Posted by: Spartan1065
Say someone thinks that I am incredibly annoying and they decide to block me but I actually make a really good thread with a lot of discussion value and people in their private groups are discussing it. They will have to choose between being annoyed and being left out of conversations with people they do like interacting with.
After a while of being removed from good conversations I think that users would decide it is better to put up with slight annoyances and stop using the feature.That example is completely unfair of you to make. If someone blocks you because what you're posting annoys them, they're probably not going to see your "really good thread" as a really good thread.
I also remember back when the Bungie Favorites were removed for Reach in favour of filtering user-generated content, Achronos said something that really stuck.
Paraphrasing.From each user's perspective, most content is not worth looking at - it is terrible. Each user also thinks their own content is not terrible and therefore should receive more exposure.
I really think that is where your (and others') argument(s) stem from; you just don't like the idea of someone else thinking your posts aren't worth reading and not getting the attention you think they deserve. And we see this already happening all the time when people do things like bumping their topics, quoting their own posts, and so on (which made it a huge problem in the files forums). Why else would they do it?
The other point to address would be the "fragmenting" which Hylebos brought up earlier. I don't disagree this won't happen, but I disagree that it would "fragment" the community to such an extent that significant discussion value or participation is lost (which some of you seem to be implying), simply because I cannot imagine users immediately and liberally clicking a block button on anything and everything they disagree with. I don't think it's a stretch to say people would much rather get into/can tolerate participating in a discussion, heated argument, or a name-calling match than to immediately block someone - people here are generally pretty thick-skinned. I think the vast majority majority of time it would be used where what someone has posted would be against the rules anyway.
Of course, we could now get into a more interesting discussion of why moderators should/shouldn't be the only users to interpret what spam is.