Quality is vastly more effective. It lasts longer, and looks natural, even for older vids.

Hmm, that sounds dangerously close to a spam e-mail for some reason.

I don't know let's find out...

*quality

*promote

Only published, queued, or discarded videos, published Sift Talk posts, and published blog posts may be promoted - ignoring promote request by rottenseed.

k, now let's see what works best

Well, at least for polls, they're rubbish

There needs to be no debate - generally, a Quality yields far more votes than a Promote does. But it's a lot more ineffective when used on unsifted videos, especially ones that only have some 2-5 votes at the time.

That said, there was also this one time when notarobot *qualitied a PQueued post of mine which had 9 votes and it didn't get a single one for a week after that. I'm thinking Siftbot glitched and it simply didn't get sent to the 1st page, but lucky hasn't gotten back to me on that one.

Any time someone * qualities a video of mine it receives far more votes than one that is simply promoted. The ability to * quality in my mind has been reserved for videos I actually want to get votes where * promotes seem almost like they've been bumped down to * begging status.

If you take a very old video, a quality is much better too. It sends it to the frontpage for a while, and the faster it gets votes, the more it will stay there.

Promote has a limited time (a few hours?) and then it sinks back into obscurity, unless it's brand new in which case it might be found in the top 30.

quality is far more effective. Kronos qualitied this post when it had 103 votes. Now it has 180. With a promote it would maybe have gotten a maximum of 20 more votes.

There's also a phenomenon that is related to the quality invocation, imo.

Before it was introduced, unsifted videos had a much better chance of getting to the top 3 pages of the front. Now I've had several videos stay at 50 views for the entire duration, and not visible anywhere on the front, and only on page 4-5 on the unsifted list.

I don't presume to understand the inner workings of siftbot, but it does seem that unless a video is either voted up very quickly (5+ votes within the first 2-3 hours) or qualitied, it'll fade into obscurity. Unless I'm wrong about the number of sifters who actually prowl the back pages of the unsifted list.

I think *quality actually works too well for videos that have already been sifted. I've seen *qualitied videos spend as much as 4 days on the front page, which to me is too long. Like the example rasch gave, he got another 77 votes because it sat on the front page so long. I'm not saying his video didn't deserve it. Hell, I'm the one who *qualitied it. But I wish it had spent less time on the front page so that other new videos had a better shot at glory.

In other words, I think the *quality invocation needs to be tweaked. It needs to do more for more unsifted videos, and a lot less for sifted videos, IMHO.

How does quality work exactly?

As far as I understand quality, it give the video's "hotness" a boost, which means it will get to the frontpage immediately, then it lingers depending on how many votes it gets - obviously, if many people vote for it, it will increase its hotness "naturally" causing it to stay for a long time.

I voted promote...probably because I've never thought to quality anything before.

Voting for this poll ended with the majority of users voting *Quality.