[Image: A yellow color block with white text that reads “there’s nothing wrong with bloc

[Image: A yellow color block with white text that reads “there’s nothing wrong with blocking people you’ve never interacted with”]been seeing some posts by people complaining that they’re getting blocked by users they’ve never interacted with and thought i’d take a minute to talk about it why this kind of blocking is not only okay but also something worth encouraging.the point of blocking is to limit your contact with certain people. there are any number of reasons why someone might not want to interact with someone else, ranging from that person just being gratingly annoying (even if they don’t mean to be) to being outright abusive. now, while a lot of people don’t end up blocking someone until after they’ve already had an experience with them they’d rather forget there are a lot of people who pre-emptively block—that is, block people they’ve never interacted with specifically so they will never have to interact with them in the future. for people who get blocked this way it can be confusing. it can make you wonder why in god’s name this random stranger has blocked you when you’ve never even spoken to them. it can also, for a lot of you, probably even seem rude or offensive.for the people doing the blocking, however, it’s the difference between noticing someone you know you’re not going to get along with and locking your door so they can’t come in your house OR noticing them, leaving your door open anyway, and waiting for them to come in and shit in the middle of your living room floor before kicking them out. i get that that’s a crude example but that’s what the thought process behind that kind of blocking is—just because a person has never interacted with you one-on-one doesn’t mean they know nothing about you. your tumblr, after all, is public and they can easily see something you’ve posted in a tag they frequent or said in a post that someone else may have reblogged and put on their dash and made the judgment from those things that you’re not someone they ever want anything to do with. they can look at those things, consider their own opinions and personality, and come to the conclusion that should you ever interact it would end badly and so by blocking you they are stopping that possible interaction from ever happening. now this doesn’t mean you’re a bad person or that you’d be a floor shitter even if the person blocking you thought you might be, and it’s totally fine to be confused or a little miffed at getting blocked by someone you’ve never so much as said “got some toilet paper?” to but the people blocking you? yeah, they’re not doing anything wrong by doing that. even if the reasons they’re blocking you are totally petty, even if they’ve totally misread your personality, even if the interactions they don’t want to have with you would never have happened to begin with—people are allowed to block you. they’re allowed to think to themselves “this isn’t someone i’d get along with and i feel like interacting with them would be stressful and frustrating so i’m going to block them so i never have to deal with it”. they’re allowed to look at the way you speak to other people and decide they don’t ever want to be on the other end of that. and if you’re still conflicted ask yourself this: how many arguments, how many bullies, how many uncomfortable and abusive interactions on this website could have been stopped in their tracks had people simply blocked a person rather than engage with them? how many hurt feelings and how much frustration and emotional drainage could have been spared had people on this website blocked someone they were engaging with at the point where it became clear that nothing good would come out of the interaction rather than letting it continue and become more and more awful? how many people would finally stop being exposed to content they don’t want to see if they’d simply block the people posting it rather than continue to see it and tear their hair out over it rather than do something to actually make their online experience a better one for them? pre-emptive blocking isn’t just okay, it’s something we should be encouraging people to do in order to save them some frustration and trouble down the road. the block feature exists to better your online experience, make as much use of it as you want. -- source link

More pics about