Re:Solar panel waste may not be nearly as bad as we once tho...
by acdha on Sunday November 13, 2022 @03:51PM
(#33587207)
Extending from ajuc's spot-on answer, a lot of those downvotes also come from how this works:
1. Fossil fuel companies are desperate to prolong profitability and avoid legal penalties. They fund unqualified people (e.g. Stephen Milloy) to come up with ways to claim the science isn't settled or to attack the motives of environmentalists. “These people aren't as green as they should be” is a popular approach since humans love to roast hypocrites.
2. Those people are basically constantly A/B testing random brain-farts to see which ones get some traction.
3. The ideas which work well early on start moving from the promoter's personal Twitter/Facebook/blog to Reason.com or Watts Up With That and, if successful, move up to Fox News or The Wall Street Journal.
By numbers, most people hear about this in the latter stages of step 3. That means that when someone gets all fired up about the hot scientific news they got from Tucker and starts repeating it, anyone who cares about the subject has not only heard about it before but has seen it debunked repeatedly, too. That tends to get instant downvotes, just as people do not read spam.
You can see a contrast here: when someone posts something original and shows that they've done some homework, they get plenty of engagement.
1. Fossil fuel companies are desperate to prolong profitability and avoid legal penalties. They fund unqualified people (e.g. Stephen Milloy) to come up with ways to claim the science isn't settled or to attack the motives of environmentalists. “These people aren't as green as they should be” is a popular approach since humans love to roast hypocrites.
2. Those people are basically constantly A/B testing random brain-farts to see which ones get some traction.
3. The ideas which work well early on start moving from the promoter's personal Twitter/Facebook/blog to Reason.com or Watts Up With That and, if successful, move up to Fox News or The Wall Street Journal.
By numbers, most people hear about this in the latter stages of step 3. That means that when someone gets all fired up about the hot scientific news they got from Tucker and starts repeating it, anyone who cares about the subject has not only heard about it before but has seen it debunked repeatedly, too. That tends to get instant downvotes, just as people do not read spam.
You can see a contrast here: when someone posts something original and shows that they've done some homework, they get plenty of engagement.