I wasn't suggesting going to war with 22's-I was merely pointing-out the efficacy of an inexpensive, readily available all-purpose round that will never go out of style for small game hunting should the grocery trucks ever stop rolling....

My suggestion for preparation for the coming invasion-occupation??

To parents of newborns:Teach them Mandarin, it will serve them well as the new world unfolds-Oh, and definitely do what albrite30 suggested and purchase real estate: It's what every able-bodied, bouncing, banking Chinese national is doing with their worthless paper....China owns us, and they work on a 1000-yr-plan, unlike the United States, with our "see how this goes" 250-yr experiment.

So what of it @shinyblurry? What does god's perfect, unchanging, gold standard of a moral law have to say about slaughtering toddlers?

Is it written on our hearts that it always is a bad thing, or are there certain allowances made for when those evil little tykes become some sort of threat to God's sovereignty over a patch of Mediterranean coastal real estate?

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

That's a good and interesting point. Maybe an extinction event is like a real estate bubble - it's hard to tell when you're inside one.

Going with no, purely because most blog posts or frontpaged items take up a significant amount of real estate and push the videos down a fair bit, and I just want my videos.

However, if they were say single text line items within a thin box, I think that might be okay. Simply text like:

"Current Poll: Would you like to see more articles on the front page?"

or

"Blog Post: The History of Videosift Part I"

that could work I think. Very minimal, but draw attention.

So here's my *rough* mockup of something that I think could work...

http://i.imgur.com/85T5i.jpg

Mini-thumbnails would be displayed for all currently active promotes (upto the sensible limit of 10). Clicking on the mini-thumbnails would make the area above swap to that video's larger thumb and details, and as you can see there is a 'tab' to highlight which mini-thumb you currently have selected.

Maybe the 'tab' could automatically cycle through the promoted videos until the user interacts with it?

The mini-thumb bar could not appear at all if only 1 video is currently promoted.

Maybe the other 9 unselected mini-thumbs could be darker to help highlight the selected one? (bit of javascript magic maybe, I dunno?)

Maybe hovering over a mini-thumb will instantly make it selected and the larger top part change to it, so you could scroll through them by simply hovering your mouse over them?

Maybe hovering over a mini-thumb, could bring up a small mouse-tip that has the title of the video...

Anyway, just ideas, and another possible implementation to discuss. The key to this one is that promoted videos are all visible... no wasted power points. And also, a fixed amount of real estate dedicated to promoted videos.

I agree with @eric3579, in that hiding promoted items in a drop down menu would kill the promote system.

I also agree with @dag in that it's important to not overload random visitors with the promoted sifts of a few.

I liked the old promote system, but I also hated it. I liked it when there were just one or two active promotes (better exposure), but hated it when it went to 9-10 promotes (your video got lost amongst the others AND the promoted videos then took up a huge amount of the front page = ugh).

What needs to remain is the exposure of a promoted video (to some degree), the value of spending that power point (i.e. not being "wasted" if three other videos are promoted straight after), and that it remains attractive to want to promote stuff to spend your power points (rather than hoard them).

The issue I have with both new systems is that they can hide your promoted videos and therefore don't represent good value for your power point.

I have an idea for a way to present promoted videos that I'll try and mock up in photoshop tonight. It should take up less real estate than the new version, while also keeping some exposure for all the currently active promotes. Hopefully it'll provide another direction to discuss at the very least...

I don't mind exercising a little patience and waiting for a poll to expire before posting my own. I've done it before. I survived. I even like it -- focuses my attention.

Besides, it isn't as if there is ALWAYS a poll going -- it isn't hot real estate, so to speak.

For the record, I was fine with Albrite's joke poll. I didn't participate because I didn't "get" it -- but s/he is a Sifter. S/he can make a poll about whatever s/he wants. I thought s/he was harshed on out of proportion to any perceived "offense." For the record.

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

OK we have been pretty loose on these- what I would describe as "novelty polls" but it hunk the novelty is gone. Especially when there are a lot of pressing matters we're dealing with that could use this real estate in Sift Talk. In the future, please keep it Sift related, and it least have it make grammatical sense. *discard

Doens't make much of a difference to me personally. The reason why I rarely visit this site anymore is the lack of editorial content. Right now one of the prime spots (promoted videos) of this site is occupied by a video with 4 votes (desc in all caps btw, very nice).

I mean sure it's nice to give some individual the opportunity to promote a video of his/her choosing to the most valuable real estate of this website, but to what end? I feel theres really a lack of quality control here.

Questions:
Why are all the video thumbnails such bad quality?
I'm looking at them and they are fuzzy, blurry and almost look like they have a screen filter on them. It is possible that the thumbnail process is compressing the images too much creating extensive compression artifact but I don't think that's it. To me they all look like what you would get if you filmed your TV screen with a low resolution video camera and then made a JPG out of it. Just plain ol' low quality.

Why are the comment text boxes so small?
Text boxes, like the one I am typing in right now show about six lines of text. I assume it's to give that sleek/slim look to the page and not take up so much vertical real estate on the page. Sometimes slimmer isn't better. I have to constantly stop and scroll up and down just to read my one paragraph as I'm typing to make sure my sentences make sense. Never mind actually trying to see more of what I've written. It's not quite like reading a book through a pin-hole but it does feel awfully claustrophobic. - Oh hold on... There's a corner I can pull and make the text box window larger - nice. You still may or may not want to set the default box size to text lines of text, at least.

>> ^renatojj:

That's how the media, left and right, treated him for the entirety of his campaign. Any respect and coverage he got was inversely proportional to his perceived chance of winning.


...And so it goes, each election more absurd than the next until who knows? Maybe some new, "New Deal" after all the cocka-roaches are gone, calling up the depressed Roosevelt-styley to help rebuild the infrastructure? I for one, hope it includes a beautification of the entire United States in the form of razing every strip-center and billboard for starters.
This includes my first act in office, criminalizing inherently evil entities too big for their britches like Walmart and Monsanto, and razing THEIR improvements on real estate assets while demanding the offspring of their CEO's to walk naked with sandwich board signs on a remote mangrove swamp with mock city streets resembling their home-towns, filled with CCTV cameras with a live feed for folks around the world to deride them for all eternity, amen.

What a couplea Kochs!

All for publicizing the horror of programming that public education in America has been molded into and nurtured with tweaks over the decades. All for more and more private schools with academics above all else as core values.....fat chance.

Public schools in the U.S.rest on the real-estate of agenda and part of that seems to crank out more and more functionless imbeciles every year.

Go check out some of Charlotte Iserbyt's ramblings.....I'd trust her before I'd trust my own take on the state of education in the United States.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlotte_Thomson_

that is what the lounge is for. >> ^ant:

>> ^lurgee:
I love you man! >> ^siftbot:
I just want to be loved.


Get a room, you two!

I love you man! >> ^siftbot:

I just want to be loved.