In answer to your point 3, hasn't Obama just set energy policy, which will affect the living expenses of every American, on promises he made in Denmark? This is a story of great relevance to the domestic American news consumer.
> This is a story of great relevance to the domestic American news consumer.
Which means it probably is not hacker news.
(Also, consider whether we want to see both sides of this issue posting their stories - if the anti-warming folks post a lot of these, the other guys are sure to want to see their side all over the site as well. I think it belongs elsewhere)
I posted this article precisely because I'm not one of "the anti-warming folks". The tribal aspect of this debate somehow manages to be both boring and corrosive, so I ignore it when I can. This article is special because its facts aren't in dispute, and yet still tend to cast doubt on the consensus view that I, at least, thought was the truth.
Have you always taken the position that global warming is not hacker news? Or has something changed so that is was hacker news before and isn't any longer?
The fact that a topic is treated by some people as a religious dispute doesn't mean articles about it can't be interesting. By flagging stuff without even reading it, you're behaving as mindlessly as the partisans on each side.
I agree that the articles are sometimes interesting, but they're frequently just re-hashes, posted as platforms for ranting comment threads by the same handful of people.
It would be nice if there was a flag-like mechanism for the community to turn off comments on articles like this one. It seems that if the karma incentive was reduced on political articles, people would have less incentive to post the thoughtless ones.
It seems that if the karma incentive was reduced on political articles, people would have less incentive to post the thoughtless ones.
This is backwards. Usenet had political flamewars despite having no karma.
People post to political threads because it makes them feel good to stick up for their particular causes. Emotions that reward us for signaling our allegiances and general loyalty are one of the cognitive adaptations that allow our species to solve the Prisoner's Dilemma to benefit from cooperation, specialization, and trade.
I think 'mindless' is unfair. I flag them because I have seen that these articles/topics regularly degrade into junk and so I do not want to see them on this site. So I have a strategy based on my own observations of how sites like this work.
Bravo. HN would be a better site if more people did that. Particularly on Sundays.
I have a few bête noir topics I try to moderate away, too, but I tend to draw the line at explicit endorsements of one side over another in a tribal conflict. I can see how it would make sense to just excise tribal issues and have done, though.
