"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," wrote Reddit's founding engineer, Christopher "KeyserSosa" Stowe. "[And, of course, you can and should still always report harassment to our community team!]"

The upgraded blocking tool has been a long time coming. Last June, Reddit finally broke away from its hands-off approach to censoring content on the site by banning subreddits that encouraged harassment. That led to a massive user revolt, with some defecting to alternative social news sites like Voat. At the time, I argued that the uproar would be a good thing for Reddit in the long run. Giving users the option to actually use Reddit without being bombarded by jerks is certainly a good start (though it would have been nice to see much, much sooner).

You can block users who message or comment on your posts by clicking a button in your inbox. If you change your mind, you can choose to unblock them from the "blocked" tab in your Reddit preferences.