About
About Warm Debate
Warm, not heated. A place to read the best version of the view you reject.
What this is
Warm Debate takes one contested question at a time and sets out the strongest case on each side, the facts both sides accept, and where the disagreement actually lies. It does not tell you which side is right.
Readers vote before and after reading. The result shows how many changed their mind, which is a different question from which side has more supporters.
Who runs it
One person, Josh, based in the UK. I can't lie and say that the entirety of the website is hand-written. A language model drafts most of the words on it – the two cases, the agreed facts, a good part of what you're reading now – working from published sources. What it can't do is decide. I decide which motions to run. I check every source before a topic is published, and the build refuses any topic whose two cases are more than ten words apart or whose sources don't match its claims. I read every correction that comes in and I edit what the model wrote when it's wrong or when it doesn't sound like me. So if you notice the language changing across the site, that's why.
There's no investor and no partner. The site carries no advertising and no company pays for anything here. I pay the running costs. Press enquiries go to the same address as everything else, contact@warmdebate.com.
Privacy
There are no accounts, no tracking cookies, and no analytics or advertising scripts. The fonts are served from this site, so loading a page does not contact Google or any other third party.
When you vote, your browser keeps a random identifier in its local storage (not a cookie) so that your vote before reading can be matched with your vote after. The server stores a one-way hash of that identifier combined with the topic; as a result, votes on different topics cannot be linked to each other. No name, email address, or IP address is stored with a vote.
To stop one connection from casting hundreds of votes, the server counts requests from each IP address for 1 minute. That count is held in memory, expires after the minute, and is never written to the database.
Results only appear once 20 readers have voted both before and after, so a single vote cannot be picked out. Clearing this site's data in your browser removes the identifier.
The site is hosted on Cloudflare, which, like any web host, processes your IP address to deliver pages.
Contact
For corrections, questions, or anything else, write to contact@warmdebate.com.