#killfiles

Oh you didn’t need to tell me -- I was just bothered I couldn’t take part in certain discussions, not bothered that I was blocked.  People who’ve blocked me are under no obligation to tell me, or to tell me why, and in most cases I’d rather not know.  (And I could be wrong about who had me blocked here.)  It was just a matter of frustration at tumblr’s new block rules making it hard for me to take part in discussions.  

I’m still fighting off an infection so I’m going to be slow in figuring out if the person I thought blocked me actually did, but I definitely don’t need anyone coming forward to tell me they blocked me, and certainly not why.  If I need to know, I’ll work it out on my own, and I don’t really want to know why, either.  But thanks for letting me know since you thought I wanted to know.  You didn’t have to do that.  (And for anyone else -- please don’t do that, it’s unnecessary and makes me think too hard about things I’d rather not think about at all.  

Plus, it’s anyone’s right to block me for any reason, including reasons I’d find ridiculous or offensive.  I come from old-school Internet days when pretty much everyone dealt with people they didn’t want to read by means of what was called a killfile.  A killfile was a file with names, email addresses, or other identifying information, and anything in that file would be blocked from your mail or Usenet client.  You could use it to block things by subject line too generally.  But most often it was used on people.

And one nice thing about killfiles was that nobody had to know they were in your killfile, and you didn’t have to explain why, and there was rarely drama over it unless someone announced “I’m putting you in my killfile.”  But even then, there was often very little drama because people accepted this as the best way to deal with people whose writing you really didn’t want to see, without interfering in any way with their ability to write it.  

My beef with tumblr here is they seem to be interfering in our ability to write things.  I would understand if it was “don’t write things on the OP’s thread”, but it seems to not just be the OP.  (Or if it is the OP... well anyway, I’ll work that out later, when I’m not feeling this lousy.  Meanwhile, please nobody feel obligated to tell me I’m blocked.  Yes, I was upset about it yesterday, but it doesn’t obligate anyone to tell me anything, and in fact I’d for the most part rather not know who blocked me or why.  Also I don’t really need private messages from people speculating about who else might have blocked me. 

As I said, I come from the old school killfile era and I wish killfiles were a more common thing online.  They really did solve a lot of problems between people. You could even killfile someone for a short time and then take them out of your killfile.  And I love how they solved that problem without encroaching on the rights of the person you’re killfiling.  It was a very simple solution but it worked. And I still believe that just as you can killfile anyone for any reason, you can block anyone for any reason, you don’t have to tell the person and you don’t have to tell anyone why.    You just go on reading and posting, and so do they, and it works out.  If tumblr wouldn’t make things difficult.