16 upvotes, 1 direct replies (showing 1)
View submission: Previewing Upcoming Changes to Blocking
The balance in your scenario goes to the good faith users; If bad faith users go to the effort of True Blocking an entire swath of people they know - or reasonably suspect - will report their comments / posts, then they will have volunteered for Reddit admins their intentions, especially if those users are the kind of users with a long history of reporting sitewide rules violations.
Then it becomes the admins' responsibility to audit that data - not moderators'.
It also means that those of us who have made a career out of loudly and vocally advocating for reporting sitewide rules violations, no longer need to do so.
At any rate - automoderator and moderation bots catch a large amount of bad faith engagement in subreddits that are responsibly moderated, and given that the old ratios of "For every upvote and comment there are ten more people lurking" still holds true --
there'll still be a lot of people out there reporting violations, and bad faith actors can't block *every username*.
Comment by Isentrope at 20/12/2021 at 23:19 UTC
25 upvotes, 2 direct replies
Nothing in this proposal suggests that the admins are going to be monitoring this feature that attentively, and if you have a large number of people doing this as factions take advantage of it to amplify their perspectives, which is almost certainly going to happen if more people catch wind of how it can be abused, it would be functionally impossible for the admins to really audit this either.
I'm not just talking about /pol/ brigades, there are a dozen or more niche nationalist brigades on /r/worldnews, for instance, where it's the same people arguing with each other or in those threads and where we implicitly rely on the opposing faction to elevate objectionable comments to us to properly moderate. Some of those aren't very small either, and we would run the risk of having people denying the existence of concentration camps in China to denying the Holocaust happened to all sorts of fairly awful content just not get actioned and outright highly upvoted because we can't rely on the users to effectively see these comments and report them.
It just seems to me like a relatively easy fix (not sure how true that is from a technical perspective of course) to allow users to continue to see comments from people that have blocked them, but just be unable to interact with their content otherwise. That way, if there's something objectionable in that content, they can still elevate the issue to the moderators via modmail. It also doesn't seem to impact the value of this feature either since, again, determined trolls will just use alts once they've realized that someone they've been harassing has blocked them, and those alts typically get suspended by the admins anyways, so that threat isn't much of an additional deterrent for them.