Quotation for the day . . .

[mmadfan]

From Steven Fry:

I’m an optimist and tend to believe the best in people, but there are unquestionably some grotesque and vile figures out there. If ever you have the misfortune to meet one, Jonathan, never ever be afraid to use Twitter’s block option. You won’t see their tweets and they won’t see yours. There’s nothing they can do about it and

Comments

[squibstress]

Worth repeating, certainly; however, in the interest of total disclosure, I should tell you that it is not possible to block individuals from seeing one's tweets unless one makes one's Twitter stream entirely private. Anyone can subscribe to an RSS feed of someone else's public Twitter stream, even if blocked from actually viewing it on Twitter or Twitter clients.

If one is not actually interested in debate, Mr. Fry's method seems reasonable.

However, in my "other life" I use Twitter quite a bit, as I am involved in some fairly vigorous debates, which occasionally veer over into ad hominem attacks and other unpleasant irrelevancies (never from me, of course.), and I find a very liberal policy to work best. I block no one other than obvious spambots trying to sell their wares, nor do I remove comments from my blog unless they are abusive to others. (Comments abusive to me, the host, I let stand, as I think they reveal far more about the commenter than they do about my arguments.) On Twitter, I use tools to sort my stream into areas

[mmadfan]

Debate is different from abuse. You must know the type that loves to pretend they're "just being honest" when in reality, they get great kicks out of being nasty, seeing people upset, and basically causing others pain. Sadly, some folks, especially kids, don't realize that they have a perfect right to "turn off" anyone who is abusive or harassing. Even more sadly, some actually commit suicide in part because of bullying which has spread to the online world and the medium of text messaging