New features and tools/toys/badges/etc to play with are great but I'd rather we spent a little time figuring out how to re-build the VS community.

Well it's not currently broke so....

Yeah, but how? Didn't that started from v5 release? IIRC, it was crazy BUSY here before v5.0 release?

I don't think it was because of the v.5 release. Though coincidentally, I discovered Reddit not long after. Initially I came here for videos, and stayed for the discussion. As a sifter of videos, no site is better than this one. But Reddit is built on discussion, and does very well there. So I guess a question we could ask might be: can we improve discussion here?

I don't think reddit is better for discusion per se, there's just a lot more of it there. So, odds are, you might find some incredibly funny or insightful comments but there's also a huge mountain of circlejerk bullshit to (ahem) sift through.

That said, I'd like to see some reddit stuff 'ported' over here. Especially saving ("bookmarking") comments.

I have some personal opinions on why the sift has dropped in traffic but skipping those, I think the major problem is the entrance barrier. I'm not talking about needing star powers but just, what the fuck is this site and how does it work etc. I think it's very confusing for new people in general. It doesn't help that the only explanation is found through an obscure link in the footer.

And on the topic of "new user barriers" could you please post somewhere in the FAQ or anywhere what the "supported" or "known" hosts are that people can sift from when they have less then 50 stars?

I've had several sifts rejected by siftbot that were from sites that I would consider known or should be supported (like nbc.com and comedy central).

If you don't want new people sifting from those obviously popular sites, please tell us which sites are allowed.

@dag @lucky760 @anybody? What are your thoughts on any of this?

In case anyone misunderstands, I want to clarify that I LOVE the complexity of the sift. I love the way it works, mostly. It just needs to be explained better is what I'm bitching about. I don't want to make it less complex, I want to make it easier to understand.

Has it really been almost 2 years? Whoa.

We've had discussions and I even started development on a radical new version of VS that I used extensively as my primary version of the site for a long time and think will be fan-freaking-tastic once it's complete. It will even include very easy simple "new user help" on every page.

Alas, real life (family, school, day job, freelance jobs) have been killing me, so I haven't had time to complete it. I really can't wait to get it finished at some point. It's just hard because once we get past all the major elements, the nitty-gritty details are so extensive, it seems like an impossible task to re-implement it all.

But we will! ...eventually

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

It's amazing to me that it's been 2 years since VS 5. The more complex a site gets the more entropy sets in, and the harder it becomes to do a major revamp. It's a pretty common IT problem. VS is big, sprawling, messy - though wonderful.