i genuinely hope anyone ages 13-15 on this website (or, god forbid, younger) stays safe and keeps their private information secure and really private
please, if you’re really young on tumblr, try not to get swept up in the discourse and the tremendous amount of arguing with strangers that goes on here. i know you probably feel mature for your age but this website, like, really psychologically affects youth, and i encourage you to be cautious about your interactions with people on here
please, kiddos, stay safe
additionally, for my young, non-adult followers,
depression memes about wanting to die aren’t a healthy coping mechanism and can lead to worsening symptoms of your own mental health if overindulged in
you are not garbage. or trash. i know these terms are popular on here, but you shouldn’t be calling yourself that. you have everything you need inside of you to become your best self, even if it’s hard to see that
seriously, really don’t trust adults who want to date you. don’t trust adults who call you hot, flirt with you, ask you sexual questions, or ask you for nudes. (that last one is VERY illegal, also, please get help from a trusted non-creepy adult if this happens to you)
the opinions of complete strangers who aren’t interacting with you typically aren’t worth it. move on, use the block button. it’s not worth engaging with people who are going to make you feel awful or unsafe
take breaks from tumblr if it’s getting really stressful for you. talk to friends if you’ve got em, play a videogame or do whatever it is that can take your mind off the massive amounts of Hell on this website
recovery is good. it’s really, really good. if you’re having mental health issues, please seek out help if you can, or ask a trusted adult or friend for guidance. you are not alone. don’t let this website make you feel like you are
to all the minors following me you dont have to reveal everything about yourself on the internet you dont have to make a laundry list of the MI’s and traumas u have endured be on your about its ok to not make this very extremely personal stuff you wouldnt tell to people you first meet irl easily available on your online web page you really dont owe anything to anyone and you can and should indulge in privacy
i might even go further and caution very strongly AGAINST doing so for minors ESPECIALLY, like look, i am not your dad and cannot demand you to avoid doing so, but it honestly allows predators to sort of “cold read” your vulnerabilities and exploit them. and be wary of anyone who demands to know that information to make a judgement on you because someone who wants to know your “weak spots” before interacting is someone whose idea of human interaction is, at best, messed up.
As someone who’s reported alt-right harassment and rhetoric on various
social media sites and been told “there’s nothing here that violates our
TOS,” seeing what RPGnet is doing is a welcome breath of fresh air.
You can’t just tell people to ‘get a VPN (Virtual Private Network)’. Buying a VPN is like buying a house. It’s very very important. Having no VPN or having a ‘wrong’ one can seriously damage your life. Especially for Americans because their privacy laws are garbage. I am going to try explain why you should get a VPN but bare with me, I am from Germany and my English is far from perfect.
Let’s start with a simple test. Click this link here: https://whatismyipaddress.com/ It will tell your IP adres, your ISP (internet service provider), and your location. The location might not be very accurate, but then again, it’s just a simple website. Imagine what the government can do!
So basically, everyone can find out where you live. But there is more danger. Your ISP. Your ISP logs your every move online and they are required to keep it in case the government wants access to it (or if a 3rd party wants to buy your data (yikes). They have everything. What websites you visit. How long you stay on a website. What you download. Your search terms. European laws are more subtle on this but if you are from the US you are #@*#&, especially because Trump doesn’t support the open internet. It’s scary but maybe in the future you can’t get a job because the recruiter knows your searched on ‘how to deal with depression’ or anythings else that’s supposed to be private because it’s your f*cking right. Or you get a $100k fine because you pirated a movie 15 years ago. You need a VPN. You’re dumb for not using one. but what does a VPN do?
A VPN encrypts all your data so if it were be intercepted no one can ‘crack the code’ and damage your privacy.
Usually being online goes like this (simplified): Your computer —-> ISP (—–> keeps data —–> sells it)
But with a VPN it goes like: Your computer —–> VPN (encrypts data)—–> ISP (ISP can’t see shit)
Furthermore, a VPN hides your IP address and location by giving you another IP address located in Spain for example (you can often choose from a list and change as many times as you want).
Now that you know why you should get a VPN and what is does it is important to educate yourself because people often choose the wrong VPN. VPN providers are also businesses and have to obey the law. If you choose a VPN provider located in the US then you are throwing your money away because the laws in the US shits on your privacy. If the US gov wants the provider to give all their logs they have to obey. The ISP still can’t see what you are doing online and sell your data but the US gov can interfere with your VPN provider so NEVER CHOOSE A PROVIDER LOCATED IN THE US.
I just wanted to make that very clear so my followers don’t buy false security.
There is still more danger! Who says your VPN provider isn’t selling your data? You need to check their logging policy. Do they keep logs? If yes, what for? For how long do they keep them? Tip: Choose a provider who doesn’t keep logs
More about law The US is part of the Five Eyes program (the worst):
The Five Eyes, often abbreviated as FVEY, is an intelligence alliance comprising Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. These countries are bound by the multilateral UKUSA Agreement, a treaty for joint cooperation in signals intelligence (source)
There is also a Nine Eyes (bit better) and Fourteen Eyes Program (better). You don’t want a VPN provider who is located in one the Five Eyes countries. If you had to choose go for a provider located in a country that’s part of the Fourteen Eyes Program or even better, go for a country that isn’t part of any program!
I know this is a shitty explanation and please pardon my english but now it’s time to do your own research. Take your privacy seriously. Maybe WWIII breaks out and you get killed for liking the ‘wrong’ FB-page.
Make sure that your future VPN provider both has green boxes for Privacy Jurisdiction and Privacy Logging.
I recommend ovpn.se and trust.zone. ovpn is located in Sweden so they are part of the 14 Eyes Program and they keep minimal logs. Their business ethics, however, are alright.
Trustzone is located in the Seychelles. No country can interfere and their privacy jurisdiction is the best you can get. The US want your data but needs to get it from Trustzone? The Seychelles will simply give them the finger and wave them goodbye. However, this makes this provider very appealing for people who torrent and criminals because they keep no logs (and that is how it shoud be) Also, there are almost no marketing efforts so this provider is one the cheapest)
Also, often providers such as ExpressVPN are being called ‘The Best’ on websites about VPNs but know that this is just marketing which also makes those provider more expensive (and they too shit on your privacy)
This must be the worst article you have ever read but please, please take your privacy very seriously.
I am also with Trustzone but I think you forgot to explain one of it’s most important features. It protects you when you are using someone else’s Wi-Fi. If you are at Starbucks and you use their Wi-Fi your privacy is at risk. Anyone with ill intentions could steal your information. Especially if you are using an unsecured Wi-Fi hotspot. With a VPN your data gets encrypted so no one can steal it.
Wait, what’s going, on? Did trump destroy internet privacy with a bill or something? Where’s the news? Oh wait, why am I getting visions of Alex Jones and selling water purifiers?
He hasn’t yet but he says he wants to. And if he is serious about it it would be really easy to do. Since all our data is already recorded, as the person above explained.
Trump wants more surveillance of Muslim Americans. This in a country where internet privacy is already close to non-existent.
To all my friends in the US, please read this entire post. Making everyone aware of VPNs is going to be my mission. Your privacy matters. Please reblog this post.
Don’t tell me you just wanted to scroll past this. Stop looking at pictures of cats for a moment, okay? Don’t you realize how important this is? This is dangerous! ‘America, the best FREE country in the world’ my ass.
With this new law your ISP can sell your Internet history which could include passwords, usernames, religion, credit card numbers, race and much more to the highest bidder. So here is what I want you to do.
You are going to read the whole thing and before you think ’this is so important. Let me reblog this real quick and go back to admiring cats again-’ NO! Don’t reblog this. Take action first. Then reblog. Sign up for a free trial! Trust.Zone offers one (here). Yes. It might be difficult to set up a VPN for some people. But is that going to stop you from protecting yourself and your family? 30 minutes. 30 minutes is all that it takes. 5 if you know how to install software. The problem with some of you is that you see ‘difficult’ as something negative. I want you to see difficult differently. I need you to push through this stuff. You are going to protect yourself. There is nothing negative about that.
VPNs are fun and costsaving too! A VPN bypasses geographical restrictions so you can access websites you normally can’t or you could start Netflix’s one month free trial over and over again- forever. And it’s legal! (unless you use it to buy weapons etc.,)
Don’t tell yourself that you are too tired and that you will do this tomorrow. Because that isn’t going to happen and you know it. You have to do this right now. You only have to click on it.
Don’t let this/shit/life just happen to you. Take yourself seriously. Get a VPN.
Privacy is not a privilege, it’s a fundamental human right
Do you really want to know my answer? Like seriously, are you actually open to listening to what my answer may be and absorbing any new information I may offer on the topic?
Because from here it doesn’t seem like you are.
Let’s be honest with each other, you started out with the phrase “why do you think it’s ok” which is aggressive language, and then you justified your disagreement with your identity. Which I always found to be an interesting tactic, because when this clarification exists in an argument it assumes that by having this particular set of identities you are somehow more qualified to discuss this problem than someone else, while at the same time personalizing you so it is harder for anyone to disagree with you.
You then use the words hurtful, and then offensive. Both button words that illicit a certain type of response, hurtful in how inarguable it is. That is your feeling and I would never argue what a stranger is feeling to them. Then there is offensive, which is a word that is very well used in the LGBT+ community to discuss important issues surrounding our dehumanization.
I don’t think that this message was a carefully crafted masterpiece of debate and trickery that you spent hour figuring out the direct phrasing of obviously, but I do think you had an intent when you wrote this message and the words you chose make that intent clear.
You don’t want to talk to me. Hell I doubt you even follow me. I have anonymous turned off on my ask box, but I am almost 100% sure that if I didn’t you would be sending this under the little sunglasses wearing icon.
Also if you checked my FAQ you would have found a helpful little link explaining to you my views on the queer discourse. You may have noticed that I have my own reasons why I decide to use that word, and my own history with it. You probably also would have seen my post saying that I don’t mind people disagreeing with me. Or you could have seen that I have a link set up that blocks the word from all my content so no one has to see it if they don’t want to, and they can still have access to the history that I give insight into.
But you didn’t care about that did you? Because you aren’t actually interested in what I have to say, if you were you would have already seen all of this and you would have seen my request for people to stop asking me to drag out my arguments for why I use the word again and again. You probably would have realized that either A) it is a lost cause so why bother B) that I have nothing left to say on the matter that I haven’t already said and you may have respected my professional boundaries enough to leave it alone.
But here we are, you uninformed and angry, and me annoyed and tired. We aren’t going to have a good dialogue, and I am near certain you wouldn’t have accepted one if I offered it. You are not here to change my mind, because I have to assume that you at least did a basic check to see that my entire project has the word queer in it and it is pretty clear that isn’t changing. And you are also not here to have your mind changed.
And to be honest I have no desire to change your mind. I don’t mind people disagreeing with me on this. It actually isn’t that big of a deal to me if someone doesn’t agree with my viewpoints all the time.
I have read a lot of arguments in favour of removing the word from our lexicon completely. I disagree, but I understand them. As I have said before, this isn’t a huge dividing point for me.
I have given people access to my work without the word queer in it, and that is the extent of what I am going to do here.
So why are you sending this in? Nothing is going to change from it, and honestly it is a pretty boring message so I can’t believe you thought something would.
I think the sole reason you sent this was performative.
You wanted to show that you tried to convince that big mean queer person without actually trying to convince them. Maybe this was a performance; for your followers, maybe you will screenshot my response and share them in a group chat. Or it is also possible this is a performance for yourself, maybe you want to convince yourself that you are doing something.
Maybe you feel ineffective or like you need to make a difference so you are sending this message to me to feel proud of yourself for trying to change something that you don’t like.
But you aren’t doing this to actually do the hard work of changing something.
And it is fine if you aren’t able to do that work for any reason, but leave other people out of your sense of inadequacy. I am not here to be your punching bag that you hit so you can feel big and strong.
I am tired, and I am bored of people sending me this performative garbage.
Which of course lends itself to the question, why am I answering this publicly?
I will admit there is a little bit of performance from my side as well, I want people to see how right I am and how much this behavior sucks. I want people to see me destroying this ask, and I am not going to lie I am totally going to send screenshots to the group chat.
What makes us different, is that I didn’t seek this performance out. I clearly did not send this to myself, and I haven’t made a post about the queer discourse in months. Which means, this person had to search for me so that they could get mad at me. Whereas I just had to check my inbox this morning and respond to what was there.
But outside of the performance of it all, I want my answer to sit with you for a couple of days. I don’t care if I change your mind about the queer discourse because honestly I do not care about the queer discourse. But I do want to change something. I want you to stop sending asks like these, because this doesn’t seem like it is your first.
And if you were just sending them to me I would be fine with it. I can delete asks, and they roll off my back if I decide to let them. But not everyone is like that.
I could now give a rant about the little baby queers I am protecting, but it is not just about them. It is about all of the people you send this kind of thing to (who almost certainly don’t deserve hate mail), whether they are affected deeply by it or not it doesn’t make what you are doing any better.
And if me writing this long message publicly makes it less likely for you to send something like this again, then it is worth the five minutes I have spent crafting it. Because if you are a little more self conscious about doing something like this again, then hopefully I will have spared a couple of people the annoyance of having to deal with this kind of garbage message.
This is also a very educational response because it takes apart the question in a very useful way. A good exercise for those of you who are interested in rhetoric and logic in discourse.
It’s also a good insight into the motivations and psychology of people when they send this type of messages. It’s couched as a personal attack on you (and it is!) but behind that is a person who is working through stuff badly, and trying to assign the blame for that to a different person (you). By studying that, you can understand more about the Discourse and the motivations behind it. It can also help to heal you (and others) from attacks of this type. When I read the initial ask, it made my body flinch: I felt that I myself was being publicly attacked by a strange and hurtful person, and that I had to defend myself, flooded with instinctive responses. Seeing the blogger’s thoughtful response calmed me.
Oh, gosh. As someone who has been on BOTH sides of this experience, this speaks to me right where I live.
If you’re at all like me, this stuff is difficult from several angles:
Firstly, I like people to be happy and not unhappy. If I can do things to make people happy, I tend to want to do them. Other people’s (un)happiness often feels like it weighs more strongly than my own (un)happiness.
Secondly, I am extremely rejection-sensitive myself, so this ups my perception of the harm to the other person. It also makes the whole topic feel extremely charged, b/c if *I* secretly don’t like this person for no reason they can control then maybe other people secretly don’t like me for reasons I can’t control. Maybe all my friends secretly hate me! (They don’t. I’ve checked.)
Thirdly, if I’m honest, I would like to be able to reject someone in a way that somehow causes zero change in their opinion of me, see previous All People Must Like Me At All Times Or I’ve Failed As A Human Being. (Also not true. I’ve checked on that one, too.)
Soooo yeah. This is one of those easier-as-a-bystander things, but here’s some things that have helped me.
-Untangle what you do control from what you don’t
You are in charge of your feelings and your actions. You CAN’T control (or even 100% predict) how the other person will react to them, so stop assigning yourself the task of being feelings!forecaster and emotions!wrangler.
Sometimes things in life (like you not manifesting the correct feelings) will make people feel bad in ways you can’t actually prevent or control. Give yourself permission to not try. Break ups hurt, and the idea that there is a Magical Correct Perfect way that will cause no hard feelings is, sadly, not a real thing. Pull off the band-aid fast or slow or however the heck you prefer. It’s gonna come off.
-Try not to project
Worth emphasizing: If they haven’t said it out loud, you don’t actually know what they’re thinking or feeling. Mind reading is a cognitive distortion, so try to spot when you’re falling into it. Ditto for fortune-telling (you don’t know how they’re going to react) or catastrophizing.
-Practice enthusiastic consent in relationships
Seriously. Do this *today.* Every time you find yourself in a position where you need decide to skype/message/reply/hang out with/otherwise spend emotional energy on this person" check in on your consent. Do you enthusiastically want to?
If not: don’t.
It is amazing how often this idea feels revolutionary. But you don’t owe strangers (or your friends) make-outs or sex just because it would make them happy, and similarly you don’t owe them a deep, emotional feelings jam. Or even a relationship. Neutrality towards someone is not harm.
Guilt is a toxic as fuck relationship dynamic, Do Not Do.
-Sometimes people don’t click
It’s not a referendum on someone’s character if you just don’t feel it the same way. You don’t need to be someone’s friend because they are nice. You don’t need to be someone’s friend just because you don’t have a compelling reason not to be. You don’t actually need a reason to not want to be someone’s friend. There are several billion perfectly nice people in the world you will not have time to be in either a platonic or romantic relationship with.
Also, having incompatible relationship needs doesn’t necessarily mean EITHER of you need to change as a person. It just means you have incompatible needs.
If you feel bad for not being able to be the Nice Thing in this person’s life, go leave a comment on someone’s fanwork. There, you’ve brightened someone’s day.
-It’s not rude to not answer someone on the internet
This one’s hard for me! But seriously. Especially the less well you know someone, the less you owe them dropping everything to craft a response of any flavor on demand. Try not to frame it as “ignoring someone speaking to your face” and look at it more as “ignoring someone shouting vaguely in your direction across a crowded room.” I’m bad at small talk, so my rule of thumb is if I don’t have anything in particular to add to a conversation, I just…. don’t. “I liked ur post” does not mandate any particular response.
-Therapists get paid
Therapy is hard, emotionally-draining work aand that is why therapists get paid to do it, and why they only do it in a very specific, limited context. When you engage in therapy as a friend, it should be as part of mutually beneficial relationship. Does this mean that 2 friends always get the same benefits out of a relationship or that 2 friends will always have the same amount of spoons to spend on a relationship at any given time? No. But over the span of years it should probably feel like it evens out.
In my personal experience, starting as someone’s free therapist doesn’t usually work out well in terms of friendship. It feels nice to be helpful, but it’s a weird power imbalance, and best case scenario you’re both eventually going to have to work out new ways to relate to each other. Worst case scenario, one or both people’s spoons drastically change and suddenly you CAN’T continue the current dynamic and nobody’s got a safety net interaction-style to fall back on.
-You can understand and empathize with a reaction without having to prioritize it
You mentioned a “terrible person reflex”. And god, I feel that. But this is one of those areas where both of you have GOT to be aware of who is in charge of handling that reflex. (Hint: it is not you). It’s very similar to struggles with jealousy or any other cognitive distortion– they are real, painful emotions, but as distortions they are not based in reality. People outside your own brain can find some ways to provide reassurance, but they cannot manage them for you. Is there a way you can work out a ritualized shorthand for the long set of reassurances or nimble tap-dancing that it sounds like ensues from this reflex triggering? (Something like: “are we still friends?” “yep!”)
In particular, if you find that expressing a need/feeling leads to you setting that conversation aside for prolonged discussion of the other person’s needs or feelings THIS IS NOT A HEALTHY OR SUSTAINABLE PATTERN.
-Listen to your brain when it wants you to stop doing something that hurts
When you’re experiencing emotional overload, distress, or damage, a healthy brain is gonna take steps to protect you. That resentment? That is your brain giving you armor. That is emotional coping.
If you’re like me, and not always very tuned in to your own needs (I *can* so obviously I *should*). Sometimes your brain will just scale up the shouting (”Seriously, Stop Doing the Thing”) until you have to acknowledge it. One example is the “bitch eating crackers” phenomenon, where your brain escalates resentment of a person to the point where even the way they eat crackers starts to bother you. “Look at that bitch sitting there eating crackers.” This is not a good place to be in in a relationship. Repression is not a sustainable interaction style in a relationship.
-People that love you want you to be happy
If you are unhappy, that is important. If your happiness requires you taking a step back, *even in a way that hurts the other person*, most of your friends will want you to take that step. Plus side: this means that sharing a relationship problem will trigger good friends’ protective problem-solving rather than defensiveness. Or at the very least you know what they would want for you if they were in a better place.
The corollary to this is, of course, people that don’t value your happiness are not worth pouring your emotional energy into.
-If you’re waiting for the Thing That Will Give You Permission to Leave, “I want to” is sufficient reason
I have to include this because it is so damn important. Seriously. If you want out of a relationship, this is your sign. Go.
-Be aware that “do this or I’ll hurt myself” is also abuse
Also so damn important. Threats of physical violence to coerce behavior are Not Good. Run run run.
-You aren’t required to invest work in fixing a relationship, but if you DO want to put it in, here are some quick thoughts:
Switch to only engaging in ways, frequencies, and topics that you find rewarding. (ENTHUSIASTIC CONSENT. DESIST FROM EMOTIONAL SUPPRESSION.)
State your needs without feeling the required to offer detailed explanation or justification. (“I’m really stressed lately, so I need to only talk about casual things”)
Resist the urge to get drawn into guilt spirals. (”I’m not mad” + restate need).
Resist engaging with stuff that violates boundaries you’ve communicated–just ignore and switch the topic. Redirect any too-heavy stuff to other channels. (“Sounds like you need a therapist to talk to”; “Ugh, that sounds stressful, hope you find someone that can help you through that”; “Sounds like something you two will need to work out together”; + TOPIC CHANGE).
Shift some of the relationship work to the other person, such as strategizing ways to balance conflicting needs.
Frankly what I’m hearing from you is “I want to stop” so…. yeah, you can stop. Official Stranger On the Internet permission given.
One of the reasons I feel so comfortable using Tumblr over other social media is because this site is clearly too incompetent to be evil.
The basic business model of a social network is to harvest commercially valuable personal data and sell it, most famously via targeted ads. Anyone visiting my blog can clearly see that I am a queer furry who’s into video games and art. And yet I am only served ads for funeral homes, Bible story DVDs, and the current president’s reelection campaign (in 2018 for some reason)
Needless to say my click through rate has not been very good
Am I the only one whose internet addiction started with my parents not letting me fucking go anywhere
This but I also had no friends so I wouldn’t have anywhere to go if I was allowed
this is a thing! danah boydis a researcher who has been studying social media for over a decade and in her 2014 book it’s complicated she argues that teenage social media “addiction” (which she also contends is like…..not actually a thing) is a result of the fact that “today’s teenagers have less freedom to wander than any previous generation” because “parents argue that these restrictions are necessary in an increasingly dangerous society, even though the data suggest that contemporary youth face fewer dangers than they did twenty years ago.”
as a result, teenagers are reclaiming these lost social spaces (which their parents and grandparents had in the form of mall hangouts, drive-in theaters, after school parking lots, etc) by using social media, where they can continue to “engage in crucial aspects of maturation: self-presentation, managing social relationships, and developing an understanding of the world around them,” aka stuff that teens are Supposed to be doing
First of all: wow, I’m so sorry!? That’s incredibly fucked up. Hang in there, anon. If there’s anything that would help you out don’t hesitate to mention.
Second: im so fascinated!? By this choice…??? Entitled is right.
I’d be curious to know: are they telling you to block them based on your relative ages? Or are all of the antis attacking you with this demand 21 and younger? Because I can see that fitting a certain ‘adults (that is: anyone older than me) have to look out for my safety even if they’ve never met me’ attitude that I find lines up with the increase in ‘trust authorities to protect you’ culture shift that followed 9/11 in the US.
Either way: isn’t it interesting how antis are insisting you are dangerous to them, and yet trusting you to block them instead of try to harm them if they put themselves in contact with you?
It’s almost like they know you’re not actually dangerous to them and this is all performative outrage and playing at activism.
Wild.
[image ID: anonymous says:
I’m the DMMD thread person who said the very controversial statement that kids shouldn’t be playing DMMD since it’s meant for adults. That really rustled their jimmies. I’ve honestly not looked at their profiles, just reported the really offensive ones and muted the others. But everyone demands I block them, and from friends who been curious, apparently there is an anti culture precedent of refusing to block people they consider bad because they think that means they lose.
End ID] (emphasis mine)
Blocking people who ship things they hate means they lose?
Well that’s the most 4chan thing I’ve ever heard.
I’ve said before that I think anti-shipper circles have learned their argument style by watching people from the alt-right argue on YouTube comments and twitter chains, b/c their ‘argument’ method is an extremely effective trolling and harassment style. This seems to reinforce it.
Bless you for your maturity in dealing with them.
The reason why this precedent exists is because internet bullies need a way to declare victory when people ignore them. Here is the thing: Bullies need a rise out of their target in order to get their satisfaction from bullying, proof that they have hurt their target. If the immediate response to a bully is block and ignore then the bully has usually put effort into their bullying and gotten nothing out of it – objectively, at best, they can hope that they hurt their target, but they will never get the actual satisfaction of knowing they did.
So they have redefined blocking people is a sign of deficiency – cowardice, moral inferiority, and most importantly trying to equate it to admitting defeat. This way they can still get their violence thrill when someone ignores them. They know they won, they know they hurt their target, because they have defined blocking to be irrefutable proof of such.
But it only works if they believe it. They have to convince themselves, not their target. Which is why people go in other’s inbox and demand that they be blocked. They have built up their world view so that they are unable to block or it is actively admitting that they are cowards, morally deficient, and are and always were wrong.
And, unfortunately, because anti culture is based on bullying and abuse they have managed to convinced a lot of younger people that this is the case, so now lots of people are unable to block people because it makes them feel that they are cowards and morally deficient.
This is yet another way in which anti culture actively harms minors. It has rendered many minors incapable of using the tools that allow them to protect themselves in online spaces.
This is an incredible analysis! Thank you.
Unfortunately it is not just analysis. I know a girl who is being stalked and harassed by a man on social media but she refuses to block him because “blocking is cowardly”.
I figured out all this by talking to her, trying to address her concerns about blocking people, and trying to convince her it is ok to block this guy. This has been going on for 4 months and still she refuses because people have drilled it into her head so much that blocking people makes her a bad person. I finally got her to turn off anon asks though, so progress is being made.
I’m really glad you went to that effort. You’re a good friend. Unfortunately, I know it’s not just theory to think over … it’s seriously screwing up a lot of lives. That’s why I think it’s so important to understand the mindsets of the people doing it, so you can see it in yourself and others before you hurt yourself or anyone else, and before you get tangled up with people who are spouting that rhetoric before you meet them.
Also: thinking back to when I was younger, blocking was considered the ‘cowardly’ thing to do even before antis were shitting things up in a particular way. On LJ, on FB, on MySpace … only assholes blocked people, at least in the geeky spaces I hung out in. Which makes me think that maybe the Geek Social Fallacies also play a part in this? ‘If you exclude people you’re a dick.’ ‘You’re a coward who won’t confront people. You just avoid them.’ Which of course, feeds into an environment where even people who don’t buy into anti-shipper rhetoric are set up to be afraid of blocking people, lest they be seen as the ‘real’ problem for failing to negotiate a ceasefire and excluding other nerds from their nerd experience.
It’s all just conveniently feeding into a space where abusers have full time access to victims and denying that access makes the victim equally abusive. 😦 I hate it.
I hope your friend ends up okay.
Blocking is not cowardly. Blocking is taking control of your time and attention, and refusing to give energy to the people who want you to waste it on them.
If you are entertained by antis, you are under no obligation to block them – if they don’t want to read your words, they can block you. If someone is bothering you, feel free to block them – your time and attention are limited; don’t waste them on people who only detract from the enjoyment you get out of life.
(Originally posted this as a reply, but I’m copying it into a reblog for safekeeping and expanding on it slightly.)
This is making me wonder if we need to revive another Old Internet term: signal-to-noise ratio. Blocking mindless hate and copypasta’d harassment is usually less about threat than about nuisance. Removing useless, irrelevant, foul-smelling garbage from your local slice of internet so you can spend your finite time and attention on the stuff you’re actually there for. This was less true on platforms like LJ that made it easier to maintain a high signal-to-noise ratio. But on Tumblr and Twitter, with high posting volume, feeds clogged with reblogs/retweets, sitewide tags instead of moderated communities as the only common spaces, and extremely limited filtering capabilities, blocking becomes a vital tool for junk control. In some ways it’s a replacement for basic mod functions like “clean up the mess if a troll starts shouting insults, baiting participants into flamewars, or otherwise interrupting useful conversations to draw dongs all over everything.” Or spam/off-topic control–my blocklist is mostly bots and blogs that post stuff I’m not interested in to a tag I’m browsing.
Related: I suspect the motivation for content-less harassment comments like “tl;dr”/“bad post op”/etc isn’t just signaling allegiance or demoralizing the OP, it’s also shitting up the signal-to-noise ratio of the post notes and inviting your followers to join in. It’s why long substantive posts are more likely to get the Tumblr-hate equivalent of a dong scrawled in sharpie–the *existence* of signal in the “enemy” camp is what’s being targeted, and trolls don’t fight signal with counter-signal. They fight it with noise.
Noise attacks are some real shit right now, too. Information bombardment is one of the cornerstones of information distortion (which was literally how 4chan and Russia drop-kicked Trump into office.)
Of course 4channers would say that blocking is cowardly – they depend on the unchecked ability to generate noise.
I encourage blocking those who maliciously generate noise.
i'll apple your turnover 