• 2 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • I’ve blocked a bunch of people, who may be replying to me with harassing comments, but that isn’t influencing what I do. It might influence the overall conversation, and that could be a problem, but I think the way that problem is dealt with should be public, because the problem is public, it’s not something that’s exclusively my problem. I don’t think I should have the authority to act to police any arbitrary community like that, especially without anyone being able to know that I’m doing it.


  • I do think it would be less bad if it only prevented direct comment replies, and not replies to top level posts or replies to other comments by other people further down the thread.

    I don’t understand what you mean by it still occurs in the other direction though. Nobody can prevent people from commenting except moderators and admins, which is how it should be. Mute style blocking isn’t moderation because it doesn’t affect anyone’s ability to comment, it’s effectively the same as a client level filter.


  • Because the alternative is easily abused, see all the issues Reddit has with this type of block mechanism.

    The core of the problem as I see it is, this gives every user limited moderation powers in every sub, the extent of that power is determined mainly just by how much they post and comment (blocked users can’t comment under their posts, and can’t reply to any comment in a chain started by the blocker), and the extent to which it is happening is invisible to most users. People advocating for this seem to assume it will be used mostly defensively, to prevent harassment, but the feature has way more utility offensively, and it’s totally unaccountable. If there is something someone is saying (not even necessarily to you) that you don’t like for whatever reason, whether or not it’s against the rules and regardless of what anyone else thinks about it, you can partially silence them by blocking and then working to get engagement in the same spaces they comment in. Think about if this was implemented on Lemmy, lots of communities have only one or a few people making all the posts, if one or more of them blocked you that’s almost the same as a ban. It doesn’t make it better that the people making those posts are often also moderators, because it would be a way to pseudo ban people without it showing up in the mod log.

    Moderation of online discussion spaces should be transparent and accountable, it shouldn’t be a covert arms race between users.











  • This is good logic but I think what you are missing is that the factor behind investment demand driving up price is volume of capital rather than number of landlords. One company can buy any number of living spaces if it has a way to profit on them, cancelling out the effects of any number of principled refusals by individuals to buy property in pursuit of that profit.

    That said, one thing that is weighted to individuals is lobbying local government to protect their investments, so more people becoming landlords isn’t necessarily good, because your finances being tied to something is a powerful source of bias, for instance towards opposing new housing developments that could increase housing supply and reduce price of your properties, or opposing higher property taxes for non-primary-residences. But if someone supports effective policies towards affordable housing, even knowing it will harm their investments, I think they get credit for that.



  • This will probably be an unpopular opinion but I think the reality is that the choice whether to be a landlord has no effect on the supply of housing and so is almost totally irrelevant to this essentially systemic issue. The only kind of stuff that matters here:

    • Supply of housing influencing its cost
    • Relative wealth of the poorest influencing their ability to pay for housing
    • Other factors (the credit system etc) limiting people’s access to housing
    • Legal ability to use housing as a speculative investment and store of wealth (ie. low property taxes even if you own multiple properties)

    The idea that people would buy property and then provide housing on a charitable basis in defiance of the market isn’t realistic and isn’t a viable solution to the problem. The only solution is to build the right incentives into the system. Someone can support the latter without trying to do the former.






  • That’s just the remote control part.

    promises of a free TradingView Premium app for Android. Instead of delivering legitimate software, the ads drop a highly advanced crypto-stealing trojan — an evolved version of the Brokewell malware.

    From another source, that works in part by exploiting “accessibility service permissions”:

    Like other recent Android malware families of its kind, Brokewell is capable of getting around restrictions imposed by Google that prevent sideloaded apps from requesting accessibility service permissions.

    This includes displaying overlay screens on top of targeted apps to pilfer user credentials. It can also steal cookies by launching a WebView and loading the legitimate website, after which the session cookies are intercepted and transmitted to an actor-controlled server.