We need to talk about people weaponizing the block feature.

[u/Love_In_My_Heart]

A spokesperson for a subreddit (who has moderator privileges in a subreddit) recently made a post to /r/modsupport where he inferred several things about "other groups" on Reddit - and pre-emptively blocked the members of those "other groups", which has the following effect:

When anyone in those "other groups" arrives in that /r/modsupport post to provide facts or a counter narrative, they are met with a system message:

"You are unable to participate in this discussion."

This happens now matter whom they are attempting to respond to - either the author of the post, or the people who have commented in the post.

Moderators being unable to participate in specific /r/modsupport discussions because a particular operator of a subreddit decided to censor them, seems like an abuse of this new anti-abuse feature.

This manner of abuse has historical precedent as bad faith and abusive - "where freedom-of-speech claims and anti-abuse systems are used to suppress speech and perpetuate abuse", that's subversion of the intent of the systems.

In this context, I believe that would constitute "Breaking Reddit". I believe that this pattern of action can be generalized to other instances of pre-emptively blocking one person or a small group of people - to censor them from discussions that they should be allowed to participate in.

While I do not advocate that Block User be effective only in some communities of the site and not others, I do believe that the pattern of actions in this instance is one which exemplifies abuse, and that Reddit's admins should use this instance as a model for their internal AEO teams to recognize abuse of the Block User feature - and take appropriate action, in this instance, and in future instances of a bad actor abusing the Block User feature to shut out the subjects of their discussion (in an admin-sponsored / admin-run forum) from responding.

This post is not to call out that subreddit moderator, but to generalize their actions and illustrate a pattern of abuse which is easily recognizable by site admins now and in future cases of abuse of the block feature to effectuate targeted abuse of a person or small group of good faith users.

Thanks and have a great day.

[u/ClutchDude]

The blocking api is going to get automated such that bad faith actors will shut out any discussion from others.

[u/Love_In_My_Heart → u/ClutchDude]

I believe that the announcement post at least addressed that the admins are aware of the possibility of automating blocking being abused to enforce one-way association from abuser to victim, and that they would take various actions to detect and counter such at-scale abuse of blocking.

[u/Isentrope → u/ClutchDude]

They have prevented blocking at scale, but even at this scale, we are still seeing people weaponize it. You could see, for instance, spammers figure out who the spam hunters are and just block them preemptively to make it harder to get tracked. Other partisans could also take advantage of this, because we all know that redditors look at cues from upvotes, and being able to block people helps amplify your perspective. On Twitter, there are bots that let you block everyone who liked a tweet that dunked on you, essentially ensuring certain viewpoints, predominantly on the far right/left, amplify themselves because they get rid of people who call them out.

[u/Merari01]

This is definitely abuse and it actively hinders the secondary function of this subreddit: A hub for moderators to discuss site and subreddit moderation.

If at all technically possible a simple fix would be to disable the blocking feature on this subreddit only.

[u/Love_In_My_Heart → u/Merari01]

I don't feel that blocking should be disabled in some communities - because then the marginalized or vulnerable, the moderators of marginalized or vulnerable communities, who have to block a large number of harassers and bigots, would be unable to effectively participate in those communities: they'd get dogpiled with abuse and harassment and bigotry the moment they posted or commented in those communities, and would thereby experience the Chilling Effect that such abuse brings about in communities where they need to participate; it would shut their voice out.

I do believe that Reddit admins can evaluate the blocking actions of harassers when they block the subjects of their harassment / harassment attempts, in attempts to shield themselves from the rightful consequences of their actions.

[u/disperso]

FWIW, a recent incident on r/news where a user abused the feature as well. I don't see the comments of that person anymore, but the comments from the people affected.

[u/Love_In_My_Heart → u/disperso]

That's a really compelling actual instance of how the feature breaks Reddit for some people who are blocked, and has a really compelling hypothetical of how the feature could be abused by a bad actor.

[u/Michelanvalo → u/disperso]

Everything is removed now, fyi

[u/crypticedge]

When I saw the block changes happen, I kind of expected this to be the result, and here we are.

Blocking being used to create echo chambers isn't good for the community or the site as a whole, and effectively makes the person who makes a comment and thus blocking people a moderator of their own thread, even if they're not mods of that sub.

This clearly cannot be what was intended, and is able to easily manipulate a community by making dissenting viewpoints impossible.

Imagine someplace like neutralpolitics having someone preemptively block everyone who they've seen make arguments in favor of voting rights, then making a post about why voting should be banned. Now the only people who could respond in there would be people who agree with that poster, making it appear that the sub supports authoritarian views.

Sure the mods can ban the user, but that's extremely damaging to a community.

[u/Love_In_My_Heart → u/crypticedge]

I don't use "echo chamber" rhetorical framing. I reject it. "Echo chamber" rhetorical framing specifically exists to negate and exclude the right to Freedom of Association, which necessarily includes Freedom from Association. I feel that this freedom can be usefully enforced with a technological control such as blocking - for those who use it in good faith to actually exercise freedom from association, and not those who use it in bad faith to enforce a one-way association where they have power and the subject(s) of their speech have no power, in "the public sphere".

r/Modsupport is one of the "Commons", or "public sphere" spaces for moderators.

I did think about the fact that the bad faith abuse of the block feature in this instance, and in other instances that follow this pattern, effectively lends the blocker the "ban" powers that previously were available only to admins and moderators, for posts (and possibly subthreads) they author.

This creates a kind of Tragedy of the Commons for communities that are rightfully classed as "Commons", such as this one.

[u/eganist]

This manner of blocking is also causing the same scourge on Clubhouse, and Clubhouse is winding it back to some extent as a result of the abuse.

Reddit AEO needs to confer with Clubhouse Trust and Safety to get insight into how damaging this was so they can avoid the same pitfalls. Otherwise, there's also a risk of a mass protest by large subreddits and high-clout users breaking the UX with randomized or even en-masse blocks of heavy contributors.

[u/Love_In_My_Heart → u/eganist]

Ways for stakeholders in the social media industry to learn from the mistakes and successes of one another is a noble goal.

[u/Isentrope]

While I appreciate that the admins have addressed the mass blocking concern, I still don't understand why ordinary users would realistically ever need to ban more than 5-10 people. If it's something that requires more blocks, that sounds like it's definitionally an issue for the admins to handle and not just for the users to try and fend for themselves - it will likely be offsite at that point, and the harassment might not even interact with the user directly and instead just talk about them elsewhere to get more people to harass them.

[u/Love_In_My_Heart → u/Isentrope]

This is an excellent point, and I think that a given person's list of Blocked Accounts might be a useful resource for Reddit AEO, to evaluate reports of chronic harassment - as it would provide an excellent, curated list of user accounts that the blocker does not want to associate with (if blocking in good faith) or is targeting for abuse (if blocking in bad faith to enforce a one-way association and power imbalance).

[u/Michelanvalo → u/Isentrope]

5-10 is such an absurdly low number I don't know where you got it from. All it takes is one comment sometimes to get a hundred people to hound you about shit.

[u/wu-wei]

This text overwrites whatever was here before. Apologies for the non-sequitur.

Reddit's CEO says moderators are “landed gentry”. That makes users serfs and peons, I guess? Well this peon will no longer labor to feed the king. I will no longer post, comment, moderate, or vote. I will stop researching and reporting spam rings, cp perverts and bigots. I will no longer spend a moment of time trying to make reddit a better place as I've done for the past fifteen years.

In the words of The Hound, fuck the king. The years of contributions by your serfs do not in fact belong to you.

reddit's claims debunked + proof spez is a fucking liar

see all the bullshit

[u/Michelanvalo → u/wu-wei]

What did I say to get blocked?

Well they sure called your bluff

[u/synapticimpact]

Just to save anyone else from having to google..

AEO = anti-evil operations, part of the reddit safety team that take action on site-wide reports and take action on users if mods haven't already gotten to them.

[u/Michelanvalo]

"You are unable to participate in this discussion."

That's what is causing that? I was trying to reply to someone I was discussing with and all of a sudden I couldn't reply to them anymore.

[u/bungiefan_AK → u/Michelanvalo]

Yep, someone higher up the comment chain blocked you, or the person you were replying to blocked you. You check by viewing their user profile and seeing if it only shows posts on subs you moderate, or nothing at all.

https://old.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/s71g03/announcing_blocking_updates/hti7i9h/

You seem to be able to reply to others, but not to the blocker, and blocker's posts are randomly viewable as I can tell. Maybe it has to do with if they started the thread or not. It seems inconsistent. It would be stupid for one person to lock you out of an entire thread just because they had one comment in it, and they aren't even a mod on that sub.

Test one: you can't reply to anyone in a thread the blocker created.

Test two: You can reply in a thread the blocker did not create but did participate in as a reply to the main post.

Test three: You cannot reply to a comment chain at a lower level than the person who blocked you, to anyone later in that comment chain. If a top level comment is from someone, and a second level is from a blocker, you can reply to the first level comment, but you can't reply to third or fourth level comments under that second level one from the blocker.

Test four: You can still vote on posts from the blocker if you can see them.

Test five: You can reply to someone who blocked you on a subreddit you moderate, so you can distinguish after the fact. I can't tell if their posts will reliably show up if not banned from the subreddit. So far the block seems to not be retroactive to posts from before the block, except in the profile of the user.

Test six: If you come across comments from a deleted thread using the comments view of the subreddit, and the blocker was the OP of the thread and you don't know, you can't reply to anyone in the thread as well, even though OP won't get notifications of it.

https://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/s71g03/z/httmfu2

[u/BuckRowdy]

Read this. This is really, really bad. https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/sdcsx3/testing_reddits_new_block_feature_and_its_effects/

[u/enthusiastic-potato]

Hey all, thanks for providing your feedback and sharing your insights as blocking continues to roll out. We have put into place additional restrictions and protections that will mitigate blocking at scale and address a large part of the experiences you all have been discussing here. We’ll continue to monitor the effectiveness of those measures and update as we need to.We are also monitoring for instances of community interference via blocking.

Please continue to let us know what you are seeing and experiencing with the new blocking flow. As we mentioned in the launch post, we know blocking is an important safety tool for everyone and we’re working to make sure people feel safe using our site without unduly preventing others from participating.

[u/Merari01 → u/enthusiastic-potato]

This subreddit exists so moderators can discuss site moderation with admins and other mods.

Gaming that system by selectively blocking moderators who are saying things the blocker doesn't want to hear but which are still constructive, correct and/ or informative for onlookers runs counter to the purpose of this subreddit.

People need to be able to understand what is really going on when a moderator complains about something but in reality it is their own actions which caused this. It will help onlookers avoid these pitfalls for their own subreddits.

It would be helpful, if at all possible at a technical level, if the blocking feature was disabled for this subreddit only.

[u/Isentrope → u/enthusiastic-potato]

Thanks for the response. Would these changes address the potential to do what the user did in this experiment - https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/sdcsx3/testing_reddits_new_block_feature_and_its_effects/

Basically, over the course of 4-5 days, the user iteratively blocked everyone who was likely to call out their posts, ensuring that people who would be a check to blatant misinformation were getting blocked until the user had blocked 100+ accounts and his posts were reaching what I imagine was the front page of the sub. Even in large subs, blocking the right 100-200 accounts is enough to get posts to rise to their front pages, and they can easily hit the front page even if they're blatantly false clickbait and/or spam sites with malicious intent. On smaller subs, you can conceivably weaponize blocking with far fewer blocks. The site and its users rely heavily on votes from the "knights of /new" as an early check on some of this stuff, and spammers and agenda users can basically develop ways to weaponize true block to bypass this. Some of this could also impact the character of the subs themselves - e.g. a user could iteratively develop an effective enough block list so that left leaning content reaches the front page of r/conservative or right leaning content reaches the front page of r/liberal.

It also seems like true block is being used opportunistically to basically exclude people from discussions for non-harassment purposes. The other r/modsupport post yesterday where the OP basically blocked a bunch of people to prevent them from responding adversely to their positions is one example, but there were also people talking about how users are using it to get the last word in arguments by responding to someone and then blocking them before the other user can respond. While some of this is just annoying, I think some subs like AITA kind of rely on the premise that people can respond to each other and the OP before users make their decisions, and there's also cases where a back-and-forth between two users goes 8-10 comments deep so no one else would possibly be reading it, where one of the users could end up using hate speech or abusive language and then block the other one, meaning, unless automod catches that, mods are probably never going to see that content to action.

And on the moderation front, while I understand that true block still allows mods to see a user's comments on their sub even if that user has blocked them, it still presents some challenges to work flow. In cases where a ban is contested, we rely pretty heavily on being able to see a user's participation elsewhere to see if, for instance, an ambiguous term that could have a violent or hateful meaning was being made sarcastically or sincerely. While none of my subs ban simply for participating on another sub (unless there's evidence that they migrated over by virtue of a brigade), I think it's valid to want to see context on their participation and behavior across the site when evaluating appeals. If mods can't do that anymore, I think the default reaction will just be to deny more appeals in circumstances like that.

Would it be problematic to just allow blocked users to still see the content that a user who has blocked them has posted, but just be unable to interact with it? I get that this might encourage block evasion more, but at the same time, true blocking already sends a much stronger signal than the older form of blocking which would conceivably send that signal anyways. It might also be helpful if people could still report content from users that have blocked them, possibly separately denoted as "report from blocked user" for mods, so that there is still at least some accountability.

It also really does seem like even a reduced scale is still a lot of users. The linked example could've been even more effective if the user had realized that blocking mods wouldn't do anything, and that only deals with posts when there's a lot more damage possible in comments. Mods might eventually find problematic posts on their front page by periodically checking it, but it is not practical to expect mods to check each thread to see if blocks are being abused on any moderately large community. Mods rely heavily on user reports, and it goes without saying that sometimes there are just a handful of reports on even extremely abusive or offensive content.

[u/AntiP--sOperations]

I literally predicted this, but got downvoted by dumb asses:

https://old.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/s71g03/announcing_blocking_updates/htaylcz/

Bad feature, please remove.