Over the past several months, Reddit has taken numerous steps to keep trolls in check with a restriction of offensive content and behavior. The website has implemented a new blocking tool that will help protect users from spam, trolling and harassment.
The New York Times reported that Reddit is aiming to mold itself around the need of individual users to establish a more accepting community as a whole. Essentially with the new blocking feature, Reddit users can now block and mute other individual users on the site to customize a better experience.
According to an announcement made by Reddit co-founder Christopher Slowe, the platform has been strongly influenced to its openness, but it also had to take effective measures to prevent harassment and help protect users in order to grow the website. Slowe stated, "Sometimes this very openness can lead to less awesome stuff like spam, trolling, and worse, harassment. We work hard to deal with these when they occur publicly. Today, we're happy to announce that we've just released a feature to help you filter them from within your own inbox: user blocking."
The shift appears to be Reddit's latest effort to become a bit more proactive in terms of helping a user to its need. This past summer, when Reddit co-founder Steve Huffman came back to the company to be placed in the role of CEO, the website has shown a fairly frequent progress in updating internal process and policies.
Slowe pointed out that Reddit used to have before a relatively basic blocking mechanism in place until now, but it only provided users to mute private message from certain individuals.
What makes the blocking feature's precaution interesting is that the offending user should actually interact with the individual to make the block happen. When a user gets blocked, they won't be notified in regards to the muting process to less likely create another account to resume harassment again.
Reddit in a sense to most users is an "Internet democracy", meaning good contents gets voted up top by the users of a post, while bad contents gets to be put down the post by users.
Slowe assured that the admin team is still looking for other ways to take effective precaution in protecting users while they protect themselves. He also added, "Our changes to user blocking are intended to let you decide what your boundaries are. And to give you the option to choose what you want or don't want to be exposed to."
