New comment policy: No more nonsense denial comments

Given what's happened in the past few weeks and months, I've revised the comment policy. No more false information will be tolerated in the comments. That mainly means that I'll be deleting nonsense from deniers who use HotWhopper to spread their disinformation.

Pinocchio by André Koehne

Comments debunking disinformation are welcome.

The reason for the new policy is that it's clear that too many people have lost the ability to tell fact from fiction and I'm not going to assist in this regard.

Read this account of a fake news writer and what he discovered. It's so bad that Oxford Dictionaries has made "post-truth" the word of the year.

The point is that extreme right wingers don't particularly care about the difference between lies and facts. It's probably worse than that. They prefer the lies and don't care that, for example, the fake promises of Trump and the Brexit campaigners were lies.

Anyone who thinks that extremists will care when the promises of Trump and the Brexiteers don't pan out are deluding themselves. It is quite possible that we are seeing the beginnings of the collapse of societies, and the associated relative peace and prosperity we've enjoyed for the past few decades. Societies that shut the doors won't survive. Societies that don't value knowledge won't survive. Societies that push for global warming won't survive (and lots of people outside those societies won't survive either).

I will continue to write about the nonsense and conspiracy theories at blogs like WattsUpWithThat and, occasionally, Judith Curry and Jo Nova and elsewhere. Articles aren't as prolific at the moment mainly because I'm very busy at the moment, also because there's more politics than science being discussed on denier blogs right now. Nasty stuff - more disinformation and dark conspiracy theories, and not much science.

The downside of this new policy is that it removes one opportunity to debunk denier disinformation. This is why I've been more lenient in the past. So I'd be pleased to get your reaction to this policy - for and against.

A refined comment policy

I've thought about whether to post this article, but having received feedback from HotWhopper friends, I've decided to let people know about a couple of changes I'm making.

First of all, in the interests of everyone, I've amended the comment policy.

Very rarely HotWhopper attracts unsavoury comments that are from real people, not your regular spam.  (I'm not referring to comments from contrarians here.) Up to now I've been very liberal and, apart from rare extreme cases, I've shown where a comment has been removed, explaining the reasons.

With the growth of readership, there is the risk that more people will happen upon something quite ugly in the comments.  It happens only very rarely (barely half a dozen times since HotWhopper was born a year ago, including yesterday and today by a past transgressor), but HotWhopper now has quite a large stream of visitors each day so even a very rare comment may be seen by a lot of people.  And showing deleted comments and the reasons doesn't add any value, in fact, the reverse.

That's not the experience I want people to have when they visit here. So I've amended the comment policy and will now delete extreme comments, without explanation and leaving no record of their existence on public display. It's not pleasant to come across and there is no reason for me to make everyone suffer for the sake of being "open".

In the same manner, comments from banned people will also be deleted.  (Only three four people have been banned so far and, with around 600,000 page views to date, to my way of thinking that speaks to the high calibre of the readership overall.)

In regard to comments about science, they are more than welcome.  That's what HotWhopper is all about.

I draw the line at maligning scientists, repeated disinformation, thread-bombing, circularity of discussion and other Gish gallop techniques, persistent tone trolling and comments that are way off topic (ie deliberate thread hijacking as opposed to alerting people to something topical of interest to readers).

I hope that these small changes are viewed as a positive for everyone.

Sou.