Turbox Tax worked hard to get AI some revenue.

If you didn’t do the multi-step downgrade of your service (have to downgrade two or three times to get to the free version) then you might’ve counted. The AI doesn’t do anything, but it starts as a way to justify charging you like $140. It’ll default you paying for it even if its unused.

Just some bots. Any human user that needs to be blocked is going to get themselves banned anyway, so they’re already going to be spinning up new accounts and instances to keep it going.

Rented until I got married and we decided it was worth shaving our monthly housing costs down by taking a 30 year mortgage. We locked in our lives and weren’t going to be moving away anytime soon.

And then we refinanced when we’d made enough payments and most of all when fed interests rates were insanely brought to 0%.

Now we’re locked in paying a fraction of what the landlords charge my neighbors. And we are constantly barraged with calls and mail to sell to corpo landlords.

That’s very possible. On second look there are a few materials that seem more set into the ground. However even the plant growth over them still might fit a time period that includes this currenr spring and last spring. (Assuming this isn’t Australia or anything.) But it could be a favorite dump site for some slumlord in the area.

Also, I have seen garbage piles with moss because the landlord had scraped everything out of a property and dumped it into a ravine. Moss and other plants could easily come with the dump too. But it’s also on netting material which is great for rapid moss growth. But more than one dump is very plausible.

I did solid waste dump responses when I worked for a health department.

When people who can’t pay to dump have trash, they dump it in the woods, ravines, forestry roads, etc.

Usually the drive to dump trash is when someone dies and someone else is having to clear out their effects, be it family, a landlord, or some worker. Or someone is evicted from their home, vehicle, or encampment.

Otherwise most people hoard it until they die or are evicted.

Two would be pushing it. The leaves would have matted more and built up in greater amounts. Put out last spring is my estimate: that’s one year of detritus.

Assuming this isn’t just two feet off the side of a trailhead or something.

You’d have to compare Bhutan to Tibet in the right timeframe.

Early 1900s both were theocratic autocracies in the designs of the British Empire’s sphere of influence.

Bhutan got absorbed into the British control. Tibet effectively became a vassal of the Qing dynasty in response to the British invasion.

Tibet pretty much was given autonomy through the rest of the Qing Dynasty, ignored by the KMT, and then after the civil war the CCP removed the system that placed the Dalai Lama as the head of state and government The Tibetan government in exile reformed over decades and only first directly elected a leader in the 2000s.

It’s unnecessarily hyperbolic to call either the modern Tibetans or Bhutanese as slaves, either way.

I am willing to bet the recent Prarieland convictions are probably the drive on this recent focus on Signal.

I feel similarly. I can do the rhythm and timing stuff, but I just kept wanting to do something different each time and there’s just no room for that in Sekiro. You play Sekiro’s way and that’s kind of it.

That and the grappling hook parkour kept giving me light vertigo.

I think you’re supposed to switch accounts between comments.

Not necessarily puppet accounts, just brigading in general.

It’s the rationale many instances used to defederate hexbear. (Even though iirc hexbear disables downvotes, so they’re defederated for users mass posting, usually that hogshit image, instead of mass voting.) It wasn’t puppets or bot accounts at any rate.

But then there’s repost communities where users share comments (especially in places they or their audience is banned from) or DMs for a group response.

Not to mention the whole ‘block and downvote all .ml on sight’ mentality. But hopefully that might be something this tool could catch.

I guess I approach it inversely. I encounter what looks like a troll post and I’ll only check profiles when either I am interacting with them, or there’s such deep downvoting already I’m just doing a morbid dive into someone’s history.

Most of the time though the user just has a deeply downvoted argument but otherwise normal and/or low engagement posts, so they wouldn’t be flagged by this.

So I understand that it can save some time with some niche cases.

But I can’t help but note that the system seems intentionally blind to targeted harassment, which can be a source, if not cause, of bad faith accounts. (And likely those need different approaches since those are also niche cases themselves.)

And maybe it’s all just because of my instance’s Local feed, so that’s what I see as a prominent problem on Lemmy.

That’s an interesting example of a user this is designed for/around.

The general system of up/downvotes seems to be doing its job quite as intended: their views appear routinely unpopular and there’s a seemingly pretty strong community consensus around that.

It looks like their threads have comments that solidly and clearly refute the garbage manosphere stuff. For some people it’s the opportunity to express a refutation of it publicly and directly. The public viewer gets to read those responses too.

So with that example: what do the flags do that the content of their posts don’t already communicate?

Are you saying that because they would get more upvotes, they could offset the downvotes they receive? Potentially, but this is where the second metric comes in (giving a lot of downvotes), and as we said, the two are almost always present at the same time.

Right, though it’s a mitigating factor. I guess there’s something I don’t know about piefed: Lemmy comments all have a default upvote from the user that makes it. But it can be revoked by the user. Does Piefed work the same way? My thought only applies if that’s the case.

giving a lot of downvotes is usually a sign of toxicity

Emphasis mine. When is it not a sign of toxicity? Rules are defined by their exceptions, so I am curious as to how this exception is navigated, if at all?

Essentially someone who posts with high frequency has a capacity to issue more downvotes without compromising this admittedly imperfect tool.

Now I was never really a reddit user, but the problematic karma farming of accounts associated with that place was directly linked to these kinds of tools and metrics, no?

I have felt there needed to be a specific type of vote available only to the original poster and to the users individual reply.

An up/downvote from the OP or the user I responded to I think should be differentiated from another user who isn’t either.

If the OP or commentator votes that should be noted alongside the X number of random votes. It isn’t an anonymous vote, but those votes would be public acknowledgements tied to the user making the public post/comment.

Need to get city planners on that bike, not bus drivers. That worker isn’t the reason for the lack of proper infrastructure.

That’s entirely possible, as it’s closer to being the very public conflicts of like a dozen people. You could have blocked one user and inadvertantly insulated yourself from almost all of it.

Sounds like a flood control for community creation would be appropriate.

It used to be in the early days instances would vet users at signup. Is there no mechanism for an instance admin to do the same for the creation of a community? They just can’t be vetted before creation?

That got built and implemented before that problem was realized and removed? Damn.

Even so, if the system is tracking votes as reputation, how were the anonymous votes actually tracked? That hash either hid the user or it didn’t.