(I’m thinking about this mainly in the context of Twitter, but there are some general principles here too.)

I don’t like blocking people. I’m personally a big fan of public spaces and public commons. I like the idea of being accessible to people, and I feel like generally people should have the right of reply. I started out with ideas like “blocking is for cowards”, “if an idea is bad you should refute it” and so on. I still kind of believe those things. Blocking can be a way of evading legitimate criticism.

However, sometimes I find that it’s necessary to block people, roughly akin to the way it might sometimes be necessary to ask someone to leave the premises.

It’s particularly obvious with malicious actors — I have very low tolerance for people being cruel and contemptuous towards other people in my mentions. If an asshole is treating other people terribly in my mentions, that discourages other people from being open, honest and vulnerable. And one of the core reasons I participate in public spheres is to find good people to be honest and vulnerable with.

So blocking abusive assholes is pretty straightforward in principle. But it gets messy in practice. What if the person isn’t being outright abusive, but simply being belligerent and unpleasant? I tend to respond with a warning: “Hey, I block people for this sort of behavior in my mentions.”

To be continued.