Reddit is fighting its war on trolls and harassment by adding a new feature that allows people to block and mute users to improve their experience on the social network. Reddit co-founder Christopher Slowe announced the changes on the news site on April 6, Wednesday and chatted about how the company is taking steps to make the platform an open community. However, the new user blocking feature will make it easier to avoid spam and similar junk mail.

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Slowe wrote that the company works hard to deal with issues such as spam, trolls, and harassment when they become public, according to Tech Crunch. Now Reddit fans can also filter users who send such malicious content to user inboxes.

Reddit users can launch the new feature by clicking the "Block User" button when they view a reply in their inbox, according to PC Mag. The person's profile, comments, posts, and messages will then become invisible. Future alerts sent by the annoying people also will also not be viewed.

Users can unblock people in the future if they change their mind by making the change on their preferences page.

The Reddit co-founder shared that Reddit already had a basic blocking system, but it targeted private messages from certain users. It was rolled out in 2011.  

One key limit of the blocking feature is that the offensive user must interact with specific Reddit users before they can be blocked. If they troll other users that a Reddit user is following there is nothing they can do until they cajole them into replying to them.

On the other hand, blocked users are not notified that they are muted. As a result they will be less likely to make a new Reddit account to keep bothering someone.

Reddit also notes that blocking users is just the first step. It encourages people to report harassment to the site's community team.

Slowe shares that this is the first version of the new user-blocking feature. The company's admin team is looking at other options to protect users from trolls and harassment.  

Last summer Reddit co-founder Steve Huffman returned to the company to become the company's CEO. Since then the company has made various process and policy changes.

In addition, last year Reddit tweaked the site's harassment policy as it tried to prevent personal attacks. However, hateful and controversial posts have been a problem at the site for long time.   

Here's a video on Reddit's battle on harassment: