Reddit bills itself as a place where just about anyone can voice their opinion, ask questions, and otherwise interact with the hordes of people cruising around on the Internet. For years, though, many have been concerned that the site’s open environment is conducive to harassment. And so this week the company took a step to make more users feel welcome by debuting an enhanced ‘block’ tool.
The tool, which allows users to hide posts and comments from Reddit posters they feel are abusive, builds on the site’s more basic “block users” feature that applied only to private messages.
The upgraded tool can now applies its blocking abilities to users that reply in comment replies, as well.
To use the feature, posters simply click the “block user” button while viewing the reply in their inbox. From there the profile of users, along with all their comments, posts, and messages, will be completely removed from view.
As with the previous version of the tool, the blocked users will not be notified they’ve been blocked.
“Our changes to user blocking are intended to let you decide what your boundaries are, and to give you the option to choose what you want—or don’t want—to be exposed to,” Reddit’s founding engineer, Christopher “KeyserSosa” Stowe, wrote on the site.
Stowe reminds users that they should always report harassment to the Reddit community team.
This is just the latest tool that Reddit has put into place to cut down on harassment between users. Last March, the company banned revenge porn with an update to its privacy policy that prohibits the posting of nude and sexual images without the consent of the subject.
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