Yeah, that wasn't really directed at you, but more at the whole "give us an objective review" cry that's been going around.

For the record, my two favourite gaming sites are bluesnews (that's how I found the sift in the first place) and rockpapershotgun, for different reasons obviously.

The reason I like blues and the issue I have with news in video format is time. I can read a days page of news on blues in well under a minute, spawning tabs of interest as I go.

Your video is 6:25 long.
First up is the BAFTA awards: it's a fairly dry list with no commentary on it. If I want that information, a link to http://awards.bafta.org/award/2015/games is a much more succinct way of presenting it.

Then some news about Hawken: cool! Hawken is awesome and I've been hoping to hear more about it.

Elder Scrolls: don't care.
Nintendo licensing agreement: don't care
Nintendo's next console: don't care

Steam refund policy change: Interesting.
Kojima to leave Konami: interesting.

The point is not what I care about or don't care about, that's going to be different for everyone. The point is I have to fast forward to the news I'm interested in and as presented, it's an inherently bad format for that.

Maybe instead of one long video have a series of shorter videos linked via annotations? Or even timecodes in the description. That way, we can jump to the stories we're interested in.

HTH

I'm not liking the way the enemies appear to be just flying around in formation on a pre-determined course. This seems like a mock-up rather than actual gameplay though, so hopefully it won't be like that when it's done.

MASSIVE LONG POST WARNING: feel free to skip this

I usually like Vsauce a lot, but I disagree with just about every assumption and every conclusion he makes in this video.

Anthropogenic vs external extinction event -
I think the likelihood of an anthropogenic extinction event is low. Even in the cold war, at the apex of "mutually assured destruction" risk, IF that destruction was triggered I think it would have been extremely unlikely to make humans go extinct. The US and USSR might have nuked each other to near-extinction, but even with fairly mobile nuclear fallout / nuclear winter, etc. I think that enough humans would have remained in other areas to remain a viable population.

Even if ONE single person had access to every single nuclear weapon in existence, and they went nuts and tried to use them ALL with the goal of killing every single human being on the planet, I still bet there would be enough pockets of survivors in remote areas to prevent humans from going utterly extinct.

Sure, an anthropogenic event could be devastating -- catastrophic even -- to human life. But I think humanity could recover even from an event with an associated human death rate of 95% or more -- and I think the likelihood of anything like that is real slim.

So that leaves natural or external extinction events. The KT extinction (end of the dinosaurs) is the most recent major event, and it happened 65 million years ago. Homo sapiens have been around 150-200,000 years, and as a species we've been through some fairly extreme climatic changes. For example, humans survived the last ice age around 10-20,000 years ago -- so even without technology, tools, buildings, etc. we managed to survive a climate shift that extreme. Mammals survived the KT extinction, quite possible that we could have too -- especially if we were to face it with access to modern technology/tools/knowledge/etc.

So I think it would probably take something even more extreme than the asteroid responsible for KT to utterly wipe us out. Events like that are temporally rare enough that I don't think we need to lose any sleep over them. And again, it would take something massive to wipe out more than 95% of the human population. We're spread out, we live in pretty high numbers on basically every landmass on earth (perhaps minus Antarctica), we're adapted to many many different environments ... pretty hard to kill us off entirely.


"Humans are too smart to go extinct" @1:17 -
I think we're too dumb to go extinct. Or at least too lazy. The biggest threats we face are anthropogenic, but even the most driven and intentionally malevolent human or group of humans would have a hard time hunting down *everybody, everywhere*.


Doomsday argument -
I must admit that I don't really understand this one. The guess of how many total humans there will be, EVER, seems extremely arbitrary. But anyway, I tend to think it might fall apart if you try to use it to make the same assertions about, say, bacterial life instead of human life. Some specific species of bacteria have been around for way way longer than humans, and in numbers that dwarf human populations. So, the 100 billionth bacteria didn't end up needing to be worried about its "birth number", nor did the 100 trillionth.


Human extinction "soon" vs. "later" -
Most plausibly likely threats "soon" are anthropogenic. The further we push into "later", the more the balance swings towards external threats, I think. But we're talking about very small probabilities (in my opinion anyway) on either side of the scale. But I don't think that "human ingenuity will always stay one step ahead of any extinction event thrown at it" (@4:54). Increased human ingenuity is directly correlated with increased likelihood of anthropogenic extinction, so that's pretty much the opposite. For external extinction events, I think it is actually fairly hard to imagine some external scenario or event that could have wiped out humans 100, 20, 5, 2, or 1 thousand years ago that wouldn't wipe us out today even with our advances and ingenuity. And anything really bad enough to wipe us out is not going to wait for us to be ready for it...


Fermi paradox -
This is the most reasonable bit of the whole video, but it doesn't present the most common / best response. Other stars, galaxies, etc. are really far away. The Milky Way galaxy is 100,000+ light years across. The nearest other galaxy (Andromeda) is 2.2 million light years away. A living being (or descendents of living beings) coming to us either of those distances would have to survive as long as the entire history of human life, all while moving at near the speed of light, and have set out headed straight for us from the get-go all those millions and millions of years ago. So lack of other visitors is not surprising at all.

Evidence of other life would be far more likely to find, but even that would have to be in a form we could understand. Human radio signals heading out into space are less than 100 years old. Anything sentient and actively looking for us, even within the cosmically *tiny* radius of 100 light years, would have to have to evolved in such a way that they also use radio; otherwise the clearest evidence of US living here on Earth would be undetectable to them. Just because that's what we're looking for, doesn't mean that other intelligent beings would take the same approach.

Add all that up, and I don't think that the Fermi paradox is much cause for alarm. Maybe there are/have been LOTS of intelligent life forms out there, but they have been sending out beacons in formats we don't recognize, or they are simply too far away for those beacons to have reached us yet.


OK, I think I'm done. Clearly I found the video interesting, to post that long of a rambling response... But I was disappointed in it compared to usual Vsauce stuff. Still, upvote for the thoughts provoked and potential discussion, even though I disagree with most of the content and conclusions.

Perfect format for watching on my phone. I've never understood the hate.

Beta Opt In right of the video title in the old format.

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?

Ooooooh fancy.

The What to Post sub-tab (?) doesn't work for me, and when I click the FAQ sub-tab, I can't seem to click back to anything else on About.

I like the format though. Think it makes videos more widely shareable.

Are you wanting to do away with channels? If not then if people can't see what channels are allocated to a submission they won't go looking very hard to verify if it's potentially missing from one.

Also, with the new format I can't see where to bookmark a submission anymore

(Sidenote: not meaning to sound negative with any of these, it's just mentioned some of it may have been accidentally overlooked, and it never hurts to ask )

Not my cup of tea. I liked the old format way more. Also, I can no longer see if I have voted on a comment or not/it's no longer bold if I have voted. I'll miss that.
Can someone tell me how to opt out? I don't see it. I wanna stick with the older version if I can.
I'll also miss the videos on the side and at the bottom. I often used those lists to find other videos I wanted to see. Now that's ALL gone.

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

I'm kind of neutral on this. I do use RES on Reddit and Alien Blue, and I kind of like the way images are reduced to thumbnails in comments, and you can expand or not if you like.

From a community culture standpoint, I think what we'd see is just heaps of memes from Imgr, that - although I enjoy, don't add a tremendous amount to discussions.

Beyond that, there's the technical requirements, acceptable formats, do we allow gifs? size constraints, host constraints. Lucky could talk more to that.

It could be. Wind resistance is why geese fly in formation. They take turns being the lead so the entire flock benefits.

Video is auto playing on the front page(due to large thumbnail format while being promoted). Changing to yt embed for this reason *backup=[...snipped...]

Everyone made this out to be a big deal but at least with my uni you could almost always find it available in the library reverse and grab it a few weeks out before the semester started.

Also, most of the big name textbooks can be found in convenient PDF format for a ... very low price, if you are willing to look.

I wouldn't particularly call this "spectacularly violent". If you show just about any cumulus congestus cloud formation as it moves into cumulonimbus formation in timelapse, it looks like a whole lot of shit going on well before there's any rain or lightning.

Here's a random example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCD0ZF6Cmw0