You can get better feedback on whether a video is bad by skimming comments. You should also acknowledge that you may like content that is unpopular (highly disliked videos are never universally disliked).
>You can get better feedback on whether a video is bad by skimming comments.
But many videos disabled comments while the dislikes count was still visible to help decide.
>You should also acknowledge that you may like content that is unpopular (highly disliked videos
For non-politics or non-music videos such as how-to tutorials or product reviews, I've never experienced this. The crowdsourced dislikes was a very accurate indicator of a bad video and I've never disagreed with it.
Disabled comments is a very strong signal in its own right. Ratings can also be disabled and usually are as well. Either way, it is still very easy to discern whether the video you are about to watch is controversial.
>Disabled comments is a very strong signal in its own right.
It might be but often it's not. A common reason comments are disabled is that a female is in it which invites rude sexist remarks. For example, there was some advanced math university lectures taught by female professors and every one of them was spammed with "men of culture, we meet here again". Understandably, the channel later disabled the comments out of respect for those women but at least the dislike numbers were still visible.
>, it is still very easy to discern whether the video you are about to watch is controversial.
No, it's actually cumbersome and wastes extra time to determine if many how-to videos are bad quality without a dislike count. That's why so many are irritated that Youtube removed it.
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.
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.
