Hacker News Reader

Comment by legitster | Hacker News Reader

I'm disappointed by the typical Hacker News folks complaining about the presentation format. This isn't the target demographic, and I applaud trying different approaches to convey the seriousness of these issues. The kinds of people who just want a spreadsheet and a PDF report are already bought in on the ideas.

While I find the format a bit cinematic for my taste, I can't help but respect their efforts to drive home the tangible effects of global warming in an emotional way.

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Well, this is hacker news. Expect us to complain as hacker news commenters would. Our complaints don't hurt the original article. We're just discussing how we feel about it. It was posted here and it's fair to debate how it relates to us even if we weren't the target audience

I find the UX undermines the credibility journalists are usually given, earned or not. This looks like a story, or a propaganda piece.

I wouldn’t be the first to point out that the medium is the message.

There age tons of factual articles about climate change. Though it does not interest many people.

Kudos for those guys for trying to tell the story differently in a hope to reach a broader audience.

Well, it is a story. Obviously the medium is designed to engage readers. This is not a scientific paper.

Journalists are usually not the ones who make UX decisions.

Seeing is believing, i think the UX with tons of pictures actually help the credibility and impact of the story.

I think they choose the right medium for the message.

I agree, this is more of a slideshow than an article, and I don't think having it as an article with pictures would make it more plausible. The pictures tie in neatly with the content in a way that doesn't annoy me as much as other similar experiences have.

It is told as a story, to engage the reader. It is very well presented. Perhaps you can do better, are you a journalist or a UX designer?

I get that, but I'm not even viewing the website because it nearly crashed my computer.

We are a bunch of extremely aggressive, highly intelligent gadflies and that’s the way we like it

There are very few submissions that doesn’t have someone complain about something. HN crowd tend to be critical. Might be harsh sometimes but not necessarily a bad thing. If you want your ideas poked full of holes, submit it here.

Complaining about presentation formats, including the colors or fonts or use of scripts on linked articles, ought to be against the guidelines: it doesn't contribute to discussion about the content of the linked article and devolves into bickering.

This is being downvoted but, barring certain circumstances, I think I agree. There's an irony in a discussion about climate change going way off topic.

Why is the content a more appropriate topic than the format?

This is a tech forum, not a climate news forum.

Hacker News is not a "tech forum"; please see the first paragraph of https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

Hi Dang,

I wasn't suggesting that all topics must focus on tech, but that the majority of Hacker News users come from tech, and may therefore have an interest in the technical presentation of the submission.

My apologies if this was not clear.

I think that if users find technical aspects of an article a more interesting topic of discussion than the content, they should be free to discuss it in this forum.

I do not think that the guidelines should be updated to prohibit "off topic" criticism, as the parent comment suggested.

But what is the seriousness of these issues?

We're inundated with articles pointing out small unimportant changes and unquantified waffle about serious future changes. But never any actual predictions of global disaster. What's the expected cost in money or lives? Nobody has a clue beyond "catastrophe", whatever that means. I saw one estimate for the economic cost to Canada but it was so low that the citizens could actually just pay it as an additional tax and carry on with life hardly affected at all. Alarmists were actually critical of that data being published because they were afraid it might support people's belief that it's not very serious. Maybe because it's not?

So if you're going to say global warming is serious, can you also quantify what you mean? Otherwise you're only conveying your personal subjective feeling.

> Otherwise you're only conveying your personal subjective feeling.

Well that can’t be right; it would turn the entire topic of climate change on its head.

There are actual costs mentioned in the site, which leads me to believe you have not gone through the entire presentation. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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