I think I’ve blocked one or two people on lemmy. Only because they like to spam posts all at once and it will fill up an entire page with just their shit.
Outside of that I’ve never blocked anyone, nor do I ever really want to block anyone.
You may want to try out scaled sort if your instance supports it, most of them do these days. Only a very small handful of archaic instances have not updated to 0.19.x yet.
Scaled sorting is what caused that issue. Active or hot don't really have that issue since they're more likely to show slightly older but highly voted things. VS scaled which will just dump all 20 posts from one person even though nobody has voted on them.
It does actually make a difference. Especially on a small platform like Lemmy. I'd say that around 50% of the time that I see a blocked user make a comment and I log out to read it, it just confirms that blocking them was the right choice.
Man I wish we had a "flag" option as an alternative. I don't wanna block anyone because sometimes I still wanna read their comments/posts.
I just want to flag them so when I come across them again I can keep in mind that they did a no-no before.
You could even use it to categorize (this user is a spammer, this one a troll, etc.)
I know that some apps and browser extensions do this, but I really think that it's important for Lemmy itself to have an existing notes feature as part of the server software and backend, which allows your notes to be saved as part of your account.
Mastodon has this feature and lets you leave notes on users' profiles. I do this a lot on there. I guess there isn't any reason why you couldn't use Mastodon's version of it if you regularly post to Lemmy communities from Mastodon, but since I and many others are lemmy users, and post + read from here it's good to have that feature available on this server's software natively.
I need that for the opposing reason. Sometimes people write so good comments that I don't want to block them for the stupid comment they write the next day.
Some people are just completely deranged, like, pathologically deranged. Those people just annoy me, and I don't want to get annoyed/angered every time I read their bullshit.