Reddit was founded way back in 2005 and thanks to its unique position of real time updates of what is happening all over the world. That is why its slogan is “The Frontpage of the Internet” which is accurate thanks to the various communities (subreddits) on the platform.
Just like any other social network, it suffers from the big problem that is harassment. Back in July last year, Reddit’s co-founder, Steve Huffman took over the company and revealed new guidelines that will regulate what will be posted on the site. Some of these guidelines targeted harassment in the form of content that incites violence towards a group or individual or cyberbullies.
In the spirit to implement these policies, Reddit announced that they have introduced a new feature to deal with spamming, trolling and harassment on the site which is user blocking. The block feature has been standard in other social media networks like Instagram, Facebook and Twitter and it is rather interesting Reddit has implemented this over a decade later.
Although they are late to the party, they actually iterate they had a “basic form of blocking” on the site which was limited to your inbox. In this new iteration, they have rolled out the blocking feature more broadly where you can block people in the comments too. You only need to tap on the “block user” button which will lead to their posts, comments and messages being “removed from your view” as Reddit says. There is also a place where you can see your list of blocked users (just like on Twitter).
Reddit says that this is one of the steps they have made to improve the experience on the network and we should expect more announcements in the future.
