Thread by @AlexandraErin

PSA: I might block someone I interact with by accident, but if someone comes to you saying "Alexandra blocked me and I think it must be an accident because we never interact.", it probably wasn't.

If I don't like how someone treats others, I don't wait to see how they treat me.

I was contacted once because someone appeared to be going into a spiral over having been blocked by me, which they took as a public declaration that they were "dead to me" and possibly the start of some further hostilities.

At the risk of being "But for me that was Tuesday, and I don't think about you at all on Tuesday"... I had no idea who the person was or why, specifically, I had blocked them.

But at a guess, I probably saw them pitching similar drama at somebody I follow.

There are people on this website I loathe. There are people I mistrust. There are people I find grating or unpleasant. There are people -- verified public figures -- that I stoop to needling more often than I like.

But I don't have any vendettas.

I view blocking and muting as user-controlled tools for curating the experiences that Twitter serves up to us. Even if I'm cutting off an argument, I don't view blocking someone as an insult, or weapon, or a message of any kind.

Might me preemptively blocking people for stuff that has nothing to do with me lead to me occasionally blocking someone who doesn't deserve it, because I missed the context?

If we grant that "deserve" is a concept that applies (which, I don't think it does), sure. Yeah.

But... oh well? There are tens of millions of people on here. Access to me in particular is neither a precious commodity nor an intrinsic right. The time and energy it takes managing random parasocial contact online is huge. I'm already using what I can spare on being "fair".

If I see a tweet that makes my blocking finger twitch, I go to the person's profile to read their bio and recent timeline. I do a search for their tweets to/from the person they're talking to, in case they've got a dynamic I don't know about. I do check.

Blocking isn't a judgment, a punishment, or a thing that is done to you. It's a choice being made by the blocker about what they consume and what doors they leave open.

And I know that it can be hard to feel that way when it happens to you. And I know there are conditions like anxiety and rejection sensitive dysphoria that can make it even harder.

I sympathize but I'm not going to change how I use Twitter at the expense of my own mental health.