't stay on the chans. They infest every space they can, doing everything they can to be unignorable. They're even on HN.

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