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Comment by Drew_ | Hacker News Reader

I too have watched Numberphile. Rest assured, there's little to no risk of their extremely popular videos being bad.

> No, it's actually cumbersome and wastes extra time to determine if many how-to videos are bad quality without a dislike count.

If this is such a hassle, why participate here on Hacker News, a website providing nothing but informational content with no visible downvote ratings? Could it be possible that this inconvenience is not as bad as you're making it seem? There's plenty of low effort and low quality content reaching the front page every day. Whatever method you use to filter through the content here can also be applied to any other website with similar rules.

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>I too have watched Numberphile. Rest assured, there's little to no risk of their extremely popular videos being bad.

No, I wasn't talking about Numberphile. I was actually talking about videos from Institute for Advanced Study: https://www.youtube.com/user/videosfromIAS/videos

Last month, every one of those videos that had a young female professor in the thumbnail had the "men of culture we meet again" spam and other rude comments. All the comments have been recently deleted and disabled.

>Hacker News, a website providing nothing but informational content with no visible downvote ratings?

The HN (net) downvotes are visible because the posts are greyed out. For tech topics (not politics), I don't scroll to the bottom to read a bunch of greyed out comments. Downvotes lowering their visibility are saving reading time on HN. Same idea as Youtube dislikes.

> I too have watched Numberphile. Rest assured, there's little to no risk of their extremely popular videos being bad.

I mean there's the Numberphile where they claim that the sum of 1 to infinity is -1/12, supporting their claim by rearranging terms in an infinite series in ways that are not allowed, while not explaining that the actual topic that they are talking about requires both a different definition of equals and extending a pattern into where it is not properly defined. So yeah, even Numberphile can put out a trash video full of errors.

By the way, I just checked the dislike ratio using an extension and while that video was still mostly liked, it has about 20% dislikes whereas most of there videos are less than 1% dislikes, so while the dislikes didn't work perfectly, they at least did inform people that something was going on with that video.

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