#blocking people

Oooh good question, anon.

So it actually takes a lot for me to block a person. I've got something like 15–20 people blocked. A lot of them are people who just pissed me off beyond belief or were sending unfriendly asks, that kind of thing. If you're actively making my Tumblr experience unpleasant, then yeah, I'm probably going to block you. I'm not interested in arguing with strangers in bad faith on the internet, and I don't owe anyone access to me.

I'm actually much more likely to block someone's username under filtered post content. I have, like, idk, 50 or so words, phrases and usernames under both filtered tags and filtered post content.

That's probably my main method of curating my online experience. I don't necessarily want to block the person - I just don't want to see some of the things they're posting about.

Tumblr's filtering system works really well for that, because it's not like the post is completely inaccessible to me. If someone else has reblogged it, for example, and I actually want to know what they're talking about, I can still click through and look at it. It's just not being automatically served to me on my dash.

Which, honestly, is kind of perfect for me. I get to decide what I want to see without having to completely cut someone out of my online experience.

There are people I follow whose posts I might filter occasionally because they're posting about a topic I don't want to see. There are words or phrases that I know are going to send me into a spiral. There are fandom things I have absolutely zero interest in. There are people I don't want to see on my dash, even if I don't have any particular issue with them.

And that's the beauty of Tumblr's filtering system, imo. I don't have to make a moral judgement about something in order to decide that I don't want it in my personal online space.

My Tumblr is for me. It's my little corner of the internet. I curate it so that it's a place I actually enjoy being.

So, yeah. My general rule is: if you're annoying me, I might filter you. If you're making my experience actively unpleasant, I might block you. And if I don't want to see a particular topic, I'm filtering that shit immediately. 😂

I think one of the biggest things I've learned about being online is that you don't have to consume everything you're technically capable of accessing. You can just... not.

You can unfollow. You can mute. You can filter. You can block. You can close the tab.