Won't be long before a browser extension checks the same page via a signed out user for you, cancelling out this feature. Seems as pointless as a public twitter account blocking someone from seeing their tweets, the blocked party can just sign out or open a private tab.
They're bringing their "block user" functionality to be in line with how blocking works on other platforms and thus what users expect out of the feature. If I blocked someone on reddit before, I would have been very surprised to find that they can still see what I post.
Previous behaviour would be more akin to what on twitter/instagram/whatever is referred to as "muting."
Also as Drakim said: it doesn't need to be bulletproof. It's for mitigation and adding hurdles to abusive users; escalation to reporting-to-admins still exists.
I agree that you can't really make this feature bulletproof against workarounds, but does it need to be? How many times will a user block somebody who is stalking them or just being a nuance, and this person happens to not use such an extension and not check with private tabs? Even a 1% success rate is still something good overall, you stopped 1% of the bad behavior.
Would you likewise not use an adblocker unless it was 100% effective?
An earlier “blocking change” they made (still in effect) is you can’t block moderators.
I blocked Automoderator and others, greatly improved my reading experience by not having obnoxious stickied automod posts at the top of many threads, but that stopped working so you need to scroll past them each time, just awful.
The stickied comment on the post clarifies that you can block moderators and it will work as it does for other users unless they post a distinguished comment. That seems very reasonable to me. Your frustration is more with the decisions of the moderators to sticky those comments.
You are trying not to engage with someone because they make your experience strictly worse, and the response is "ok, unless they really would like to". That's asshole design.
How does having the ability to stop people from digitally screaming in your face equate to censorship?
It happens a lot and it is always a better option to destroy the method of communication than it is to argue it out, as being in an argument and ultimately changing your mind during it is the rarest of all things, and even rarer on the internet.
It doesn't for normal people. The only people who would receive any backlash from this change are the trolls and instigators.
Well, I suppose a certain percentage of people with poor communications skills will find themselves blocked unintentionally from time to time, but I would hazard that would be uncommon.
