Don't Use Facebook Blocking

I upvoted this post, but I would have strong upvoted it if instead of presenting a one-sided case with a call to action, it had laid out the situation in a way that acknowledged why people might want to block in the first case. 

I think mental health is a sufficiently good reason to block people most of the time, but it does mean that people who do lots of blocking can't easily participate in important "Town Hall" FB discussions without distorting the conversation. This seems like a Rock/Hard Place problem. I think there are probably technical solutions, and probably this is situation we should solve by Eliminating Scarcity rather than fighting over tradeoffs.

I think Facebook is actually pretty good for community discussions – FB has just actually optimized itself fairly well to be a social hub for extended social circles. It seems to be the place where, by default, community Town Hall stuff at least in my own social scenes is likely to remain for the foreseeable future.

Also, it has limited effectiveness at hiding from the person you blocked; comments on posts with global visibility can be seen while logged out or in incognito browsing.

When I block people on FB, I do so because I don't consider their contributions to discussions valuable and don't really care about them. If I'm correct about how much they matter, then presumably it's fine if they can't meaningfully participate in conversations. Furthermore, I don't think this is an unusual blocking pattern for people who block people on FB and participate in rationality community discussions.

Counterpoints:

• There's a unilateralist curse problem where if just one person underestimates how valuable a person's contributions are, they don't get to fully participate in discussions. Hopefully this can be fixed by holding a high bar for blocking?
• Even if you don't want people to participate in discussions, you often want them to see the discussion. A common case of this is when a norm is being hashed out that you want everybody to follow. (You could attempt to fix this by only blocking people who are peripheral enough to communities of concern that you don't care about their behaviour, but sadly your friends probably have slightly different communities of concern that you're bad at determining the boundaries of.)
• If you're reading a big community thread, then even if nobody has blocked you, if you don't know that nobody has blocked you (and you don't) then you have an overhead of not knowing if you can see all the discussion, which probably makes discussions worse. This is a cost that you can only eliminate by having blocking be extremely uncommon.

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I only block people who annoy me a lot, so I don't really cry over making their Facebook experience worse.

(I suppose this falls under "using the block feature sparingly", so I am not disagreeing with you.)

I disagree. If Person B is blocking Person C, then Person B probably has a good reason to. In that case, Person B doesn't want Person C to comment on a thread that Person B started, even if Person A has commented in the thread and doesn't block Person B.

Of course, the best solution is just to not use Facebook.

I initially though this was going to be a critique about facebook container...glad to know there's nothing wrong with that.

But blocking in general never made much sense to me on a website... though I guess facebook is getting to be more and more of a self-contained adterner rather than a website.

You can improve this advice by removing the last word from the title. Move the ending parenthetical to the top, remove the parentheses, and bold it.