Why do LW users need the ability to ban other users from commenting on their posts?
If user X could choose to:
make all comments by user Y invisible to user X; and, optionally,
enable a public notice on all of Y’s replies to X that “Y is on X’s ignore list”,
what desirable thing would be missing?
The optional public notice would ensure that X’s non-response to Y would not be taken to imply anything like tacit agreement; it would also let other users know that their comments downstream of a Y comment would not be seen by X.
(‘All comments’ in the first point could be replaced by ‘all replies to X’, or ‘all replies to a top-level post by X’, depending on what exactly X wants to achieve.)
Then there’d be a whole discussion happening on an author’s post that the author can’t see, which produces weird affects where not everyone can be quite sure which things everyone has seen, the author will be aware enough of it to know something is happening, but operating blind.
My experience with this style of blocking on FB is that it’s pretty terrible.
The public notice is an innovation over facebook, but you’d still see a bunch of people referring to one conversation thread that you can’t see. The problem is the lack of common knowledge of what’s actually going on.
Fair enough, but it still seems like an okay situation to me, with something pretty close to common knowledge of what’s going on: everyone but X knows exactly what is visible to whom, and X knows everything except the content (edit: and actual existence, but not potential existence) of a well-defined set of comments that they have chosen to opt out of.
So nobody but Y will have any trouble communicating with X; I guess occasionally someone will unthinkingly refer to something from a Y subthread, but any resulting confusion will be easy to resolve. (And there could be a norm/rule against anything akin to bypassing X’s ignore list by reposting Y’s comments.)
Not absolutely perfect, sure—but the existing system certainly isn’t either.
This mostly just doesn’t actually solve the sort of problem that I think most authors have with hosting discussions they don’t want on their post. (But, it’s cruxy for me that I don’t expect people to want it. If some authors I respected did want it I’d be open to it)
I guess an unstated part of my position is that there’s a limit to how much control a LW user can reasonably expect to have over other users’ commenting, and that if they want more control than my suggested system allows them then they should probably post to their own blog rather than LW. But I get that you (and at least some others) disagree with me, and/or are aware of users who do want more control and are sufficiently valuable to LW to justify catering to their needs in this way. I won’t push the point; thanks for engaging.
(FWIW, my biggest issue with the current system is that it’s not obvious to most readers when people are banned from commenting on a post, and thus some posts could appear to have an exaggerated level of support/absence of good counterarguments from the LW community.)
Why do LW users need the ability to ban other users from commenting on their posts?
If user X could choose to:
make all comments by user Y invisible to user X; and, optionally,
enable a public notice on all of Y’s replies to X that “Y is on X’s ignore list”,
what desirable thing would be missing?
The optional public notice would ensure that X’s non-response to Y would not be taken to imply anything like tacit agreement; it would also let other users know that their comments downstream of a Y comment would not be seen by X.
(‘All comments’ in the first point could be replaced by ‘all replies to X’, or ‘all replies to a top-level post by X’, depending on what exactly X wants to achieve.)
Then there’d be a whole discussion happening on an author’s post that the author can’t see, which produces weird affects where not everyone can be quite sure which things everyone has seen, the author will be aware enough of it to know something is happening, but operating blind.
My experience with this style of blocking on FB is that it’s pretty terrible.
Wouldn’t the ‘public notice’ in my second point remove that ambiguity?
And I’m not playing dumb here, I just don’t use Facebook: does it have something like that public notice?
The public notice is an innovation over facebook, but you’d still see a bunch of people referring to one conversation thread that you can’t see. The problem is the lack of common knowledge of what’s actually going on.
Fair enough, but it still seems like an okay situation to me, with something pretty close to common knowledge of what’s going on: everyone but X knows exactly what is visible to whom, and X knows everything except the content (edit: and actual existence, but not potential existence) of a well-defined set of comments that they have chosen to opt out of.
So nobody but Y will have any trouble communicating with X; I guess occasionally someone will unthinkingly refer to something from a Y subthread, but any resulting confusion will be easy to resolve. (And there could be a norm/rule against anything akin to bypassing X’s ignore list by reposting Y’s comments.)
Not absolutely perfect, sure—but the existing system certainly isn’t either.
This mostly just doesn’t actually solve the sort of problem that I think most authors have with hosting discussions they don’t want on their post. (But, it’s cruxy for me that I don’t expect people to want it. If some authors I respected did want it I’d be open to it)
I guess an unstated part of my position is that there’s a limit to how much control a LW user can reasonably expect to have over other users’ commenting, and that if they want more control than my suggested system allows them then they should probably post to their own blog rather than LW. But I get that you (and at least some others) disagree with me, and/or are aware of users who do want more control and are sufficiently valuable to LW to justify catering to their needs in this way. I won’t push the point; thanks for engaging.
(FWIW, my biggest issue with the current system is that it’s not obvious to most readers when people are banned from commenting on a post, and thus some posts could appear to have an exaggerated level of support/absence of good counterarguments from the LW community.)