- CAVX
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- Exalted Legendary Member
I respect the individual user's desire to want to block out specific content, but I don't see this feature as being able to adhere to a model like this forum. A lot of you have used social media examples as support for this feature. There is an inherent difference between these examples and a forum thread. Mostly that these are within a thread, and the social media features would ignore complete threads instead of their components.
Have you ever gone on a YouTube video, looked at the comments, and seen a thread hidden for spam? If you're not immediately wondering what it is, you'll probably see a bunch of vague replies to the comment, where you click to see what they're replying to and it's that same censored post once again. Eventually, it's hard not to feel like you need to know what it says to know what the heck anyone is talking about.
In a forum structure, unless someone is breaking the rules, every post is part of the conversation. They aren't really individual components. They are braided together. When you block all posts by a given user, would you not often see their post quoted anyway a few posts down? Would it not be strange to see a post devoid of quotes but referencing a post you never saw, or to see the thread moving in another direction for no apparent reason? Wouldn't it be annoying to post something only to realize that someone said the same thing already 3 pages back but you were ignoring their posts?
I just don't think the feature fits the format.
The problem in my eyes is that this feature would be proactive. I think an ignore feature would work great if it only allowed you to ignore individual posts as you see them. That way you still gain the full context of the thread, but if you see a rulebreaking post, or a really obnoxious post, you can ignore it so you'll no longer see it when you visit the thread in the future. In the same vein, you could ignore without worry posts by others in which they exclusively reply to your target "ignore" post, and you can do this because you don't have to just block the user forever. This alternative method keeps full thread context, gives users a chance for redemption, and still allows for custom control over what you want to see.
/twocents