With oohahh flirting with the 100 mark (you'll be back shortly!), I have no idea how to declare the total # of 100-star users we have.



But joemawlma is one of them, thanks to a stupid reporter and the graphics department at his TV station.



Here are some of my favourites. (And now I know how not to get arrested.)



Honorable mention to one of the most frequent dupes I seem to find - dirty JLo.



Welcome to the club - your secret handshake manual is in the mail.

Rickegee has also moved into the 100 club. It's getting crowded fast. Rickegee, or just Rick as I know him is my brother in-law. He had a penchant for video sites prior to coming here, and has adapted well to VideoSift. Rather selfishly I suppose I plan on exploiting this as conversation fodder when the holidays draw closer.


Here are some of my favorites.


Thanks for everything.

Oohahh is now part of that super sexy oh so exclusive group of sifters with 100 or more videos posted. Welcome to the club.


I had the chance to meet Oohahh and his most excellent lady friend SwinginPagan out in Portland a couple of weeks back. In what will hopefully be the first of many SiftUps. Yeah I just coined that, anyway they showed me an excellent time and I can without a doubt say that we are fortunate to have him as a member of our community.


These are a couple of my favorite videos he's posted, I'm sure you can find some more.

Link 1

Link 2

Link 3

Link 4

Link 5

Link 6

Link 7

Link 8



Notice a pattern within these links? Well yes, they are all my uploads, but can you find the other pattern?



It seems that I have a parasite attached to me that constantly find my videos and desires to downvote them. This occurrance isnt happening in any of his other votes -- it seems that he is targetting me alone.



Whats the call for this DeathCow? Why does it seem you want to take away many of my hard earned votes? Did I offend you and this is your revenge?

I was wondering if it would easily be possible to add the top 2/3 comments if there are any to the video queue listing, perhaps on the side of the video where there is space?

It's not vital or anything i realise, but it is nice to be able to read atleast the first persons comments before making a judgement on whether to watch a vid or not.

I've made a small sample of what i was imagining to help visualise it. Here

Thoughts? Hate mail?

Be able to download your favorite videos on Videosift using the Mozilla Extension, VideoDownloader

I think we need a bit of a breather. Instances of astroturfing, multiple account users and self-links seem to be increasing at a rate we are not happy with, so we're closing the gate.

We have some ideas about a better way to introduce new members to VS and maintain the high quality level of posts. We'll bring this up in a blog post soon. In the meantime, everyone take a deep breath - and allow me to thank you 4,000 odd Sifters (yes odd) for coalescing into the bestest new online community around.

Hey dag or james what kind of videos would Isend to the siftoff?

Dag or someone, would you fix a typo I did in the Siftoff? I spelled literally wrong. LOL! Thanks!

After a recent flurry of posts either sent to the Siftoff or simply discarded, and the comments that I've read from the submitters of those videos, I realized something.



Despite sounding obvious to old-timers - those people who seem to stay up all night sifting, months on end - many new users don't understand what the term "self-link" means.



So I'm going to clarify that right now.



A self-link is any video that where:


1. you posted it to Google Video, You Tube, or any one of our other hosts,


2. you were operating the video camera,


3. you were involved in editing/compiling the footage,


4. you acted or performed in the video,


5. anything else happened which, in spirit, means that you're the creator of the content.



In a nutshell, "to self-link" means to post a video which is in some way 'yours'.



And "You" refers to both yourself and the person you share your videosift account with, in the case of couples or groups who sift together. Yes, I know of at least two such accounts.



I hope this clears things up - this'll probably end up migrating to the official posting guidelines document, but until then you can refer to this posting and treat it as a fair interpretation of Videosift rules.



I think that covers everything but if I missed anything I'm sure another wonderful Sifter will share points of clarification in the comments linked to this post. And as always, you're also welcome to ask questions if you need to clarify anything



As a an additional reminder, this is directed mainly at new visitors strolling in, you are also not allowed to create multiple accounts - only one account per person is allowed. This rule is strictly enforced for what I hope are obvious reasons.
<h4>Why have this rule in the first place?</h4>
In case you're wondering why we have these rules, they're to avoid self-promotion. If someone else likes your vid, then they post it. It's like a "first round" of sifting before we even get to the actual voting process.



By posting your own content, you're essentially skipping that step, since it stands to reason that you'll enjoy your own creation. It's also a control against deliberate viral marketing or astroturfing, which the community generally does not support.



Finally, don't forget that the Siftoff is running and you're more than welcome to enter your submission there.



Thanks for coming to videosift and enjoy your stay. As per the posting guidelines, if the Siftoff is not running, contact the admins and let them know about your video.

flapjax at MeFi just pointed us to this truly brilliant site full of instructional videos (see: metafilter). Yes, they do have embedded links code. Can we please, please, please have VideoJug added to our list of sites? PLEEEEEEASE? *bats hopeful puppy dog eyes*

Now that the queue is down to a svelte sub-100 number, we're raising the submission limit to 4 videos per member. Yay!

http://www.slate.com/id/2148214/fr/rss/

"The show's stock in trade was to find the lowest common denominator and then hit it in the crotch. Consider this list of select highlights from the show's 'Best of Kids & Animals' DVD: a kid doing a cannonball onto his dad's groin, a baby running into a church pew, a dog peeing on a wedding dress, and a kid clocking his dad in the nuts with a helmet. While these clips are all certainly lowbrow, they've also got something else in common: They're oozing with family values."

I commented VideoSift on slashdot's story: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/08/27/1757214 ...

Currently holding the positions 1, 2 and 3 in the top 15. Most impressive.

How often are we/you/the system purging dead links? It seems to me the youtube links are mortal. I know there was at least one big purge of dead 'uns... has that become a regular event?
My precious Colbert/cocaine vid, http://www.videosift.com/story.php?id=6372, has bit the dust. That means I should anticipate those points being deducted from my total, correct?

One of the things I like about YouTube is the ability to save video clips I like. Is there a way to save vids (0r links to the vids) in a My Favorites section so we can go back and enjoy them without having to remember the name of the link? This is a suggestion that I would like some feedback on please.

(PS ~ Sorry if this has already been asked)

After the huge success surrounding the downvote philosophy conversation, I'd like to raise another topic that, ironically enough, hasn't seem to have generated much of a pure discussion or analysis: comments themselves.



When do you feel compelled to write a comment? Whenever a video amuses you? Angers you? As a tactic to increase traffic to a video in the hopes of increasing its votes? Or to just give credit for the source of the video?



Or do you write in response to someone's rants? Along with many others, I've been a big proponent of encouraging people to keep their debate at the Sift civil; through a combination of cool heads and mutual respect, as well as the generally high intelligence of the user community here, VS has been remarkably successful in that regard, despite our penchant for heated debates about politics, religion, and other fun "not for the polite dinner table" issues. The level of discourse in an average comment thread here is like night and day compared to some of the inane chatter you get on the videos' original posting pages.



I've pushed my own views on this topic long enough - I'd like to know what other Sifters think: do you ever step back and think about the point of your comments and what their relationship is to the rest of your activity on the site? Are there any rules of thumb that you follow in your own postings?

Well after many discussions and rule adjustments, it looks like the queue is tamed – at least for now. Of course it is still a “work in progress.” I figured I had to use the title before someone else did . . . running, ducking, grinning . . .

The VideoSift FAQ states the following:


Negative voting is useful for when you find something that you really don't like. It's also helpful for us if you negative vote videos that don't belong here. This includes things that violate the posting guidelines (eg. self-links) and duplicate posts.




The question this leaves open is obvious: "At what point does a video deserve a downvote?" It seems that many users are divided on this subject.


Some believe that a down vote is purely as a rules state: a downvote should only be issued when a video is something deserving a discard or, more important to this debate, a video that is disliked by the voter.



Does this mean that the options of voting for a user should mostly consist of upvotes and downvotes, rather than upvotes and novotes? In one sense, we are all conditioned to either upvote or leave alone until we get our first star, at which point we have the ability to downvote. To many people this can be seen as something as a privilege, while others believe that it should become something commonplace and used often.



After presenting this, the question I leave to the community is, "What will the final consensus be on the topic of downvoting?" Should a downvote be reserved only for videos that are distasteful to VideoSift, or should a downvote be used whenever an upvote isn't?