I'd like to see the site allow selecting which items you want in your sidebar. But two things you can get rid of in the talk sidebar are "video hosts" and "recently discarded videos" (used to be important but not anymore with advent of pqueue).

Hmmm.. I've been waiting for this. The first and biggest one I would like to see would be able to leave a comment in the drop down thread without having to open the video in its window. That would be uber *awsomesauce.

As far as aesthetics go, I think the site looks great. It has one of the best interfaces of all the other video sites that are out there. As far as sidebars go, the "useful pages", "video hosts", and "subscribe" I think could all stand to go. Although useless the donor boxes are nice because they recognize the Sifters who go the extra mile to help the site.

"Top 15 users" ... now that one could probably stand to go. That list never changes and is easily assessable from the top of every page.

The same goes for the tag cloud. I know I never use it, and it is huge.

The "hot tab" still bears the flaming red ass, but is it still beta?

Thats all I can think of for now, but I'm sure I'll have more to say on the subject later. Thanks for listening.

[edit] Please, just no frames.

OH! How about an LCARS interface? Sweeeeet.

*In this thread (A few little tweaks I think VideoSift needs...) many ideas were launched to improve VideoSift.
I feel a lot for the neighbour system they have @ the last.fm community..it would be great to have it @VideoSift

*As can be read in a recent thread, I and others like VS to become a more mature community where members want to stay and new members feel welcome.

----

*Declutter the sidebar:
-Maybe the donor sidebars could be made smaller/integrated into one?
-The "recently discarded" bar these days often contains discarded dupes

*Layout/design:
-Some of the sidebars are quite long..maybe make the content small and have 2 rows in one bar.

*The advanced search is very versatile and I think underused.
(the only thing I miss now is to be able to seach in a channel or multiple selected channels (e.g. all dark+fear+geek posts)

*Attractiveness
Maybe do something more with the logo/top menu bar.

This may seem like an obsessive compulsive detail, but can you give a function to center videos (to the center of the screen that is)? It's the only thing that keeps me from switching to higher resolution view, hate having to watch videos with my head screwed to the left.

"The same goes for the tag cloud. I know I never use it, and it is huge."

Chalk up another vote for the tag cloud; get rid of it.

top 15 users is a waste of space...

...until I'm on it.

Um, I'd have to say the recently discarded is a meaningless sidebar thingy. How about the ability to watch a random video by the push of a button. Also, this feature would be cable of channel filtering.

..yeah, maybe move the tag cloud from the side bar to a link, so the tag cloud has its own page. This would allow the cloud to be bigger than 100 as well, which is more interesting I think.

hmm... sidebar... yeah that could use cleaning:

• top 15 (user/comments): who? no, really, who's really looking at it?
  
• latest channel/talk/blog posts: again, whos looking?
  video host list: auto hide upon getting gold since you can get from any host by that point
  
• recently discarded: maybe rewrite to be recently pqueue'd?
  
• current users: another item that was thought to be good once and now, just clutter
  

Yeah, I agree with Rotty. I'm not suggesting getting rid of it.. just make it bigger:

A VS members page would cool. Call it "Community" or something.

-- You could have the full ranking of the site on it plus other stats like most votes this week, fastest rising member of the month, highest rated comments, expanded donors list, users online etc...


You should tighten up the real estate on the front page. The front page should be ALL about attracting visitors and being user friendly to the light users of the site. Think FUN!

--Trim up the front page. I know the donor part is important, but one list is enough plus the donate button, and more could be put on the "community" page :😉:
--Only the Top Users of the Week should be on the front and the Top 15 well... would be on the "community" page along with everyone else.


--It would be nice to move things around on the side to fit how we use it.. drag and drop sort of thing
OR
--Instead of scrolling down down down to see everything on the side, you could have it wrap up neat and compact under videos.

Oh and HUGE YES on being able to add comments in a drop down w/o having to open a new window. Quicker commenting would be more fun.

--Along with the quicker commenting, a jump arrow to the bottom and top of the page would be very handy. We check on these long threads all the time and we scroooolll

>> ^darkrowan:
hmm... sidebar... yeah that could use cleaning:

• top 15 (user/comments): who? no, really, who's really looking at it?
  
• latest channel/talk/blog posts: again, whos looking?
  video host list: auto hide upon getting gold since you can get from any host by that point
  
• recently discarded: maybe rewrite to be recently pqueue'd?
  
• current users: another item that was thought to be good once and now, just clutter
  

For those of us that enjoy reading these... again a "Community" page would solve all of this.

The only thing I really want to see is dag in a grass skirt and dancing the hula for my viewing pleasure. Oh about the site, well fist of all keep the motif going but dang there is a lot of clutter. All the things darkrowan said except the latest talk posts, that I still like because it streamlines the talk page and leaves it less cluttered.

understand that popularity does not equal quality. separate those two concepts before doing anything else. realise this place is fundamentally flawed for that reason. it will get better if you stop denying this obvious problem.

reinstall 2.0 (just kidding, sorta)

remove comment voting.

remove "ignore member".

raise sift threshold to 20 or 30, or whatever is proportional to the number of users a year ago. who cares if some people moan... read the title of the page, it says "quality control" not "we want you to be sifted as much as possible so you can get a gold star in 3 months with cat/clinton videos".

give me a favourite sifters list. i don't use RSS. and please don't then derive some rube goldberg "popularity metric" from the data.

flag adhom, it's worse than spam, and it's the only thing comment voting was supposed to combat anyway, and the only thing that should be "ignored/censored/downvoted" rather than challenged with actual words and intellect.

stop making deals with shitty advertisers. you'll get more donations anyway if you stop acting so retarded.

understand that growth is not necessarily good. if you lose 50% of your members it would be no bad thing (depending on which 50% you lose...) and at least the server would cost less. Reduce stress on the server, rather than adding to it. Focus on quality control, not handwringing inclusivity. Value your best members, not "the cloud", and learn to live with Dunbar's Number. Then you will find more people donate more because they will actually give a shit.

do as much as possible to restrict access and page requests and serverside processing for leeching lurkers and Ps. Participation should have rewards. You don't need thousands of more new users anyway, only the dedicated ones. If, as a P, all I could do was watch the top 15 every day and try to post my P-busting Sift, and that wasn't enough to make me want to join the community and see what's inside, why would you want me here anyway? Why give me all the candy for free and let me upvote crap and comment on shit with my tiny inactive nonparticipatory mind? How many users do you actually NEED? Do you think you can actually sell this crap to microsoft for $40 a share or something? I know you don't. Better to just try and have fun and find nice videos, even if that means (god forbid... elitism!) restricting membership to "only those people who try hard for a long time". Ban Ps who don't Sift. put a little "zzZZ" inactivity logo next to people who have had an empty queue for more than 2 weeks. Ban them after 6 months. Use it or lose it.

enforce proper tagging. badly tagged sifts should be suspendable by senior members. why should we have to edit the tags just because some noob is too dense to understand that "star, wars" is retarded tagging? why allow noobs to be lazy? "oh fuck it, some gold star will fix it or maybe he can't be bothered to fix it because he is busy posting his own videos and i will get away with my crappy data entry..." ... just give seniors a "bad tags" button. If people abuse it, ban them or demote them to bronze. If people think their tags were good, they can PM the guy who suspended them, and find out the answer. Job done. I would spend time to explain this to a noob, but i am not just going to fix it for him. Give a man a fish... etc.

introduce a time capsule for all sifts where we can add info to help resurrection if the clip dies. sometimes i don't want to spoil the joke or the ending, or clog up the description with boring details, but i do want to leave future undeaders enough info to find the clip.

calculate star points by posts and undeads ONLY, not freaking "applauded comments" and all that other crap. people seem to consider "100 posted videos" to be a "real" gold 100 anyway, so formalise that consensus.

don't worry if people complain that it's harder to get clips sifted. FUCK IT. who cares if you get sifted? Who cares if you only just joined and now the threshold is raised to 30. Who cares? it's just a game. fill your pqueue. share clips with your friends. You can't all be on the damn front page every day. (and the people who think about rankings all the time are shitty sifters anyway, so why encourage them?)

DO worry if senior dedicated quality members complain about the level of quality on here. Don't just sit back and say "hey that's freedom and the wisdom of crowds"... FIGHT that information meltdown. Do something about it. This site is POINTLESS if it's hard to find good videos here. The fact that there is an emergent consensus that cats are cute is NOT a laudable achievement of your algorithm, or a fair reflection of the tastes of the community. It's just more proof that cats are cute and perfect for short low res movies. 10 upvotes from a for ANOTHER cat video and you get a star point? wtf? What have you added to the archive or the community?

Explain "Hot" to me.

I remember when it was a fascinating game to see which videos would sift, and which would not. I felt like I was testing my intellect against the finest minds on the internet. The quirky vids that didn't sift were anyway applauded by the friends that mattered to me. Now it's just bullshit. Cut the dead wood.

Your name is VideoSIFT. your slogan is QUALITY CONTROL.

So let's have some more sifting, quality, and control.

^some interesting points, but all-in-all, I'm glad you only have an opinion on videosift and you don't run it.

Comment voting is a very good thing.
Ignore member is a bad thing.

I'm here as much for the comments as for the videos, and the top comments help with that.

Mink: "do as much as possible to restrict access and page requests and serverside processing for leeching lurkers and Ps"
That's just foolish. There are twice as many lurkers as there are contributers.

Many of the boxes in the right bar need to be removed, to clear up clutter. Basically all the static ones, imo.

All MINK's points about the quality of sifted videos dropping (a lot) is completely true. (I'm sure other people have also said the same kind of thing).

These days you need to browse through 50 videos just to find a few you want to watch.. you may as well go straight to YouTube and browse around there for things you are interested in [or type random words into the search engine and maybe find something unusual]

There's barely anything in the top 15 that I like, and the number of published videos is insane... the sifting net appears to have a large hole in the bottom!

God help you if you leave it a whole week before checking the site.

Anyways, raising the number of votes required before something sifts = good thing. if you want to check out all the videos that have been posted, then you can visit the unpublished page! Maybe then you are also more likely to catch the interesting videos that haven't been making it...

It might also have the advantage that turnaround of a person's queued vids will slow down.... meaning 'major submitters of videos' will have more time to browse the Sift or look for the real quality videos elsewhere.


In terms of comment voting, I like the idea of being able to see who liked/ disliked your comment.. it's nice. (comment voting is broken on youtube but it seems to be ok here for now)

However, I dislike the fact that you can get star points from comments (especially when people keep getting star points just for typing something like "Congrats!" into one of the 'hey, such and such is a gold member now!' threads. The warm fuzzy feeling/ getting your comment featured should be enough for you.


I'd like the ability to fix embed code even though I am a lowly member..

The 'cloud tag' and 'Current Users' could go.

If I may comment again, I miss the old days where the site was simple and straight forward. It seems over time that it's become cluttered with, what is simply crap features, not that the features themselves are crap but they serve no higher purpose then it's "a neat idea." And were "trying it indefinitely", change is necessary but not all change is good. I say we retro-fit videosift and give it some of it's old simplistic charm again. All the "make-up" makes siftbot look like a whore.

I agree with Mink about the star points, but I'll take it one further. We should earn rank by published videos ONLY.

Star points should only be good for earning promotes or trading like currency.

I think I'm not the only old head around here that felt a twang of guilt when we earned our last high rank before actually publishing that amount.

"Ignore" should be flushed down the can and pronto.

oh.one more thing and I'm gone shoppin...

Raise the publish limit to 15 (or 20) votes to escape the queue. Since we have our pqueues now, we still have our loves available for viewing.

We could use the challenge. Lets make it tougher to get them published. We'll work harder for the good stuff and the front page will be more interesting... more exciting

discarded recently posts must go. video hosts section can be smaller.

current users, donors, top 15 users (both), comments and blog section can all go under some sort of separate community page like swampgirl suggested. i also like the idea of separate tag cloud page and eklek's idea of a neighbour system (last.fm is indeed a good example).

i'd leave top 15 expiring videos, top 15 new videos by vote and videos being viewed right now in the sidebar. and loose the "beta" on hot tag. as for design - i like it clean, simple & functional.

I also agree with mink on the issue of getting stars for commenting and sift talk posts. instead i propose some sort of rating system that would be independent from video voting.

i like the idea of tagging inactive user. temporary ban after 6 months and instaban in another 3 is not so radical, I think.

threshold - raise it to 12 and see where it takes us.

promoted videos should have more weight than the rest. the more video was promoted, the higher rating (+ number of total votes, also take into account number of downvotes in the equation). I also propose each member gets a chance to promote one video per day that is older than 6 months. use powerpoints for self-promote and promoting newer videos. I found lots of gems that deserve promotion just sitting there not getting any attention...

one thing about the dead videos that bothers me - every once in a while i feel the urge to undead some good videos from the deadpool. make it so that you can fix as many videos as you like (i don't know why but sometimes, when I've already been awarded star point for the first fix, i get these 403 messages - what is that?). loose the gold star awards for fixing dead videos (same thing as with comments, integrate this into separate award system and put it all under "community" page... but you could give out another 48 hour queue slot for bringing back from the dead 5 videos in a week or something like that. same could go for comments and sift talk quality awards.

tagging is sometimes terrible. and senior members are not excluded from this. if you want an example of good tagging look for eklek's posts.

you should read Fedquip's article on VS it would be super awesome if we could somehow post other related videos in the comment section. if such link is then recognised by the community as relevant and useful (again, some kind of quality control would have to be put in place) the video would then get permanently embeded in the comments section. maybe this could be also extended to pictures and audio files but that's pushing a lot, i know...

edit: forgot one thing - dupes. people should be responsible for posting them. there's too much of that happening just because people are fucking lazy and I for one would like to see them squirm a bit - maybe shorten their time in queue for one of their unsifted videos ever time they fuck up? it happens to all of us but some people never learn.

-Is there anyway to view videos full screen directly from VS, without having to go back to the host site? I'm guessing no, but just thought I'd ask.

-Threaded comments would be nice.

-A quick access friends list would help to more quickly navigate to a particular sifters page without having to randomly search the site or bookmark. Yes, I am lazy.

-It would be nice to have some way of being alerted to new comments on old sifts.

In making changes, please avoid shrinking type so small that we have use a magnifying glass to get around the site.

speaking of dupes, the "validate embed" button, while useful for fixing deads, is pretty much ineffective when the videos are from two different sources. I just discarded two dupes because of this. Is there some way to expand the capability?
and even though I've been against raising the escape limit beyond 10 in the past, there simply may be no choice but to raise it (15 or 20 is a bit high though, try 12).

I wrote a massive blog post about this last night

I am reflecting on my past year as a member on the Sift (and 2 years of using VideoSift) and the sections and functions I frequent...
Sorry about the length. Hope you guys find this useful.

I know there's a lot of wild stuff, but instead of self-censoring/limiting, I thought I would put it all out there and see what can happen.

Suggested Changes:

• disable the number verification code after a user is no longer Probationary
  
• Long as a channel
  
• Change right pane (see below)
  
• Remove the mid-page blocks like 'feeds' or something. (Are there stats on the use of these things? Are they effective?)
  
• "Subscribe to user", they show up on your "Your VideoSift" page

Suggested Commenting functionality

• I'd like to see a toolbar of clickable in-text invocations (maybe using a logo?) that can change by adding more or less depending on the user star level. (Perhaps even a basic GUI?)
  
• Power Points in-tab (on the top) moved to above the comment fill-in box with a number to say how many you have left, gets updated. The invocations (like *.beg and *.promote) would grey-out if there are not enough power points left.

Suggested Ajax add-ons:

• Integrate a "Quicklist" functionality
  
  • Like adding videos to a temporary playlist "play queue", lasts for 2 days, with option to save. (I am always adding tabs with videos I will eventually watch...)

Suggested Right pane management:

• Allow for users to specify what blocks appear, check boxes? Ajax/movable boxes (à la Drupal/iGoogle?)

Suggested Main menu tab list:
It's growing - and maybe facing growing pains, but some of these items are similar.
I see sift-related tabs, community-supporting tabs and user-specific tabs.
Perhaps a two-rowed tabs would be better?
I know there is already a pseudo-2nd row there right now...these items (Submit a video, Support) should be gathered into a box in the right pane as they do not change with the tab (gives a false sense of tab-specific functionality)

I suggest the following break-down of 4 Main tabs (more like 3 + search) and tab-specific Second tab menu hierarchy:

• "The Sift"
  
  • Home (default)
    
  • Unsifted (sorted by:)
    
  • Date (default)
    
  • Dynamic dropdowns: Votes: From:(1-9) to (2-10)
    
  • Users in my friend list
    
  • Top
    
  • Hot
    
  • "ReSift" (Beggar's Canyon)(The beggar's canyon is difficult for newbies and even commoners to fully grasp. Plus I can't see how having the word "Beggar's" is good on any collaborative/community site)
    
  • Channels (form drop down list in the menu section, and a page with boxes of the channels and the usual Personal+Overall Top Channel)
    
  
  
• "Open an account!"
  No sense in having public users access the community if they do not have a user account, right? Plus also it just may confuse anonymous/public users to see playlists and the talk pages and the blogs when all they want to see are videos.
  I suggest anonymous/public users see a tab that says "Open an account", and when they do, they see the following two tabs:
  
  
• "Community"
  
  • Playlists
    
  • Talk
    
  • Blogs
  
  
• "Your VideoSift"
  
  • Playlists
    
  • Blog (if applicable)
    
  • Comments
    
  • Account
    
    • Settings, etc.
    
    
  • Submit a video
    
  • ...
  
  
• "Search"
  (this is always good to have everywhere)

Stars Ranking order names (The "Second-to-last section, I swear" section)
This may be just opinion, but I think the stars ranking can be more logical. If using the theme Bronze, Silver, Gold,, then continue as such: Bronze Diamond, Silver Diamond, Gold Diamond, Bronze Crown,. I know, it's just the Gold 100 that throws it all off, but I wonder if there are others scratching their heads as to whre the Gold Diamond is.

Bonus! Last section! Siftbot!
Perhaps added invocations, using a separate invocation character (#perhaps?) for users with stars Gold and above to request information on a video from Siftbot. Like #dead to find out if the video has been dead before, how many times, and when was the last.
Perhaps there should be a dynamic drop down (uses css:visible call) for users to 'sift-out' invocation responses from Siftbot. These can be lengthy.

OH NO! Another one? Please stop! [Facebook thumbnail]
Gotta fix the thumbnail embed when people post on Facebook. I share stuff on Videosift with friends on Facebook, and VS (or Facebook) never gets the thumbnail right. It's a slew of other videos, or I can use the VS logo. If this could be fixed, I (and others I'm sure) wouldn't have to get the original YouTube URL (or whatever source) to share on Facebook (and perhaps other social networking sites?).

Change "flag spam" into "flag abuse", meaning spam and adhom/hate speech

The current 10 votes to be posted / 2 days in the queue is not satisfactory.
12 votes may be a solution and put more focus on the quality of videos, but then again I also think it has become harder to find good videos. As there are more videos in the pool, the niche videos need more exposure:
What about having both the new sifted and unsifted (via a clickable tab that opens this list) videos in the individual channels?

I like MINK's time capsule idea, meaning hidden spoilers tags I guess?

Bad tag policing may work, but I think one could also make it obligatory to fill three? separate tag spaces with at least 1 tag of max. x characters when submitting a video. Those 3 are published as one string of tags.

What about a separate site statistics page, where we can see e.g. top (15/overall) members (of the week), new non-starred members, tag cloud, recently discarded posts, recently promoted posts, amount of views/hits per dag/week/month, an interactive real-time graph of VS-posts featuring their quantity of votes over time et cetera.

Transform SiftTalk into the proposed Community page, where there's this forum, who's online, latest blog entries, recent channel talk and on top of the page an introduction? text/links..

i repeat

flag adhom, it's worse than spam, and it's the only thing comment voting was supposed to combat anyway, and the only thing that should be "ignored/censored/downvoted" rather than challenged with actual words and intellect.

what's the worst that can happen, we discourage arseholes from posting arseholey comments? (myself included)

You really need to find a way to get old videos more attention. There are so many good videos on the the sift and most people, like me, have only seen a small fraction of them.

Maybe something like a new tab that would go through the old sifts (8+ months?) pick a good one and put it at the top of he list.

@doogle

Indeed: advertise "Open an account!" to lurkers and new visitors!
I just read the second comment of Fedquip's post: it seems that some people somehow don't know anyone can sign up!?

Not sure if we need to hide the community part to visitors.

Also a (subscribe to) friends system may have undesired consequences as discussed in the "ignore function" thread. I'd prefer only a neighbour system.

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

After reading through everything - one thing I'm hearing very clearly is that the queue escape level is too low and not enough filtering is happening.

We don't have to wait on that. We can raise the queue escape level to 20 now. Who's with me?

>> ^dag:
We don't have to wait on that. We can raise the queue escape level to 20 now. Who's with me?


I'd say 15, personally... doubling the required votes seems kinda drastic in one step. Though if that still isn't enough then yeah 20, or even higher...

>> ^dag:
After reading through everything - one thing I'm hearing very clearly is that the queue escape level is too low and not enough filtering is happening.
We don't have to wait on that. We can raise the queue escape level to 20 now. Who's with me?


I'm with you dag!

I misread. I thought he was talking about comment upvoting.

I'm not with you dag!

20 seems a bit high there dag. I would say 12-15 would be good.

Bear with me folks:
I'm imagining a type of slider on the main page - that slides to sensitivity of the votes to appear - where videos are sifted from more or less depending on the 'granularity' setting of the sift slider.
We're almost going there anyway, with the Sift, Unsifted, Hot, Top, PQueue, Promoted...
Have the users use a slider, I say. (Maybe with checkboxes, to show pqueues, promoted, already/not voted on,)

For now though - I count ~50 sifted videos in the past 24 hours. Do we have an idea how many videos is the target for a 24-hour timeframe (I know this number fluctuates day to day, esp. weekends). If so, let's aim for that and have the # of votes follow. If we want to aim for 30 videos...15 votes?
(i.e.: 50 videos @ 10 votes, how many at 15? 20?)

>> ^swampgirl:
Oh and HUGE YES on being able to add comments in a drop down w/o having to open a new window. Quicker commenting would be more fun.


I concur.

i'm with Zifnab on the issue of queue escape level, 12-15 would be just fine for a start
^some statistics would come in handy in this discussion - guys?

Why not raise it to 12, if it works good raise it again to 15 after about a week, then we can re-group and discuss raising it higher

Raise the escape level if need be, but -- and I'll probably be on my own on this one -- bring back the requeue!

[dodges tomatoes]

It's been gone for a while, but I still miss it.

Rather than the never-ending need to keep adjusting the queue escape level, how about publishing videos algorithmically?

For example, every half hour, a video can get published, based on whichever vid in the queue has the highest votes. Or perhaps the highest votes per unit time in the queue.

I'm pretty sure that's what most of the bigger social media sites do.

>> ^arvana:
Rather than the never-ending need to keep adjusting the queue escape level, how about publishing videos algorithmically?
For example, every half hour, a video can get published, based on whichever vid in the queue has the highest votes. Or perhaps the highest votes per unit time in the queue.
I'm pretty sure that's what most of the bigger social media sites do.

We will not be defeated by machines!!!!

Another Idea would be to make the "Hot" Tab the new front page, exposing popular queued videos to the main audience

I think that raising the publishing threshold is extremely important. I say that it be raised to 15.

On a side note, we should call the next incarnation Videosift Me.

http://i306.photobucket.com/albums/nn258/Knemidokoptes/VideoSiftMe.jpg

I'm with you on this one Dag.

If we are REALLY serious about quality control around here then lets go for 20. We will not see the amount of change in quality we're asking for with 15. I for one would love to see the front page slow waaaaay down for a change.

We still have the unsifted queue to play on and comment and since the sifts will last in member's pqueues, there's no loss. Only the very best of the submissions will reach the front page. That's what we want correct?

20 votes to escape the queue! Come on guys don't be chicken Let's try it. Consider it a challenge?

@swampgirl
Considering the average amount of votes more obscure videos have, a 20 votes treshold is too high. I think we simply don't have enough voting members to justify this number. Less members would be satisfied with what gets sifted.

If we raise the queue escape level, should there be an increase in the queue time back to three days? I'm torn on this one.

I like the idea that it would take 20 votes to escape the queue, but anything that's remotely obscure or esoteric would be lost. When the only thing you have going is popular vote, then the lowest common denominator is a force to be reckoned with.

20 is too high

Considering I'm unlikely to get a video out of the queue any time soon* I'm not against raising the threshold, but I disagree that it will increase the quality of videos coming through.

More votes = popularity, not quality. I'm baffled as to why people continue to think otherwise.

*never

^Agree whole heartedly with Zeph! The only thing that raising the the vote threshold will accomplish is setting the lowest common denominator even lower. Which will marginalize the obscure and long videos even more. If you want more quality, you need to convince people to spend less time searching out bizarro videos that they can convince their friends to vote for and more time looking for the gems that are already here.

If you raise it to twenty then you might as well raise it to 40.

Perhaps if you could promote an unsifted video with at least 10 votes to the front page. If it doesn't reach the vote threshold before the promote expires it goes back to the unsifted page.

>> ^gwiz665:
I like the idea that it would take 20 votes to escape the queue, but anything that's remotely obscure or esoteric would be lost. When the only thing you have going is popular vote, then the lowest common denominator is a force to be reckoned with.


Here here! This is exactly what I was thinking on the subject.

I totally agree with zeph and gwiz on the populariy, not quality deal.

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

Very good points on the loss of the quality, obscure videos by raising the queue escape level.

I did have one kind of radical idea around the queue escape. Instead of having a set queue escape level, we could just publish the highest voted post in the queue every 15 minutes.

This would give us a constant flow of posts to the front page at 4 an hour or 96 posts a day.

Of course we could play with number after a while, make it every 10 minutes or every 20 minutes - but it would give us a lot of flexibility.

How about this then... 10 or 15 votes to escape to a channel's front page, but 20 votes to escape to THE front page?

Let's raise the escape level to 300, that way every time we come to the site, we only have the best of the best videos on the internet to watch over and over again.

Seriously though...what is "quality"? I mean does it have to do with popularity within a certain community? Does it have to do with originality and obscurity? If it is subjective, which it is, then we have to come up with a way to determine an average "quality" of the existing community. What we could say then, is that the content that is upvoted by a certain number of those that watch it is worthy to sift.

Now we rely on votes alone to capture quality content. I propose we use a simple calculation that involves the number of unique voters that view the video and the number of votes that it has. We might even be able to do away with the whole pqueue bs because, if 100 unique members have viewed a video, and it only have 5 upvotes...I'm not saying it's not quality, but let's face the community obviously agrees they don't like it much.

Here is an example of how it could work...
One posts a video, of course he is going to upvote it so that's 1 vote. So now you have to get a second vote by 20 unique member views,
3 by 30
4 by 40
5 by 50...and so on

Now I'm using these as rough numbers, but you get the idea. This may be a bit extreme, but this is 3.2 we're talking about after all.

I'm kinda likin' the after time thing. Lets face it, a video with 8 or 9 votes is going to get sifted anyways.

Personally, I find votes harder to come by period. So, I vote no on raising the queue limit.

If you make it too hard for folks to have videos sifted, they'll find other things to do.

As far as quality vs. popularity, if someone out there has a reliable way to get the former, without being subjected to the whims of the latter, you shouldn't be wasting your time here, you should be trying to tell the world about a new, upgraded replacement for democracy based on that principle.

I'm torn over the talk of the quality filter being too low. I somewhat agree, when it comes to general interest vids. I pass by most things on the front page, and even find myself disappointed with some Top 15 posts.

It's no secret I'm something of a politics nut though, and it's a rare vid that doesn't get my upvote in that channel.

I'd say quality is subjective -- I'd much rather see something like an analysis of Hillary's popular vote claims get sifted, than a vid about a cat sanctuary.

How about letting people set their own personal "frontpage" vote quota? Vids would still be "sifted" at 10 votes (or 12-15 if we want to slow down star point distribution), but users could bump up the quote on their personal front page to 20 or 30 if they want a more rarefied view of the sift.

If we want to get more radical (pre-4.0), and change to a more complex metric than sheer vote total, I agree that vote/view/time ratios are likely to be a better metric for identifying the popularity of a particular vid. If I post a vid, and it's sifted 2-3 hours later, it's almost guaranteed to end up on the Top 15.

Making the front page the Hot page would amplify that effect.

I also think we should set up some formal or informal guidelines for downvoting. Right now, siftiquette is that it's rude to downvote a vid unless you think it shouldn't be on the sift at all (as opposed to just being pqueued). If we fully encouraged people to downvote things they find boring, or uninteresting, that would definitely create a finer sift of videos. As it is now, it just seems to lead to friction, instead of making a substantive difference to the fate of the video.

We also should probably separate the conversation about how we want to actually sort/sift videos from how we award star points.

Having it be relatively easy to get star points is a good motivator -- make it too hard, and it will be harder to get more contributors sucked in.

From my perspective, we have the right balance between difficulty of obtaining a star point, and the numbers required to get ranked -- it's not hard if you're determined, but it's not so easy that it can be done overnight. Making it harder to get star points affects that balance, and should be kept in mind.

I also like the flag abuse/flag ad-hominem idea for comments. What effect that actually has is certainly up for debate...

I'm seeing two conflicting things being said in some of the arguments, 'if we raise the vote cap it'll keep the crap out' and 'look at the crap that makes it into the top 15'. I'm going to assume crap = cute animal videos, people being stupid, and/or the multitude of politics videos. Those kinds of videos sift the fastest and generally get a decent amount of votes, I think raising the queue will make them even more prominent than they are now. (I actually happen to like those kinds of videos).

Videosift has a lot of users, therefore a lot of videos are going to get submitted and a lot sifted. I think its just one of the "problems" of being a large site.

I still think video sift has a lot to offer over youtube in terms of quality:

Dupes are rare, whereas on youtube you can bet your ass there are at least ten different versions of any given video.

I have yet to see any videos sifted that consist of some kid trying to show the world how cool they are, that's what 50% of youtube right there? (Well unless something happens that show they are plainly not cool at all in the most hilarious fashion possible ie. lifting weights breaking a fish tank, and calling for mommy)

The actual video quality of sifted videos is generally good. Occasionally something with bad video quality does gets sifted, but that normally means the content is quality and it just has the misfortune of coming with bad video.

And last but not least, videos are marked and sorted 800 times better than youtube. That alone makes video sift worth it.

ok i will recap in the light of this interesting discussion.

the first thing i said was: separate the idea of quality and popularity.
Getting out of the queue indicates POPULARITY not quality.

I KNOW. ESOTERIC VIDEOS WILL NOT GET OUT OF THE QUEUE.

that's practically the DEFINITION of esoteric. this is the fundamental flaw i was talking about.

what we need is a strict pissing contest (hard to escape queue), and then a good archive that's easy to search for esoteric stuff from esoteric users. We simply cannot have a site where esoteric stuff gets more upvotes than lolcats, i think that is practically and theoretically impossible (unless farhad interviews every new member and we use visible:none on the catsanddogs channel)

What's fucking fascinating to me is that people (including Dag) are suggesting interesting variants of dynamic queueing. Let's rewind 10 months.
http://www.videosift.com/talk/Dynamic-Queuing

can't be bothered to read that? it says regulate queue escape depending on number of users. i think some of the variants of that idea in this thread would be REALLY useful.

And to the people saying "let's raise the threshold to 12 first"... shut up. you are being selfish and stupid. Last year did you want the queue threshold to be 4?

we need to treat queue escape as a BONUS, and stop thinking of pqueue as a graveyard. you get less star points? so what? the idea is to collaborate on a filter, not to show everyone how big your SiftCock is.

I'd like the site to go porn, so I can tell all my local high school buddies, yeah you remember Brian, yeah he's a PORN LORD now dude, I swear.

>> ^deathcow:
I'd like the site to go porn, so I can tell all my local high school buddies, yeah you remember Brian, yeah he's a PORN LORD now dude, I swear.


well...most of the porn sites have embeds now, it wouldn't be that hard to add an "opt in only" XXX channel.

here's my 2nd idea

[redacted due to a failed joke]

So the "flag spam" button notifies admins of the offending user's antics. There ought to be more of a public indicator than this.

If you change it to an "abuse" button, then after say 3 or 5 tags something should automatically happen. I suggest the member is automatically pulled and deposited into a SiftTalk by Siftbot. Then everyone could resolve the matter as a community.

>> ^swampgirl:
So the "flag spam" button notifies admins of the offending user's antics. There ought to be more of a public indicator than this.
If you change it to an "abuse" button, then after say 3 or 5 tags something should automatically happen. I suggest the member is automatically pulled and deposited into a SiftTalk by Siftbot. Then everyone could resolve the matter as a community.


I actually disagree with you on the automatic part: Though we are a rather mature for a community, I'd fear anything that is set up automatically like this can and at some point will be abused (even, ironically, and abuse button). Maybe automatically email the admins and they will work on it. A layer of defense it would be.

>> ^MINK:
we need to treat queue escape as a BONUS, and stop thinking of pqueue as a graveyard. you get less star points? so what? the idea is to collaborate on a filter, not to show everyone how big your SiftCock is.

The only problem with that is that the PQ is a graveyard -- videos that go there don't get looked at unless they get begged out, or if another member makes it a point to go and check out someone's PQ. In order for your ideas to work the whole layout of the site would have to be changed to give PQed videos some kind of exposure.

Would it be interesting to consider the relationship between views and votes?
The results would be distorting the landscape of fine tuning it?
eg: Nosy Cat, view champion has 1 vote for each 126 views. The latest Zero Punctuation sports 1 vote for each 18 views.

I would like a more kitten oriented site.

> I would like a more kitten oriented site.

What is the age of consent on kittens/cats?

Sarzy - I'm thinking you're looking at videos posted on VideoSift having the right of being Sifted, instead of the priviledge of being sifted.

Perhaps this view has to cease.

So you've added a video to the 'Sift -
doesn't mean it's just a matter of time before it gets sifted so you can get your fancy star.
It (should) mean that you submit to let VideoSift to work its magic whether there are 10 users more who like it who deem it worthy.

oooh then darnit, I should have known to use the "automatic". I'm not for the site doing automatic behavior control, just the opposite. We should look for ways for US to efficiently deal people around here instead of just clicking ignore buttons. There's enough mischief around here for just one or two guys to look after. It would be good if Siftbot gives us a heads up to offenders.

We don't want deputies or something lame like that, instead we need a system...an etiquette if-you-will of flushing out the naughties without laying down tons of rules or buttons.

Dag, and others, seem to have missed the reason for raising the votes required to get sifted.... The point is: there are too many videos getting sifted to the front page!

I agree with MINK (again) about people's unrealistic attitude towards esoteric videos..

Think on this next point very carefully:

Escape votes = 10. (or votes to views if you are 'delirious':)

Two videos are posted to unsifted, one is 'popular type' (evil!) and the other is 'esoteric' (saintly)...

Which one gets sifted first?

ok. .after pretending that anything could happen, admit that it will be the 'popular' video that gets sifted first...

Now consider the fact that when a video gets sifted it immediately aquires a much wider audience.. casual sifters/ people short on time .. people that like to vote for 'popular' videos!

Then?

Whilst the popular video has made it to the top 15 and gained an even wider audience... what has happened to the 'esoteric' vid?......

Has it been pushed so far down the unsifted page by videos posted by people with free queue slots that it is never seen again?.... great! Your plan to improve the quality of the sift is.. er..

Anyways,
you need to raise the escape votes required in order to slow down the turnaround of vids and encourage users (that aren't pure vote whores) to bring quality sifts here...

Currently, far too many videos get published. Even if your amazing esoteric video makes it, how long will it stay on the front page? Better start forcing everyone to check the site every hour incase they miss something....

[Considering the time requirements to view every video, why not repackage the site as a web-based MMORPG where you level by gaining (or buying) star points!]

@ Sarzy: If the PQ is a graveyard, what about the thousands of videos that are already posted? I guess we might as well delete them all and start again? hmn...

[and edited to change what was in bold.. it was making my eyes bleed]

>> ^doogle:
Sarzy - I'm thinking you're looking at videos posted on VideoSift having the right of being Sifted, instead of the priviledge of being sifted.

I actually wasn't addressing the current, ten-vote escape system -- which I like for the most part and think works fairly well -- I was addressing MINK's proposal of jacking up the escape threshold and allowing only the most popular videos to get sifted, giving everything else a nice cozy home in the PQ. If the sift were to work that way most videos would never get seen by anyone beyond their queuing time, because PQed videos are pretty much invisible to 99% of the people who come here.

Fire Siftbot and replace it with AntBot.

bisexual male,(HIV-) 43 seeks serodiscordant relationship..oops wrong thread-(wouldn't a worked out any how)

Here is the ULTIMATE solution to the debate over videos getting sifted because of the user:

Hide the users name who submitted the video while its in the queue. (except probies) That way we are 95% guaranteed that videos get votes based on the content, not the Sifter. THERE. You may all thank me now for solving this problem.

^Except that it has already been suggested months ago.

^Eat me.

Since I'm sure everything I would suggest has already been suggested at this point, I'll only give a small suggestion

Thumbnails

I noticed in some of the posts, the small previews don't work. For example, videos from dailymotion.

I'm pretty sure this affects views and votes, even in some small amount. Psychologically, I think people sometimes pass to the next video if their attention about that post which lacks a thumbnail is not enough to make them interested.

Perhaps you guys could add a system for the poster to be able to upload a thumbnail. Just like we are able to display Avatars, the same could be added for posts in case a thumbnail fails to display automatically.

Now, obviously if you guys make it so that all posts display thumbnails in the version 3.2 then even better

^ Great idea.

Also, if you want to encourage people to downvote videos they don't think deserve to be on VideoSift, then simply give a function to hide the name of the downvoter.

Although that could have unwanted effects, where people are downvoting topics they disagree with principally, which otherwise are great controversial videos for discussion.

^ I can't disagree more on that one. If you are going to downvote, there is no reason to fear retribution. Just down vote, leave a small comment as to why, if you feel like it, and move on. No one needs to get but hurt because there was a down vote. (unless they are abusing it). Ok, Now I am asking nicely, lets not discuss the downvote issue anymore in this thread. thats not why this thread is here.

Comment vote idea:
often people don't up-/downvote a comment because they only partly (dis)agree. It would be nice to show partial (dis)agreement by up-/downvoting a half point.

>> ^arsenault185:
^ I can't disagree more on that one. If you are going to downvote, there is no reason to fear retribution. Just down vote, leave a small comment as to why, if you feel like it, and move on. No one needs to get but hurt because there was a down vote. (unless they are abusing it). Ok, Now I am asking nicely, lets not discuss the downvote issue anymore in this thread. thats not why this thread is here.


Just to respond to what you said, it IS probably the reason many people don't downvote though. Especially right now when it's perceived as a kind of wrong doing, even though in actual fact it is not. I mean I'm sure some people do have the mindset that they'll be looked down upon/have their own videos downvoted.

Hey, I joined in 2006, and I think this site has taken leaps and bounds. I am a c# java developer, but I think that this site is in capable hands and that has been proven. its been excellent when I joined and it still is.

New Idea:

A frame wouldn't be so bad. But ONLY the top of the page, the tabs and links. It might be nice to have that so when your at the bottom of a thread (i.e. this one) and you are ready to move on to the next area of interest, you don't have to scroll ALLLLLLL the way back up. But maybe if you make it an option that users can select in their preferances, then you might be able to make everybody happy.

Very important idea for 3.2:  MORE STYLE!!!

The default colours & styling for the site are soooo boooooring... have a look at the Nature channel to see an example of what can be done.  Not that I love my own work or anything.

Here is another suggestion
Message counter
How about having a simple counter for messages next to your name at the top right corner?

Like

mauz15 (3) | Account | Log out

So in that case I would know there are three new messages for me. I am aware of the notification by mail but while useful is not really the best in my opinion.
With this counter, we could perhaps reply faster to comments.


>> ^arsenault185:
New Idea:
A frame wouldn't be so bad. But ONLY the top of the page, the tabs and links. It might be nice to have that so when your at the bottom of a thread (i.e. this one) and you are ready to move on to the next area of interest, you don't have to scroll ALLLLLLL the way back up. But maybe if you make it an option that users can select in their preferances, then you might be able to make everybody happy.


Um you never need to scroll all the way up.
Just click the 'Home' key.

>> ^Eklek:
Comment vote idea:
often people don't up-/downvote a comment because they only partly (dis)agree. It would be nice to show partial (dis)agreement by up-/downvoting a half point.


I think that's just over-complicating things. If you don't agree with a post but don't feel you want to downvote it, then.....Don't vote at all.
Why bother adding a semi-vote when not voting seems to accomplish the same thing?

^Wow. You know I use that damn thing all the time when I type, but I never thing to use it for that. Never mind.

>> ^MarineGunrock:
I'd like the site to go porn because I like porn.


Take your own advice on this issue from a previous thread. its been done.

Hmmm... Not really sure where you're going with that one. I only said that as a joke in response to DeathCow's comment....

>> ^arsenault185:
^Eat me.


[gnaws] Meh, doesn't taste good.

Re-Organizing VideoSift Levels and Privileges
http://www.internetresearchleague.com/?p=2900

Though I like your proposed rewards for getting the golden crown, I think the 'P' should stay. It's big, it's ugly, and it lets us easily identify newbies to look out for bad stuff. The uglier it is, the more they will want to get rid of it by becoming a contributing member.

really? you think putting new members on "Probation" is a good idea for a website? My simple thinking is that a more friendly icon will be...well... friendly.

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

Thanks for all the input. I can guarantee that some of the ideas will make it into 3.2

*unstickying - but feel free to continue to leave comments - we'll be watching.

Unstickying this post from the top of Sift Talk - unsticky requested by dag.

[97 comments already???]

I'm usually keen on reading the whole thread to see if there's anything else I can add. But I've spent too much time on the Sift considering there's a giant laundry list of things I have to get to. Including laundry, naturally.

My suggestion? Implement the best ideas.

And stay off my lawn!

I still want a way to "validate embed code" when my queue is full.
Would be a good way to check for dupes.

By the way: Now that people change the player size a lot the validation probably catches a lot less duplicates. Maybe validation should focus on the video link, not entire code.

>> ^MarineGunrock:
Though I like your proposed rewards for getting the golden crown, I think the 'P' should stay. It's big, it's ugly, and it lets us easily identify newbies to look out for bad stuff. The uglier it is, the more they will want to get rid of it by becoming a contributing member.


or keep the P and just re-name it from "Probation" to "Primary Member" er..something like that

>> ^Fedquip:
>> ^MarineGunrock:
Though I like your proposed rewards for getting the golden crown, I think the 'P' should stay. It's big, it's ugly, and it lets us easily identify newbies to look out for bad stuff. The uglier it is, the more they will want to get rid of it by becoming a contributing member.

or keep the P and just re-name it from "Probation" to "Primary Member" er..something like that


Or a big, ugly, red "N" for "new member"?

now combine all those comments into a hideous abortion and roll it down a hill and pretend it's still a car

>> ^arsenault185:
Here is the ULTIMATE solution to the debate over videos getting sifted because of the user:
Hide the users name who submitted the video while its in the queue. (except probies) That way we are 95% guaranteed that videos get votes based on the content, not the Sifter. THERE. You may all thank me now for solving this problem.


Absolutely agree. If the poster has nothing to do with the votes, then what is anyone worried about?

^Eklek:
Comment vote idea:
often people don't up-/downvote a comment because they only partly (dis)agree. It would be nice to show partial (dis)agreement by up-/downvoting a half point.


http://www.videosift.com/talk/VideoSift-32-Roundtable-thread#comment-426350

I think that's just over-complicating things. If you don't agree with a post but don't feel you want to downvote it, then.....Don't vote at all.
Why bother adding a semi-vote when not voting seems to accomplish the same thing?


Well, it does not accomplish the same thing because without voting there's no quantitative analysis of its content. A lot of commenters don't reply in a new comment to clarify why they up-/downvoted or abstained from voting. A half up-/downvote would be less absolute.
It often happens to me I read a post where I partly disagree with that I commend nevertheless, a 1/2 upvote would value the comment in question and contribute to determining what the community values (quantitatively)...a full +1 upvote would be not fully satisfactory in this case as it would appear to some degree that I fully agree with the content of the comment.
A small (1/2) and big (1) up- and downarrow is not so confusing I think.

Arsenault wrote: Hide the users name who submitted the video while its in the queue. (except probies) That way we are 95% guaranteed that videos get votes based on the content, not the Sifter. THERE. You may all thank me now for solving this problem.

Agreed, but I extend the discussion further...
I think it would be valuable to hide who posts a video and who upvotes or downvotes. Maybe we can from someone's profile what videos they put up, but that would make it damn difficult for someone to grind an axe against someone back if they have to try to figure out any type of pattern in their indiscriminate votes.

From what I've seen from this thread, I strongly agree with three things.

-Quicker commenting
-Non-visible usernames in Unsifted queue (to prevent favoritism)
-Improvement upon the thumbnails system.

Also the site does need some tidying up to not make it so busy on every page, but I personally don't have any suggestions for that.

As an aesthetic improvement which won't really increase functionality, color themes which are implemented site-wide would also be pretty nice. Just because I get tired of the blues. I'm sure everyone else agrees, sometimes you need a little change to spice things up.

^
^
^
I'm not sure about the idea of hiding usernames in the unsifted. I think this would inconvenience the average user and won't stop the kind of things you are trying to stop with it.

The username can give a pretty good indication of whether or not you might like the video.

^Really?
But it shouldn't - the merits of the video should be based on the video, not the user!

I agree with arsenault's no name in queue shpeal.

^
Yes, whether or not you vote for a video should be based on the video's merits...

However, whether or not you view a video in the first place cannot be based on that.

**
Some things to consider:

Is it a fairer system if we only judge whether to view the video based on how eye catching the title is? (If your answer is 'Yes', my next question is "How drunk are you?")

Are you planning to force everyone to watch every single video? (If "Yes", then when did mental patients start getting free internet?.. You have lost your grip on reality)


Try to think of the poster's name as just another tag to aid filtering. It's the same as reading the tags or title. Hiding it would be silly.

^ I thought the above comment was silly (and perhaps written while under the influence), and I was about to write a lengthy retort -
but then I saw that it was written by Debacle and thought perhaps others were used to his comments, and opted instead to write ironic drabble.

> you remember Brian, yeah he's a PORN LORD now dude

Hmm I just saw that Dag has "bush" in his favorite tags....

RE: Sharing tools

I notice that users can submit the video to Stumble Upon

Other sharing sites should be considered, and maybe lump in "Email" into a drop down of Sharing options - (I really like how they do it at the TechDirt website) and add other sharing sites as more can be integrated.

RE: "more inside"
Also, I'm sure this was intended at first, but I'll reiterate that the "more inside" cut off message when descriptions are too long should be css:show and show users right there "more" when clicked without having to take the user to a separate window.

RE: Leaving a comment
And I support being able to leave a comment right there under the video in the listing view, instead of having to go to the video link.