The Block Button Is Not a Career Decision

Reputation and risk

I want to talk about the six weeks I didn’t block someone, because I think that interval is more instructive than the block itself.

The situation was not complicated. Someone had been leaving comments on my posts that were designed, with some precision, to make me look like I was out of my depth. Not hostile comments (those are actually easier to deal with, because the hostility is visible and people can see what’s happening). These were the more sophisticated kind: agreeable on the surface, subtly correcting in the subtext. The kind where if you screenshot them and send them to a friend you sound paranoid, but if you read them in context you can see the architecture of what’s being built. They were positioning me, comment by comment, as someone who meant well but didn’t quite know what they were talking about.

I knew what was happening. I’m autistic, and one of the things that comes with that, at least for me, is a very fine-grained sensitivity to patterns in social behavior. I might miss the obvious stuff that everyone else seems to catch instinctively, but I am genuinely good at noticing when a pattern of behavior has a structure to it. This had a structure.

And still I didn’t block them. For six weeks.

I wrote a few months ago about why LinkedIn makes you feel worse after you close it, and one of the things I didn’t get into in that post (because it deserved its own space) is what that platform does to your ability to protect yourself. The same mechanism that makes the scroll depressing also makes the block button feel dangerous. LinkedIn has convinced a meaningful portion of its professional user base that their reputation is a live, fragile thing that can be damaged by any visible conflict, and that the block button is a kind of conflict.

So there I was, a grown adult with two decades of professional experience, doing the math on whether blocking someone who was quietly working to undermine my credibility would hurt me more than letting them continue.

The math I was doing went something like this: this person has a reasonably large following. We have mutual connections. If I block them, they might notice. They might post about it (people do this). Mutual connections might see. I might come across as petty, or thin-skinned, or unable to handle professional disagreement. My “thought leadership” (a phrase I will never stop finding mildly embarrassing) might take a hit. My engagement numbers might dip if the algorithm interprets a block as a signal of some kind.

I am describing this in the tone of something absurd because, in retrospect, it is absurd. But I want to be clear that in the moment it felt like genuine risk management. That is how completely LinkedIn has colonized the part of my brain that is supposed to handle self-preservation.

Here is what is actually true about the block button: it is a door with a lock. That is all it is. The person on the other side is not entitled to access to you, your work, or your comment sections. There is no professional obligation, no social contract, no industry norm that requires you to leave your door unlocked for someone who is using their access to cause you harm. The idea that exercising that lock is a reputation risk is something LinkedIn’s engagement-optimization machinery has implanted in your head, and it benefits from you believing it in the same way a landlord benefits from tenants who don’t know their rights.

The thing I kept worrying about, the social consequences of being visibly protective of myself, was not actually a risk in any meaningful sense. Nobody with a healthy relationship to professional self-respect looks at someone who has blocked a bad-faith actor and thinks less of them. The people who perform outrage at being blocked are overwhelmingly the people who were doing something that warranted the block. And the people watching, the mutual connections I was so anxious about, are mostly not watching at all. They have their own feeds, their own anxieties, their own six-week decisions they haven’t made yet.

What I lost in those six weeks was not nothing. The comments continued. A few people who didn’t know the context probably absorbed some of the framing being constructed. I spent cognitive energy I didn’t have to spare on managing my own response in a space where I should have been able to show up without that overhead. And I modeled, for myself, a pattern of tolerating something harmful because I was afraid of how it would look to stop tolerating it.

That last part is the one I keep coming back to. Because the fear of reputation damage, in this context, was not really about my professional reputation. It was about being seen as someone who couldn’t take it. Someone who needed protection. Someone who was, in some hard-to-articulate way, not tough enough for the game.

Which is its own kind of LinkedIn logic, and its own kind of trap.

The block button is not a career decision. It is a boundary. Those are not the same thing, and the fact that a professional networking platform has spent years blurring that distinction is one of the more successful pieces of psychological manipulation in recent tech history.

I blocked them. Nothing happened. My follower count did not move. No mutual connection sent a concerned DM. The algorithm did not punish me. The person did not post about it, at least not anywhere I could see.

What did happen is that I stopped spending six weeks doing math that shouldn’t have needed to be done.

That is the whole lesson. I wish I had a more interesting one.