My beliefs aren't so fragile that I need to protect them from beliefs that don't agree. We need to engage with the extremists. We need to call them out and let each other know that the person we are talking to is a bad faith actor who isn't interested in a discussion or understands but to simply spread their extremist message of hate and intolerance. If we block them they continue unchallenged.

[–] negativeyoda 4 points 1 year ago

If you have the energy for that, go nuts.

Being that the bulk of the loudmouths are bad faith trolls no sort of reasoned discussion is going to get through.

If enough people block them they eventually get quarantined into their own echo chambers and the oxygen of getting off on pwning the libs will run out

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If we block them they continue unchallenged.

That's why they should be blocked at the instance level, not individual users.

Engage them? No thanks. All that does is help train their LLMs.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I don't like the idea of blocking people who have different ideas but who aren't otherwise doing anything problematic. I'm talking with someone this morning who has the most ridiculous ideas about how the world works. His ideas are just nonsense and he advances them with great confidence. I have him flagged so that as soon as I saw his name come up as red this morning I knew that I needed to slow down and careful about my response. I don't want to block him because the things he says offer a chance for people who know how the world works to respond, perhaps influencing the perception of a reader who comes along later.

If you want to block people, by all means block them, but you're taking yourself out of the conversation, not them. That was the problem with the blocking system on Reddit. If you blocked someone you took them out of the conversation. On Lemmy when you block someone you take yourself out of the conversation. Unless you want to operate in an echo bunker where you can only see people whose ideas agree with yours that's a bad thing.