The senior officer, Amy Scott, was conducting routine duties nearby when she was directed to head to Westfield shopping centre following reports a man was using a “massive” knife to stab shoppers.
Within minutes, the officer was inside the centre and began chasing the offender.
“This all happened very, very quickly,” the deputy commissioner of police, Tony Cooke, said.
“The officer was in the near vicinity, attended on her own, was guided to the location of the offender by people who were in the centre and she took the actions that she did, saving a range of people’s lives.”
Albanese thanked the officer, other police, first responders and the “everyday people” who reacted to help victims.
It’s just such an echo chamber on these sites. Whatever is popular gets upvotes and goes to the top, whatever isn’t popular receives downvotes and sinks to the bottom. People feel peer pressured to vote similarly to others on comments, the cycle continues.
One of the reasons why I didn’t want Lemmy to grow any more than it did. Keeping the community small but active allows people to discuss and debate without massive pile-ons occurring.
I wonder if it would be better without votes at all: You have to comment to interact, you can’t be passive. That way mods can deal with spam more effectively. There is no way for me to tell which users are abusing their votes to silence people rather than interact respectfully. I hate it when I comment a legitimate argument (or worse someone else has and I agree with it) and it gets downvoted with no comments at all. It feels like I’ve committed the horrible act of having an opinion.
I haven’t had votes visible since I joined Lemmy and it has definitely been a more enjoyable experience. Whether that means it would be better without them altogether, I can’t really say.
Downvotes are disabled on my instance and I think it helps a decent amount of what you’re saying. Only seeing how many others agree with someone does still lend a decent amount to the discussion I think. It’s way starker to see someone still on 1 when the person they’re arguing with is on 10 in my opinion.
I think this is the same problem, though. You are being influenced by how other people interpreted the comments before you’ve even read them properly yourself.
I hear where you’re coming from but I think it’s just s lot different when it’s 1 compared to -9.
Oh it’s definitely a more extreme version of the problem, I agree.
I wonder also whether it would be interesting if votes were public like on Facebook for example. Though I don’t think disabling downvotes solves the problem. It makes it easier to agree and harder to disagree. You’ll still be mostly exposed to things that the majority of people agree with, this not challenging the majority opinion. Looking at how most social media work, aiming to keep you on the platform longer to see more ads the votes make sense, see more stuff you agree with, happier you are, longer you stay. I don’t see why we need that here, I’m not currently aware of any for-profit instances (there is threads I guess). It was probably brought over from Reddit without much thought.
Edit: I’ll also point out that the voting system on the Stack Exchange sites is different as those sites generally cover objective topics (it does fall apart in some cases), while here pretty much everything is political.