I think that I realized something about how people perceive blocking differently on here. I think there are roughly two camps:

1) People who see blocking as an individual judgement on individual accounts.

2) People who see blocking as a means of risk management.

I think those are the broad categories, with various variants within the two camps.

One example:

1) People who think blocking means "This account is bad and deserves to be punished."

2) People who think blocking means "If I block certain kinds of accounts, Twitter will be more pleasant and I won't get hurt as much."

I'm decidedly in camp #2. For more, blocking is about risk management, and about what I am and am not willing to expose myself to.

Eg: Without blocking people, having a large Twitter account means that on any given day, there's a large risk of being on the receiving end of a hate swarm.

Block chains dramatically reduce that risk.

Without blocking, there's also a large hate swarm risk to everyone you interact with, including small accounts who they probably otherwise wouldn't notice.

Block chains dramatically reduce that risk.

I'm not willing to subject myself to hate swarms, and I'm not willing to subject people I follow to hate swarms.

In order to prevent hate swarms, the type of account I need to block is accounts that I'm not already following who follow hate accounts that come to my attention.

People follow hate accounts for a lot of reasons, and some people who follow hate accounts are people I'd want to interact with if I noticed them individually.

I still have to use automated block chains to avoid hate swarms.

I think that people don't always understand how serious trolling is. Trolls are people who like to hurt people for fun, and who have highly developed skills at hurting people.

I'm not willing to be around people like that if I have a way to avoid them.

I'll leave this here for now, but I might add more examples later.