Give up. People don’t want to hear it. They prefer to mute people and never seem them again then be forced to see what they say. I tend to agree with Jeff here, even if I don’t like how he says it. People are just constructing little bubbles of agreeability with these sorts of features (whether here, Facebook, Twitter, Medium, or other places) rather than availing themselves of site rules and standards if folks are truly out of line.
If people mute/block enough folks, they remove all the rough edges from what they read in a “community,” which I suppose can be rather pleasant but strikes me as pretty false. Of course, some of the biggest proponents in this thread are also folks I know will probably mute me as soon as they see this, based on interactions back on the Boing Boing BBS in the past.
You’re not going to win this fight though, the responses make that damn clear. People just want their soft-serve ice cream.
Not always. There’s lots of folks I disagree with but listen to, even if only to argue with; it’s quite rare (out of the old bbs i can only think of 3) I find someone insufferable. But this is super-duper for those few. It’s a tool, you can use it to build a house or a shitty broken ass bird feeder, all in how you swing it.
‘It Is Known’ that you and I don’t particularly care for one another, and we disagree quite often.
But I feel no need to use the feature on you, because you share the same basic modicum of mutual respect as I do:
I leave you alone, you leave me alone, and everything is everything.
If everyone could respect the personal boundaries of others even when they don’t get along, there would be no need to mute or block anyone, as far as I’m concerned.
But alas, that ain’t the case; so it is what it is.
When you mute someone else can they still see your comments even though you can no longer see theirs?
Apologies if you covered that in the body; I only skimmed it while I was at work earlier, and now I’m in lazy mode…
Agreed; though I usually say It’s just a tool - it can be used or abused.
I don’t really object to this feature, but I don’t see myself using it. If I saw the blank space where a post was muted, or a partial quote in another user’s post, my monkey curiosity would not let me pass by the unmute button. After all, the post may be necessary to the discussion, or—more likely—of so little interest l that I shrug and skip over it. Or it may be so offensive that I want to flag it.
In my circle of friends and acquaintances in real life, there are some who annoy me on a regular basis, and I’m pretty sure they feel the same about me, but we manage to find some common ground.
Muting isn’t about “rough edges”. It’s about making it so you can read a thread in peace without That Person’s posts interrupting the flow. Maybe they are what-about-ists. Maybe they make every topic, from politics to slow cooker recipes to video games, into a soapbox so they can go on and on about what they think about fluoride. Maybe they sea lion so often you wonder if they’re posting from a tank at Marineland.
But since they don’t technically break the code of conduct, they’re still there.
Rough edges I can handle; it seems most other folk here can too. It’s when someone’s on a different polygon altogether.
That thread was incredibly frustrating to read but typical Jeff. When you come at him with an idea he doesn’t like he’ll double, triple, quadruple down on dismissing it until you just can’t take it anymore and give up. It’s basically discouraged me from ever wanting to contribute dev cycles to Discourse (which is unfortunate because it really is a wonderful piece of software).
Of course the irony is there nobody here I can see myself wanting to mute (unlike the other place where there’s lots of people I’d love to mute/block).
Everyone on this message board is a rough edge. To avoid them one simply doesn’t come here.
What people want the mute for are people they consider assholes. It’s a win win. Asshole gets to asshole, the people who enjoy the asshole can still see it, and the people who hate them don’t have to.
Also, use “Granfalloon” to describe our relationships here. It’s more accurate.
This brings to mind an idea. When a post is muted, and all we see is the little icon to unmute, could it be possible to know who we are unmuting before we make that decision. For those who have muted many…
One more idea to throw out there before I pass out. Which as @enso pointed out makes little difference since somebody has taken it upon themselves to implement this already.
A slightly more reasonable approach I think is to hide post by content. If it uses certain words, or relates certain concepts, then it gets filtered. The difference being that it does not tie people to “identities”. I love the guidelines of BB - apart from the fact that they are deliberately vague and enforced capriciously. And one of the great failings there is that everybody who participates there agrees to criticise the idea rather than the person - a very civilized notion - yet there is a lot of resistance to this, which is largely accepted by the staff. (How can one respect the rules of those who don’t respect their own rules?)
My experience is that accurate or helpful information can come from anywhere. The answers to how to cool your CPU, plant ginger, filter water, or patch your own genes are not dependent upon coming from a certain organism. What matters is that they work. And I see being attracted to or avoidant of an “individual” to function more as a form of emotional rent-seeking. Looking for an excuse to help or hinder others, rather than to be harmonious or out of social duty. But a person “is” ultimately only what they do. In my version of the real world, ecology comes first, then lifeforms, then one’s species, one’s family/commune, and then one’s “own person”. Why? Because each is a subset of the former, and like it or not, none can exist without the larger more fundamental unit. So having an individual want or worry that is more significant than the larger whole is somewhat destructive.
So even though hide post by subject would yield some ignorance, some blind spots in knowledge, it would not be essentially selfish in nature. A person might imagine that they are hiding info out of some sort of individualistic self-interest, but 1. they really aren’t, and 2. at least they are not pressuring other people into individualism by shaping the discourse of the group around personal identity.
People seem to find it workable enough to filter their web searches by text string. Does anybody do searches of “french + seam + sewing - EXCEPT if it is by Howie, because I fucking hate Howie”? Anyway, you are taking my certain words out of context, seeing as they are followed by “or relates certain concepts”. There are only so many hours in the day, so I can appreciate that filtering data is at times necessary. But that is distinct from being mired in personal problems.
