About
A record of who argues online, how well they do it, and who people rate.
Online debate happens across a dozen platforms and disappears into them. OnlineDebaters keeps a single record: who the debaters are, what they have argued, how widely it was watched, and how they score against a fixed set of judged metrics.
The scores are ours, and they are opinions rather than measurements. What goes into them, and what deliberately does not, is set out in the editorial policy.
Readers can put money behind a debater. That total is kept well clear of the judged score, because how well somebody argues and how much their supporters will pay are not the same question. Backing funds the site; it is not forwarded to the debater.
Most debates here have participants and no winner, because who won is the argument the site exists to host rather than one to settle by fiat. Where the team has watched a debate in full it can mark a winner, and that is labelled as a staff review so you can see it is a judgement somebody made rather than a fact the site discovered.
Figures we do not have are shown as unrecorded rather than as zero — a debate with no view count is not a debate nobody watched. For the same reason we do not publish follower counts: we would be typing them in by hand, and they would be out of date by the time you read them.
We also do not decide who is right. A score says how somebody argued, not whether their position is true.
Signing in uses a JTS account, the same one used across the other JTS sites. It exists here so a debater can claim their own profile, and so a claimed debater can submit their own debates without waiting on us.
A claim is a request, not a switch: you send it from the profile page with something we can check, and the team decides.
You can have a reply published on it, ask for a correction, have your picture removed, or ask for the profile to come down. You do not need an account and you do not need to give a reason.