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...

Damn - another rare vid I've missed for days...