The new location of your list of blocked users - at the bottom of your blog's Settings page. I've edited out the middle of the page to save space, so yours will be longer. To edit the list you just click the pen symbol to the right.
If you recall Tumblr prior to spring 2012, you’ll know that once upon a time the site had a Block function. You didn’t want anything to do with a user? Fine. You simply hit Block, and bang – they were out of your life, end of. Well, almost end of. They could create another account, of course, but since it was much quicker to hit a Block button than to create a new account, any persistence would inevitably be finite.
In spring 2012, however, Tumblr changed the old Block feature to a softer, updated option called Ignore. The idea behind this was to prevent users from easily recognising they’d been blocked, and perhaps cut down on some of the revenge tactics they could feasibly consider (like creating aggressive new accounts to circumvent the block and hurling abuse). Afterall, if a troll doesn’t know they’re blocked, they’re not going to try and take action in response.
Twitter also experimented with an ‘ignore’-type feature as a replacement for blocking, back in December 2013, but it was very badly received by users, and the hard Block was restored with almost immediate effect.
THE BENEFITS OF IGNORE
The philosophy behind an Ignore feature is, however, sound. Human beings are always going to react badly to rejection, and on the Social Web, blocking is the ultimate rejection. There are many people who have an over-optimistic view of their importance, and other people’s tolerance towards them. When they don’t get replies, they don’t assume they’re blocked, or on ‘ignore’, or even that the recipient of their interaction is purposely blanking them. They tend to believe that their interactivity is somehow being missed. “It’s not that I’m unwanted. It’s that I’m not being noticed”. The number of people on Twitter who message minor celebrities, get no reply, and conclude that the celeb’s inbox isn’t working properly, is amazing.
But if those same people see a message saying: “You are blocked”, there’s this shocked epiphany, frequently followed by the immediate setup of an alternative account, and a string of angry “WHY HAVE YOU BLOCKED ME???!!!” messages. “SCARED OF THE TRUTH ARE YOU???!!! YOU TOTAL ***ING ****!!!”... That’s the situation Ignore functions set out to combat.
FAULTS WITH IGNORING
But the problems with any soft option on blocking, are that: a) those being blocked are much less likely to change their behaviour, and b) there will always have to be some far-from-ideal compromises on access from the 'undesirable's side.
The only way trolls and spammers will learn to behave better, is to be made aware of the fact that their behaviour is unacceptable and is causing them issues. Soft blocks such as Ignore just don’t teach the kind of lessons such people need to learn.
And the compromises on access with Ignore functions can render the whole situation a farce. For example, in order that an Ignored Tumblr user would not detect that they were being blanked, the person Ignoring them would still appear in the Follow widget on their blog. Naturally, if you’re clicking someone’s Ignore button, you’re overwhelmingly unlikely to want any association with them. So to be unavoidably appearing as an association on their blog was highly undesirable.
Worst of all for many users, a large percentage of Tumblr is made up of porn blogs. Were you happy appearing in a widget on the sidebar of some aggressive, hardcore porn blog? Nope, thought not. And perhaps even worse, this kind of thing could theoretically damage your own blog’s SEO potential. Those widgets create backlinks, and if you’re getting 100,000 backlinks (one per page) from some spam-hole of secondhand porn, it’s probably not going to impress Google greatly. This ridiculous state of affairs just had to change.
TUMBLR’S REINSTATED BLOCK FUNCTION - 2015
So there was an exceptionally strong case for restoring the hard Block to Tumblr. Apart from anything else, Tumblr didn’t need a soft block. Tumblr has better privacy arrangements than Twitter's, and that makes it tougher for undesirables to initiate reprisals via associates (like: “Ask your friend why he/she’s blocked me!”), or to trick you into accepting messages with cloaked accounts, etc.
You don’t automatically have to accept direct/private messages from people you follow on Tumblr, and unless you want them to, the average user can’t rifle through your follow list for information on your associations. If they’re clever, they can Google your Tumblr username with an advanced technique to find some of the posts you’ve Liked. In the process they may also find blogs you’ve followed. But that’s a hell of a lot more complicated than just clicking Twitter’s Following/Favorites buttons and getting a complete list of usage data in an instant.
By and large, make sure your Tumblr’s “Let other users find me by email” switch is set to OFF, and you’re as anonymous and detached as you want to be. If you block someone on Tumblr and they get angry, then they make a new account or whatever, just block the new account. The message will soon sink in.
So the question was always: why NOT reinstate the hard block?
WHAT THE TUMBLR BLOCKING UPDATE DOES
Rather than allowing users to continue thinking they’re following and/or interacting with you (whilst you remain blissfully unaware of their efforts), Blocking completely and obviously ‘excommunicates’ them. When you Ignored a follower, your follow stats would remain the same. But now that blocking is back, you’ll see that Followers total drop by one as soon as you hit the dreaded button. The person you block will see their stat drop too. If they’re getting blocked a lot, they’ll notice their Following total regularly falling without them touching anything. Hopefully that will persuade them that they have a problem, and that they need to change their behaviour.
A blocked Tumblr user can’t even see you, or any of your content, unless they log out. And if they’re logged out, there’s no means for them to interact with you – unless you’re accepting messages from random members of the public, which is probably not a good idea.
And that’s not all. Your list of blocked users (now shifted from a separate Ignore page onto each individual blog’s main Settings page), has pixellated avatars. So unless you unblock someone, you can’t see them either. That’s a great idea, which was presumably prompted by the prevalence of obscene avatars on some porn accounts, and generally creepy people with a warped idea of what makes an enticing avi. Tumblr’s pixellation idea on the block list is something Twitter would do well to follow.
Another significant change is that whereas the Ignore feature applied per account, Block applies per blog. So if you have three blogs on one Tumblr account, and you want to block a user from all of them, you have to block that user three separate times – once on each blog. With Ignore, you just clicked the user’s Ignore button once and you stopped receiving their interactivity across the board. The reason for this change? I’m not sure, but I suspect it’s to minimise the drop in Follow stats.
HAPPY DAYS
So, the Block is back on Tumblr, and the site is a better place for it. Now we just need WordPress.com to come to its senses on the issue of blocking.
