Why I Blocked You By @Husaria

Before anyone ever cared about where I posted my hot takes, I was a kid from Western New York. It’s where I was born, I was raised, and where I still live. It’s where I watched the Bills lose four Super Bowls and the Sabres get cheated out of a Stanley Cup. It’s where I’ve high fived strangers at bars during Pominville’s shorthanded OT goal, and it’s where idiots think a racial slur for a high school sports team honors heritage.

Why am I writing about this? Someone looked up my Twitter handle from my initial article and the question was asked, “Why does this dude have me blocked?”

Twitter, and by extension the Internet, is an amazing place. I’ve been on this medium since 1996 when AOL chat rooms were the place to be on 14.4k modems. My internet journey has taken me from there, to IRC chat rooms on 56k modems downloading Metallica on Napster, to meeting lifelong friends on my college internet board, to making friends in World of Warcraft that remain friends to this day despite not playing the game in years.

So here we are today, cataloging our lives and uploading them for all to see on the Internet in almost an instant. We’ve come a long way from those days where porn was in 30 second downloadable MPEG clips and took 5 minutes to download. The Internet is a vast place of collaboration and discussion; however, some of it is downright horrible.

I remember my first block. Twitter was just starting to deal with porn and spam bots. It was some weird cam site. As the years went along, the Twitter spam got worse and the spam list grew, and then, the group of idiots that made Facebook so bad (your dumb racist relative or high school friend that never made it out of town and thinks Olive Garden is the bee’s knees), found Twitter.

The Internet is a vast place, like space, and like space, there’s a ton of fucking heat out there that I don’t want to deal with or handle, so the block button is my atmosphere. It protects me from the stupidity of others. For example, I have the entire Buffalo News staff blocked (with small exception). You work for TBN? BLOCKED.  I block because quite frankly, I just don’t want to see your stupid fucking posts. Or maybe, I think you’re a fucking creep. Or, you went to high school with me.  Or I blocked you for a moment so I wouldn’t say something stupid to you and forgot to unblock.

You’re an asshole. I don’t like you and you posted something that pissed me off so much that I don’t want to engage with you. You’ve been proven to immediately become a shitbaby once someone engages with you or you just outright block. I can think of a few national sportswriters that engage in this behavior.

You’re a fucking creepy asshole and I don’t want you to stalk me or my friends. I’ve known certain people that like to act really sketchy, take really creepy photos and make people feel really uncomfortable in social situations and are really the worst people to deal with, but they think they’re awesome. Spoiler alert: no, no one wants to tell you.

You’re a raging bigot that denies the Holocaust, there is no hope for you.

You post articles and express ideas that I just don’t have the time to even tolerate on the Internet. You have no value to my time. These people include: those that think Jack Eichel is a bust, that athletes (like Cam Newton, or Marshawn Lynch) have an obligation to talk to the media that goes beyond what’s required in their respective labor agreement, that baseball players who miss one game out of 162 to be with their wife for the birth of their child are not team players, that Sully is always right, and so on.

I’m writing this article so in the future, you understand why I have you blocked. I’m not here to make you happy, I’m here for myself. I’m not going to tell you on twitter why I have you blocked, because I just don’t care, unless somehow your friends advocate for you and they aren’t total douchenozzles.

Now I’m not saying you’re going to stay blocked forever. I’ve had a change of heart as I get older and realize maybe I was wrong before. Some people I’ve blocked I actually unblocked and have become good friends with. The Internet is a vast place, as I said, and I like to be here. Twitter, like AOL Chatrooms, message boards, and Myspace, won’t last forever. There will be the next big thing and maybe you’ll have me blocked there.

Maybe in time I’ll just unblock everyone, but until then, BLOCKED.