Welcome to the Unpopular Opinion community!
How voting works:
Vote the opposite of the norm.
If you agree that the opinion is unpopular give it an arrow up. If it's something that's widely accepted, give it an arrow down.
Guidelines:
Tag your post, if possible (not required)
Rules:
1. NO POLITICS
Politics is everywhere. Let's make this about [general] and [lemmy] - specific topics, and keep politics out of it.
2. Be civil.
Disagreements happen, but that doesn’t provide the right to personally attack others. No racism/sexism/bigotry.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Shitposts and memes are allowed but...
Only until they prove to be a problem. They can and will be removed at moderator discretion.
5. No trolling.
This shouldn't need an explanation. If your post or comment is made just to get a rise with no real value, it will be removed. You do this too often, you will get a vacation to touch grass, away from this community for 1 or more days. Repeat offenses will result in a perma-ban.
Instance-wide rules always apply. https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/
To be clear, some really great community members have these names, but they're everywhere now. And with the right characters you can create some really annoying overlaps: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3790
Enough of them floating around now that I'll probably do a PR for my favorite client to filter them out.
I only use the browser version of the site which luckily allows me to hide profile pictures. Signatures aren't a thing here anyway. On forums it's a bit different I feel, as having a profile photo/signature is the norm rather than exception so users with those don't really stand out.
I don't mind blocking people for petty reasons. My blocklist has somewhere from 300 to 500 users I'd guess and I add few news ones every day. Same for communities. I got over the FOMO ages ago and though I'm sure I'll miss things I would've liked to see, the truth is I'm going to miss much of it anyway, so it doesn't matter. Especially since I don't even know what I'm missing out on. My reasoning behind this is that the only way to make social media tolerable is by heavily curating it.
I also have word filters for posts about Elon, Twitter, Trump, Sailor Moon etc. All this greatly increases the signal to noise ratio. Sometimes when I see a blocked user comment something I might log out to check what they said and more often than not my conclusion is that nothing of a value was lost.
I always say social media is always better without a "friend" list.
Interesting. I've never thought about it that way but I definitely agree. Even on Instagram I've always treated my friend list more like a list of subcribed users. I don't follow people because I know them; I follow them because I like the content. However since not following people back seems to be frowned upon I'd just much rather spend my time on places where I'm anonymous. I'd never ever tell anyone my reddit/lemmy accounts name.
Honestly good on you for having a healthy mindset regarding this kind of stuff. I learned to just block people whenever I feel a little too engaged in trying to argue with them. It's better for my mental health to filter what I see anyway