dag, I was reading a slashdot story, and I've now been giving second thoughts to your new member queue. You might want to track/query 'users/newusers by month' and 'votes per month'... (also, just thought that videos submitted by month would also tell a neat story)

I'm afraid many people visit a site and then leave forever if they can't easily create an account and join in. Now I realize this isn't a forum, and some sucessful forums have bizarre new member requirements that lead to higher quality users.. But I'm wondering if someone just wants to join and vote on videos and make the occasional comment... the new member queue may be too much. Especially seeing how hard it is to find a good video, that won't be attacked for being a dupe, or ad.

I think you are correct in controlled stable growth, but maybe the new member queue can be for those who want to post videos, to filter out spammers, etc. Maybe non-video submitting users can have a 'P' that goes away after so many votes or activity time. Anyways, my point is just that there is really only like 5 new members per week now.

Anyways, seeing your number of comments, I suppose the site is doing quite well in terms of comments. And relatively little trouble in the way of comment-spam or needs-moderation. (I know, I know, awkward point between small community happy site, and exponential growth, huge bandwidth bill fark-type site)

Wumpus,

You are correct. It is "fair and balanced" and free of any "spin", just like FOX News.

In my opinion, the problem is not FOX News itself, but the climate that allows for a channel such as FOX. The problem isn't that FOX is right-leaning, or that any other channel is left-leaning. There are always political biases in media, that's the way it works, and that's the way it should work. It's a sharing of ideas, and since many issues have more than one possible view, a diverse media perspective is in order.

The problem is that the majority of the media is controlled by large corporations, and large corporations share common interests which don't necessarily reflect the interests of the people they're supposed to be serving. So whereas a horde of small, privately owned media outlets would provide a diverse perspective on most issues, encouraging meaningful debate and discourse, the range of views offered by corporate media is comparatively narrow. They tend to focus on issues of overall mild importance, but ones which get people fired up. Examples are abortion, terrorism and illegal immigration. When you compare these issues to ones such as the exponential growth of the national debt, political corruption, pressing environmental issues or anything else that poses a far greater threat to you or I than whether or not someone can get an abortion, they really aren't all that important. But they keep people watching, and they keep people preoccupied with bickering with eachother over issues that don't have a significant effect on the status quo for business and politics.

So, in my opinion, it's not what these giant media outlets are saying or doing, it's what they aren't saying and doing. At least we have the internet, for now.