Not exactly hacking, but other people made me remember it…

If you ran early software like a forum, often passwords/DMs/etc. weren’t encrypted in the database, so you could just look in your own database (or in the case of the perl-based forum I ran, the text files) and get people’s passwords and private messages. I remember my shock at seeing that when I was poking around the back end of my own forum, lol. Luckily for my users, I’m not an asshat, so I never got up to mischief with that. But I absolutely could have, and I know plenty of dudebros in IT who would/did.

I still operate today on the idea that once you interact with an online system, the admins of that system basically have everything you give them and there’s no privacy.

(Also, often if you, the user, “delete” something, usually what the system does is check a box for that data that is more or less a binary, “Is deleted? Y/N?”, and then shows/hides the data based on that flag being set. This is due to corporate customers crying if they delete something by their own fat fingers, but it means if you do intend to delete something, you should assume it’s not actually deleted, it’s just hidden from the view you, the user, have permissions to view. Of course this all depends on the specifics of the system you are interacting with, but I still default to assuming the “delete” function is just a flag that alters the view you see, not a true delete feature.)

Nothing. If I eat breakfast I’m hungry by 10 and that sucks.

If I don’t have a choice about eating breakfast, but I do get to select what to eat, eggs and hashbrowns.

But I also eat those for lunch and dinner because they are yummy.

There is a genetic link…some of us carry Neanderthal genes that predispose us to certain patterns.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/neanderthal-dna-may-help-explain-why-some-people-are-early-risers-180983438/

I block individuals pretty freely, and it generally improves my experience online.

The reason I block is because I’ve lived through bullies and a shitty family, and I am familiar with the techniques bad people use to eat up my time/overwhelm me.

These days, I am also secure in myself and my emotional responses in such a way that I no longer feel bad or guilty (as I was conditioned to growing up) when I remove these people from my life. They are not owed my time or eyeballs.

I figure that if they behave in such a way that other people (such as me) decide it’s better to remove them from their life and block them–that’s their fault, not mine.

I also know my intellect well enough to understand that I’m not losing something irreplaceable intellectually if I block. I actually am better at learning and improving myself in a form that is NOT debate, or live, or putting pressure on me in the moment, because stepping away from the immediacy of something gives me the tools and breathing room to actually think.

So folks yapping and fretting about echo chambers forming if you block and curate your experience is weird to me…even pre-internet I went out of my way to learn new things. If you’re in an echo chamber, you chose to be there, it doesn’t happen on its own. And blocking asshats won’t magically put you in an echo chamber unless you’ve chosen to be in one already.

Live debate with unpleasant people who often in this day and age have ulterior motives, including a desire to provoke an emotional response that will hinder one’s thinking ability, is a technique used to manipulate others. By blocking and opting out of such things online, I can keep my temper more easily and use my brain instead.

So yeah. I block freely, whenever I feel like, and I’ve stopped feeling bad about it because I have quite a bit of experience on the internet now, and have seen the patterns in which people engage, and a handy block button is basically the only effective tool to manage it with.

I also block communities, but that’s mostly just so I can browse Lemmy in public without looking like a degenerate with all the porn subs hanging out in the open.