Comments on articles erode the public's trust in science.

Text of Obama's comments on the initiative itself.

These are notes summarizing comments made by speakers and audience during this session:

• Are you a geek? When telling a story, how often do you elaborate on the details? Baseball stat geek, science detail geek, D&D geek, all about details.
• What actually constitutes a geek?
• Student: it’s good to be a geek, it means someone who is passionate about something.
• Student: Geek is starting to be glamorized. Big Bang Theory, Harry Potter movie.
• Radio Show Host: compares herself to scientists, and doesn’t think herself a geek, but the audience is geeks (Skeptically Speaking). Considers herself a translator. Geeks listen more closely to the show, and send emails. Geeks provide feedback.
• “You call it geekery, I call it passion.”
• Geeks distrust social niceties. Why aren't they just giving me the information straight? Tendency towards argumentation.
• What are Benefits and Pitfalls of a Geeky audience? Bonus is passion. Geeks get immersed in details, and have a self-generating energy and will keep working through things left to their own.
• Geeks don’t see correcting others as a slight.
• Accuracy VS Completeness: don’t ever say false things, but you don’t have to get totally immersed.
• Geeks are obsessive enough that they will voluntarily seek out details on their own.
• How to delineate between being too geeky and not geeky enough? Keep things entertaining as a means of keeping people with your content. If it’s entertaining, people will stick with you through the sciency parts.
• Make sure your headline and introduction are not for geeks, but you can geek out later in the story. Skeptchick uses humor to open all posts, post about Twilight.  Scicurious has posts that reach out to her audience, Friday posts about sex.
• Catchphrases and Inside Jokes create communities, but they also put up walls to communities.
• Surprise people with a story, ask a question to pique curiosity about how it will affect people personally,
• Whatstheharm.net – anecdotes. Turns on non-geeks, but turns off geeks because we want data. What’s the difference between whatstheharm.net and Rush Limbaugh using anecdotes to hurt science?
• Snark: a way of building a community, but causes pile-ons, turns off outsiders, PZMeyers’ fans attack whoever he points them too. Snark is the nature of the Internet. Radio difference: no snark rule.
• Use snark to empower the weak against the powerful. Use it against trolls against power.
• Try going with a private comment first before going public.
• Remember that it’s the internet, your tone doesn't communicate in the text.
• Don’t do threaded comments.
• You’re going to offend someone. Radio got called a Marxist for her show on gender.