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Comment by wakawaka28 | Hacker News Reader

So, someone's reputation matters when they post a video of someone else? Can you not just judge the video for yourself and seek more context if you need it?

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Reputation matters when the listener decides what to do with the message. Are those the facts, are enough facts fairly represented. Judging a video could be complicated if you don't know - or can reliably estimate - those things, and if you need more context all the time, it's becoming pretty hard to watch videos. Hence reputation.

Fair enough, it is actually work to do research. But that doesn't make the video wrong. People have time to comment on here and talk crap about a source, but not a few minutes to watch a video and find out possibly insightful information. I think people have wrong priorities here, and the real objectives of comments about reputation are to prevent other people from watching the very thing that you don't feel like watching, and farm internet points in the process.

I'm not saying the video is wrong. I'm saying that often when you have to consider the message, to understand the message, to put it into perspective you need to understand the messenger. If you have one part of information readily available and another part not, you may register the information as a sort of "conditional" one - you don't "feel" a good understanding of it. For example, if you convey this information to somebody else, can you answer basic questions about that? If not, then maybe you don't have a good understanding. The mentioning in this branch is that who's the messenger could be important to understand the message, and the previous history is what you may rely on.

Post history has importance when considering whether someone’s ignorantly sharing partisan propaganda or not. Don’t feed trolls.

I feel like I'm being trolled left and right here.

>Post history has importance when considering whether someone’s ignorantly sharing partisan propaganda or not.

Yes but it doesn't tell you whether the thing is good information or not! Not everything that is "propaganda" is bad information. Especially in cases of "partisan" issues, you have to look at both sides of it because it often happens that one side denies or misrepresents the other side. I can't believe I have to explain all of this...

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