Hacker News Reader

Comment by ericvanular | Hacker News Reader

We have baked-in anti spam moderation to the community. In regards to climate deniers coming on and brigading the community, I felt that it would be better to let moderators & the community treat those on a case by case basis with counter arguments and voting as necessary

What do you think? I'm open to suggestion but I feel like suppressing free speech goes against the ideals of the community

View on HN

Absolutely agree with that, but the problem might be people not having the time to follow up on long discussions, and source information to disprove climate denier arguments. In fact my experience is that many climate activists are not that familiar with the science & economics themselves: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qaJKM77j00 (she should have quoted Martin Weitzman's work on the fat tails of the climate sensitivity distribution).

I would suggest having a repository of clear arguments and counter arguments with links to reputable scientific sources, that we can refer any climate deniers to. For example: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2018/06/will-c...

I'm hearing you loud and clear. That's a great idea to keep the conversation focused. If you're willing, we would love to have you put forward this idea on the platform itself!

I am just worried that your platform might turn into a debate forum with endless back and forth arguments instead of being a "community for discussing positive climate actions". Discussing actions assumes you already agree on what the problem is. If you want to be successful, focus is the key. And to enable focus, you need to guard your community. Heck, HN is successful and heavily moderated.

edit: If you are serious about solving climate crisis, there is no time for counter arguments. Arguing with deniers and "sceptics" is a distraction and a waist of time. They are already a minority anyway. The majority of the population, both in US and EU, supports climate policies. The task is not to convert sceptics, the task now is to get the pro climate majority off their butts, away from their keyboards, and to "the streets".

Very valid concern. Thanks for your feedback! I'd suggest that you post that on the community Meta section and we can determine a standard approach for dealing with climate deniers transparently out in the open. What do you think?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com