Do-Not-Interact? Huh?
(last revised: 28/07/2026)
The "Do-Not-Interact" is a social convention, and a means of alerting people what to expect from me. I find it useful as a means of letting people self-select and curate their experience. However, to my vexation, I see arguments on why I should not do this, and nearly all of them share the same flaw: they argue against the worst or most careless version of the practice, rather than the practice as it's actually used.
First of these is the false analogy. A list is not the same thing as an open door. A sign that tells you not to solicit at said door is not an invitation to burst inside. Somebody determined to upset me will try to do so regardless of whether I curate a list or not. The list changes how efficiently they can do it, not whether they're inclined to in the first place. The same error runs the other way too: a DNI was never meant to function as a lock, either. It has no power to physically stop anyone, and I don't expect it to. A boundary is only ever a stated term, enforcement is a separate, manual act, blocking, reporting, disengaging, done by the person whose boundary it is. Treating a DNI's failure to enforce itself as a flaw is asking a signpost to do a lock's job.
Then there's strawmanning. Of course this is not to say that somebody could not share more intimate details, but more often than not I see the DNI for stances in various arguments. A transgender person wanting to avoid radical feminists. Or a fan artist wanting to avoid other fans, most commonly on the subject of taboo or disturbing fanworks such as rape and incest. These are stances, not confessions of intense psychosexual trauma. If anything, keeping to a simple stance avoids the belabored conversation such topics tend to invite, and lets everyone involved stay focused on what they actually came to enjoy. And even then, anyone reading my posts already has some sense of where I stand; the list mostly summarizes what's already visible rather than revealing anything new. Where I'd actually call a DNI excessive is if the topics mentioned are legitimately emotionally taxing on the person making it. Even so, anyone who does overshare in this way still has every right to name a boundary without shame. At most I hope for them to obfuscate the specific details, as not to re-expose themselves to bad memories. Without going into the gruesome details, CPTSD has a cruel tendency to make you think that you are the sum of your trauma, and this is where overly specific criteria can bite. Keeping it vague, while unsatisfying to some, helps to cast a wider net and cost you less mental energy than if you were to recall the specific details of a thing and have to look at that list repeatedly. Categorizing behavior rather than people is often proposed as an alternative to a DNI, but it doesn't negate the need to state a boundary, it's simply a more granular way of stating one. Naming which behaviors you won't engage with is still a DNI in substance, whatever it's called.
Finally, and the most insidious to me, responsibility-shifting. As discussed before, a list does not invite bad people, nor should the user of said convention be blamed for the behaviours of people they're actively attempting to avoid. I think to blame somebody for receiving unkindness for being vocal about their boundaries is, if anything, more telling about the person making such a claim than about the practice itself. Someone who reacts to a stated boundary with hostility isn't proving the boundary was unwise, they're demonstrating exactly the entitlement to interaction the boundary was drawn to exclude. This holds regardless of how much or how little else is known about the person stating it, even if a DNI were the single most revealing thing someone has ever shared, the responsibility for what follows still sits with whoever chooses to act on it, not with the person who named the boundary. The same principle applies if someone unknowingly interacts with a person they'd have preferred to avoid, that's an error of attentiveness on the part of whoever failed to check, not evidence the convention itself is flawed. And the same holds again for anyone who states a DNI and fails to live up to it themselves, that's a personal lapse in follow-through, no different from anyone who fails to act on any principle they've claimed to hold, it says nothing about whether stating the boundary was worthwhile in the first place. Nor does stating a boundary transfer the labor of enforcing it onto anyone else, that work, blocking, reporting, disengaging, remains the boundary-setter's own; a DNI only puts the term on record so that disregarding it is a choice, not an accident. Misuse of a boundary is not a mark against boundary-setting. Harassment is not inevitable, and there are many ways to prevent it, however it is telling that I see people tell each other not to set lines more than they're told not to harass.
For what it's worth, in my own experience, the people most scathing about DNIs tend to be the same people posting at length about whatever else has made them angry that week. I won't pretend that's a rigorous sample, and I don't offer it as proof of anything, but it's shaped my sense that a good deal of the mockery isn't really about anyone's wellbeing. It's a disagreement over what counts as acceptable disclosure, dressed up as concern. "Concern-trolling," as it's been called for a while now.