It's a bit of a false advertisement that the fonts upside down are not symmetrical in relation to when they are right side up. The small loops on the 8 are at the top before and after they flip it. This is a clear, yet subliminal "tell" to try to trick the viewer. If they really wanted to do this they would not have swapped the fonts when rotating.

Not at all from my read.
To me, it's like trademarking the word "news!", forcibly removing any videos labeled "news!", and insisting anyone that posts one pay them 1/2 the revenue they might make...and probably taking it too far and going after those making 'news' claiming they're also infringing and forcing them to pay or defend themselves in court.
It's not at all as specific as you claim.
I see the difference in your analogy, but I totally disagree with your characterization. It's far more like trademarking 'news!' than trademarking 'news filmed and broadcast from a window of a bathysphere sitting in your swimming pool'. If it were that specific, there would be no outrage.
If they didn't come up with it, it's not their idea...and 'humans react to' videos is NOT distinctive enough by far, IMO, and in the opinion of MOST people. If they actually limited it to videos with the exact format of people watching unseen videos at an angle, and the exact same title of "Kids React!" they're still over reaching to control something they did not invent and should not own. Kids reacting was a genre of video/photograph LONG before they started making them, and if the reaction is exciting, using an exclamation point is normal English, as is capitalization of all words in a title.

They have no right to 'protect' something they didn't invent by taking other people's money, first that's not protection, it's simple extortion, second, it's theft, since it's not even their idea in the first place.
They don't have to be the first, possibly, but they certainly shouldn't be able to trademark a common phrase that existed before their company, or a format that existed long before their company, which is what they did.
If they want to 'protect their brand', they need to re-name it something that's not already a common phrase, otherwise they're trying to co-opt a commonly used phrase (that they didn't come up with in the first place) and extort money from those who commonly use it under threat of lawsuit. They also need to steer FAR away from attempting to enforce it against ANY video not in their EXACT format, including font, capitalization, punctuation, stated video format, content, etc. It a video doesn't meet EVERY standard there, they should leave it alone. I'm fairly certain that's NOT their intent, as it would make it impossible for them to extort money and make this move useless.


EDIT: Can we at least agree that, if a company is going to do something like this that COULD be a huge over reach and could easily be abused to both extort money and remove any competition, and their spokes people do such a piss poor job of explaining what they're doing that it sounds like they're using the law to steal property and money from actual content creators and erase those they can't control, while creating absolutely nothing themselves, and offering nothing for the money they forcibly take, that that company deserves ALL the ridicule and losses that follow, and their best move left would be to drop the entire thing rather than continuing and making numerous failed attempts to explain themselves?

Reverse engineering the Linotron 202 fonts at Bell Labs has been added as a related post - related requested by oritteropo.

AT&T Archives: The UNIX Operating System has been added as a related post - related requested by oritteropo.

I was actually wondering if anyone else had heard of Brian Kernighan, Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson... this video is going to be more interesting to people with a comp sci background (or at least a Unix or linux background).

These are the guys from Bell Labs who used a spare minicomputer to write an operating system and a sort of word processor or computerised publishing system in the 70s, before you could just buy a word processor.

The system had some interesting features, like being more portable than was normal of operating systems before it (the subject of this video) and its habit of treating every file as a text file (previous operating systems tended to treat a text file as different to a database file as different to a video file for instance).

I'm sure there are videos around here somewhere that explain it.... I know computerphile had another interview about the typesetting part:

*related=http://videosift.com/video/Reverse-engineering-the-Linotron-202-fonts-at-Bell-Labs

I haven't watched this video on Unix, but it's very likely *related=http://videosift.com/video/AT-T-Archives-The-UNIX-Operating-System too.

I just tried it on my phone, and yes it seemed to work like in the video. There's a limited number of languages supported for the camera function, the text needs to be large and in a simple font, and some words seem to change often, like the app isn't sure of the translation.

Overall still pretty damn amazing!

Um, that is game changing if it is real and actually performs that well, which is why I don't buy it. I suppose it is just a combination of OCR and the Google translate engine with some fancy font and vector graphic effects, but in my experience those things are far from perfect on their own let alone in combination.

Still, damn. I would not be surprised at all if it sort of worked okay some of the time, which means in ten years it will work pretty damn well most all of the time. That will be tremendously useful. Well, not for me, I'm an American. It's everybody else's job to adjust their language for my convenience.

Best thumbnail ever. Guy absolutely looks like a cynical world-weary font of knowledge, kinda like a disillusioned House without a house.

Very articulate, and a victim of a single wrong-place-wrong-time mistake. I wonder what he would have been like now without that one world-changing drug charge.

And I wonder how many others in 'murica are like him.

Rumour is that MS's W10 browser will support Chrome extensions. Somehow.

I'm somewhat curious. I'm falling out of favour with Chrome, it gets bogged down and chuggs badly on mobile CPUs when you use font scaling. Also Google's application design is increasingly becoming restrictive and frustrating. Why is there no way to turn off auto-update? Why is the interface locked from modification and I'm forced to squint painfully at the address bar on my 1920x1080p 13 inch laptop?

Firefox has terrible font rendering and I haven't been able to improve it. I originally moved over from it because it seemed to have memory issues where over time videos would randomly freeze for like half a second during play intermittently, dunno if they fixed it.

Opera seems better in these regards but I can't for the life of me get used to browsing without alt + # for switching between tabs.

Meanwhile IE 11 handles font scaling well and memory wise seems fine, but also lacks basic extensions at the moment. If they fix this issue I may switch over at least on my laptop.

What's up with the extremely tiny font? I had to squint just to read what they were saying.

@lucky760 Thanks for the font change. When did you make the change btw?

So quick thoughts and obviously just my personal opinions.

<redacted my main point>
Due to font style/size change i hadn't noticed or was just recently done. Much nicer ty

Suggested videos i dont ever see myself using (just to random) although i have no clue if it would be used by non members(benefiting the sift in other ways) or other users.

Related videos are often not related well enough to be reasonably usable. I dont use them as I either click a tag that does a related search or hit up the search bar which works much better.

I don't think anything 'MUST be' in the side bar, but would rather have something useful then not. What i think would benefit the sift and sifters instead ill have to think about.

Also am i right in assuming these side bars are just for pages with individual videos on them? Not all pages? As of now different pages have different sidebars (front,unsifted,sifttalk,etc.). I assume all the other side bars would stay the same as they are currently?

I opted back in and did a "standard sift watching session" for me of a few videos.

This time I forced myself to actually look for things that I noticed weren't in the places that I was expecting.

Some more thoughts:

I tried to figure out where to see "who voted for this video", currently under the comment entry box. I can't find that information in beta UI. I must admit that the current location isn't particularly logical, but I know to look for it there and I can't find it at all in the beta.


The "sidebar" content changed from Sift of the Week / Comment of the Moment / Leaderboard List (of whatever section you are currently in; Top New Videos, Top Videos Expiring Soon, etc.) to Suggested Videos and Related Videos. I think the old sidebar content was more likely to be relevant to what I want.

I get that that stuff has been moved into the header menus, but in my opinion it is harder to access there:
For beta - mouse to Watch button/menu, hover, mouse to relevant section like Top New Videos, mouse to which one I want
Old - mouse to what I want in the sidebar, which is probably already visible but not taking up TOO much screen real estate, and if it isn't visible it is a quick mousewheel jump away

In the meantime, the new sidebar makes stuff that I personally don't care about at all BIGGER. I don't understand what/who suggests the "Suggested Videos" and by what criteria they are deemed to be of interest to me, and "Relevant Videos" are mostly relevant in a long-timescale sense (ie., stuff from a single video series, containing same/similar tags, etc.) where on the sift a big part of the appeal is to vote on what is hot NOW. But those two things take up more space than the old sidebar that was filled with stuff that I *did* care about; they are now big thumbnails with a title underneath plus lots of spacing between list items compared to small thumbnail with title *beside* and very minimal extra padding/spacing between list items. So, the new sidebar has stuff I don't want to see, and spaces it out so that I have to scroll the mousewheel a lot more to get through it (even though it has fewer total list items than before!).


A big part of my personal enjoyment and engagement with the sift is video comments. I'm not a big fan of the beta font for comments, but I think I could potentially get used to it. But more important than the font is that it seems like each comment gets less total screen real estate, and there is more padding/space between each comment AND the sidebar.

I'd like to see that spacing/pad cut down to more like the old style. Beyond that, I figure it is safe to assume that you're not interested in bringing the old sidebar content back (Sift of the Week / Comment of the Moment / Top X Videos) from its beta location in the menubar. Assuming that that will stay there, I'd *much* rather see comment boxes that take up the majority of the page width with NO sidebar. Old sidebar and old style comments would be my personal choice, but assuming that isn't going to happen, I just feel like the beta sidebar is unnecessary and massively oversized / overspaced.


So, I gave it another shot ... back to opting out for me for now.

Still prefer old font in comments over new font. Old is easier to read and more professional (imo).

Also i like the old larger comment boxes. So little text per line now
(18 lines is now 24). Maybe increase comment box size or make font size smaller. Maybe both.

Comparison made with this comment http://videosift.com/video/Last-Week-Tonight-with-John-Oliver-UK-Labour-Party#comment-1848099

For the frame below the video how about dividing it into like 4 cartesian style sections. The same as now, but making the entire frame a consistent size so the left and right side are the same height. The leftover space to the right of "submitted by ..." and the "... days ago" could be used for channel tags. You could let the video title stretch rightward further to prevent it clipping over to a new line (font size could be sized to avoid clipping based on video title maximum length).

Actually, I just noticed the video description as well. Perhaps apply the same philosophy of symmetry above but incorporate the video title somehow as well.

EDIT -

Okay how about a 3x2 frame. Those bottom top are now:

(left) video description, viewing: (list of names here)... [next line]
(right) voted up: ...., [next line] voted down: ....

Both left are right side are enforced to be the same size. The viewing, voted up and voted down are clickable items that will enlarge the list to include all names, pushing the frame beyond standard size length to show all names that apply to that list. Clicking again on them will reduce size of the frame back to standard. Similarly on the left size where, if the video description is too long, it is abridged with an 'expand' at the end.

I like the top menu (the level where the Videosift logo is), it's nice. Can I suggest moving everything up there rightward so it's left alligned with where the video frame begins?

Also I like how you centred the video (got rid of stuff to the side of it) and made it larger. The centred-ness goes well with my OCD

As an idea for the side bar where you currently have Suggested/Related - how about possibly canning Suggested? I feel like Top, Unsifted, 'others in channel' encapsulates it already. How about instead having the following in a browser style tabbed menu (that wouldn't reload page when you select between them):

(1) Top, (2) Unsifted (expiring + beg), (3) Related, (4) Channel (maybe a filter that you select from a drop down of all channel from most popular to least), (5) Top Comments. You could re-use the buttons style you made for the old format for selecting "light/dark" or "newest/upcoming" but larger which would be good for TV/HTPC users.

Also for consistency, how about making that side bar identical in style to the items under the "Watch" menu up top? Actually, maybe only similar, with the same style but larger font and wider like they are now?