To start off I'll say that the 4.0 upgrade was probably the best of the bunch, IMHO. Now that asses have been kissed, allow me to offer a few suggestions:

1. I still like my idea about country tags. That way there won't be a need to create more regional/ethnic channels, and we can more easily find videos from various countries.

2. Have a way to highlight the accomplishments of new sifters. Maybe make a panel that shows the Top 5, Top 10, or maybe Top 15 new sifters. To define "new" we could say it means anyone who has joined in the past 90 days. Put the panel either below the Top 15 Sifters of the Past Week, or in the rotating panels found in the upper right hand corner.

3. Implement a new way to raise the escape threshold for videos. Right now you're posting polls for it, and that means we'll probably never get above 10 votes no matter how many members we have. I described in detail what I meant by this a few months ago, so I won't create a wall of text by detailing it again. Something like this is long overdue, really.

4. Make new invocations: *channeltalk and *sifttalk. *Channeltalk would remove any Sift Talk post from the main page and place it in the Newest Channel Talk Posts on the side. *Sifttalk would do the reverse - move a channel talk post to the main page. Even though we've discussed this issue numerous times, people still keep putting non-Sift-related posts on the main page, so hopefully this would alleviate the problem. Make the invocation available for Ruby members or higher.

5. I mentioned this a long time ago, but I think it's worth mentioning again: Have Siftbot randomly promote an old video once a day. Let's define "old" as at least six months old, and let's also say that the video has to have a minimum of 30 (or maybe 40, or 50) votes to be eligible for random promotion.

6. From time to time, randomly erase all votes. This place needs a good shakeup every now and then.

^ I like 1,3, and 5...and I guess 2 is alright. 4 kinda seems like a natural evolution of the sift.

This isn't UI, but how about (depending on your finances) Top sifter of the week/month/lunar cycle gets a free Videosift T-Shirt?

Weekly themes are a possible idea. For instance, this week could be "Cold War Week" and all Cold War related videos sifted this week could get their own feature space on front page.

1. Add a function for either a non-vote (as opposed to up/down) or simply allow us to keep track of videos we've seen or already clicked on and those we haven't. They could change colour somehow like hyperlinks maybe.

2. Add a way to pop up videos in their own tiny window. i remember asking for this ages ago and it didnt happen but now that I see youtube has this i know i can't be the only one who thinks this is a good idea! Because what I at least tend to do, is if I'm watching a long sift such as a documentary, I'll put it on in the background, and do something else while it's playing. you can already kinda do this in chrome pretty easily by ripping the tab off and squeezing it into a small box and shoving it to the side of the screen, but if there was a simple button to create a neat popup, it'd be so much easier.

3. Add a small drop down menu on each video page, that gives you an option of all the obvious long/short/genres/blocked commands to be posted automatically. Leave it so you can still do it manually too and add some witty comment at the end of it of course. I just think not having such a simple option makes it seem a bit archaic.

A mobile version and an option that displays only YouTube videos.

3G networks are becoming accessible and a lot of people sport iPhones/Android devices. I check the Sift daily on my HTC Hero and it is a bit painful.

Use the blockquote tag to quote in comments rather than just italicizing. Wouldn't this comment be much easier to follow if it looked like this?

-Perhaps one of the rotating panels could be a random batch of older videos. Or KP's idea for a random promote for older videos. The way the site is designed now, there are so many great videos that essentially no one gets to see unless they're specifically searching for them, or unless a member promotes them. It would be nice if older videos could get highlighted somehow.

-I recall a while back that campion had come up with a system where, when someone invoked something, instead of a whole new comment, siftbot's response would be nested within the invoker's comment. That seemed like a much better/cleaner way to do things. I don't know if it's possible to implement that for the whole site, but it definitely seems like it would be an improvement.

Let's show how many times a video has been emailed.

Make the search function more easily sortable. I would like a drop-down menu after I have performed a simple search, where I can quickly reorder my search according to newest / oldest / most votes / etc. As it is now I first have to "go advanced with my query" and do the search again.

I think most of us can agree that the number of channels can be overwhelming, even to experienced sifters. I propose that we categorize some of them, if we can. I've tinkered a bit with it, but some categories are near impossible, because they are pretty subjective, but others like "time/period" or "area" are pretty general. Here are some of the stuff I've mulled with (sorry for the wall of text):

Uncategorized (for now)
Art - Books - Bravo - Catsanddogs - Comics - Conspiracy - Controversy - Cooking - Drugs - Eco - Fail - Howto - Law - Military - Money - Magic - Meme - Nature - Sports - Spacy - Timeshift - Terrible - Travel - Waronterror - Wheels - Wings

Emotional response:
Cute
Fear
Dark
Happy
Love
Wtf


People:
Femme
Geek
Gay
Humanitarian
Kids
Teens
Sexuality
Eia(?)

Movies and TV (scripted entertainment):
1sttube
Videogames
Woohoo
Scifi
Standup
Actionpack
Animation
Cinema
Grindhouse
Horrorshow
Latenight
Shortfilms
Parody
Mystery
Viral
Commercial
Comedy (may be too big for just the category)


Beliefs:
Cult
Islam
Lies
Religion
Politics

Areas:
Asia
British
Canada
Downunder


Music:
Music
Livemusic
Blues
Jazz
Rocknroll
Wildwestshow (among other things)
Hiphop
Metal
Obscure
Dance

Period/time:
80s
Vintage
Election08
Future

Mind expanding/education:
Brain
Documentaries
Engineering
History
Science
Talks
Worldaffairs
Philosophy
News (perhaps?)

Perhaps some sort of activity filter, that sorted out votes from users who have not been active in a long period of time (like not logged in for the last year or something) so that we could clean up the overall voting record and automatically avoid drive-by voters, who vote for one thing and then leave. Now, I don't want their votes to just be deleted, of course, just flagged "inactive", and then when the user logs back in, it can be activated again and count for the voting.

It's also possible to have this activity filter disabled for users over X threashold (silver star perhaps) so that people who have done a lot of good work still can "leave a legacy" of votes, that won't just be deleted. This plays into the idea of a meritocracy, that users should show that their votes have merit.

Comments are too hard to find for the site visitor, I fear they won't get a sense of our community, or will miss the great conversations. I would propose decoupling it with "bookmarks" and "playlists" in the little player frame, and making it easier for the uninitiated to find. Taking this a step further, it might even be fun if there was a way to place the video's top rated comment on the "outside" in multi-post mode.

An alternative to just raising the queue escape threshold, could be to do a feature I've been talking about for some time: tiered rewards. Instead of just giving out a star point at 10 votes, a video could give out more than that if it attained many more votes, but maybe with some diminishing returns. It would break the simple 1 video, 1 star point model we have now, but it might have some merit as the site grows. If, for instance, the maximum amount of star point that could be given out for a single videopost was 10, then there could be several thresholds: 10 votes(4 stars), 20 votes(3 stars), 50 votes(2 stars), 100 votes(1 star). This would reward popularity, but still give a good reward for the under-appreciated gems in the bunch. (This would of course upset the star levels that we have since they would have to be raised, but I think it would be worth it in the end.)

A similar thing could be done with comments - there's usually a quality difference between a comment with 15 votes and one with 40+, for instance, and it's a shame that this is not rewarded somehow.

PS. Sorry about the many posts in a row, I'm trying to isolate each idea, so there's a clearer image of which people like and don't like.

Display the video length in the description?

>> ^Ornthoron:
Make the search function more easily sortable. I would like a drop-down menu after I have performed a simple search, where I can quickly reorder my search according to newest / oldest / most votes / etc. As it is now I first have to "go advanced with my query" and do the search again.


I've mentioned this before and it's a good point. Wherever there's a listing of videos you should be able to filter and sort using easily accessible links. Sometimes it's good to quickly see the most recent videos matching a search to prevent you wasting time with a submission. Right now it's quicker to do the submission and get told it's a dupe.

>> ^xxovercastxx:
Use the blockquote tag to quote in comments rather than just italicizing. Wouldn't this comment be much easier to follow if it looked like this?


Nested quotes like that would be good, as long as they don't get too retardedly small. I will stress that nested commenting would be atrocious, though.

Can you guys put the "submit video" button somewhere we can always see it?

kthxbye

>> ^thegrimsleeper:
Can you guys put the "submit video" button somewhere we can always see it?
kthxbye


YES!

Would be fantastic if the submitter of a duped video got some sort of notification- happens to everyone from time-to-time, and speaking personally I've wasted much valuable sifting time to find out just what happened to some videos.

>> ^therealblankman:
Would be fantastic if the submitter of a duped video got some sort of notification- happens to everyone from time-to-time, and speaking personally I've wasted much valuable sifting time to find out just what happened to some videos.


Personally I get emails about that. I suppose a separate "siftbot messages" that only contained such things would be cool to have on the profile, so you could easily figure out about what had happened to your posts.

Dear Santa,

I think a little notifications system like you have on Facebook would be nice. It could tell you of new comments, dupes, discards, promotes, etc. I don't know how much overhead something like that would add to the site.

I'd also like a floating comment form that slides out the side or bottom of the browser. See the feedback form in this example video around the 25s mark for an example. It should be { position:fixed; } so that the rest of the content can be scrolled and the comment box stays in view. I like to refer to the video and other comments when writing my own and it's a pain having to scroll between them and the comment form.

I'd also like peace in the middle east, an end to suffering and a pony.

^I could end the suffering of a pony in the middle-east.. would that make you feel better?

Dag,

At the risk of repeating myself I want to let you know what a fun site you have in Videosift. I have spent more time over the last several years on the Sift than all of the other good sites on the web combined. I have attempted to partake in many aspects of this community, including t-shirts (got "Once I Was Stoned" a week ago!), developing friendships, seeking advice, offering council (no one listened), and offering a buck or two when I was able. It's been a great place to hang my hat, so I offer the following suggestions not based being disgruntled, but based on my overall satisfaction and with a desire to make the Sift an even better place for people to hang.

1. When a video is a dupe, and the *dupeof command is invoked, I would like to see the comments under the dupe be moved wholesale to the older video. While I have but few ideas on how to delineate them from the comments on the earlier vid, I'm confident that you guys could work it out.

2. Although I've mentioned this before, and received a partial answer, I think that the mechanism with which your program locates dupes during the submission process could use some tweaking. While it finds dupes once in a while, it does so with increasing irregularity as the number of videos increases here. It's a time burner and an incentive killer to Sift videos that already exist only to find that out hours or days later.

3. Create a 'Sandbox' where the cat-fighting can take place. There are an increasing number of personal arguments taking place in public on this site. I, for one, think they ought to remain private. Barring that discretion, would it be possible to consider sending these threads or even one-off posts to a section of the site specifically designated for spats? Diamonds and above could, with the click of a mouse, place the offending post, in a dark recess of the Sift accessible by all, but only intentionally. We have the power to hobble, how about the power to muffle?

4. Lastly, this is more of a question than a suggestion (possible suggestion to follow) if someone were to be known to be using the Sift to promote an agenda, say political or moral, for instance, and this is what they were being paid to do; promote agendas on the web. How do you think that ought to affect the status of their Sifts? In other words, say the Catholics find out that they are taking a beating here. So they pay one of their employees to post videos favorable to the church. That person has all day to do that; write positive posts, place church-friendly videos, etc. That is going to, after time, affect this place and the deciding factor is money.

I realize this discussion took place many moons ago over Fedquip, but I want to know if there is a policy regarding promoting an agenda here as a part of your job; using the Sift to reinforce a position while being paid for it.

Brian, thanks for listening. Take these for what they are: suggestions only. Whether they happen or not, I'll be in the background sifting away.

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

^Thanks silvercord. On your last point- covert paid shills are a threat on all community sites. We're protected from this a little by not being quite the size and therefore the easy targets of a Digg or Reddit. I know there have been cases on Digg of top users being paid substantial amounts for a front page post.

I sometimes wonder if notable Sifters have been approached for something like this ... Probably a topic for another post.

>> ^dag:
^Thanks silvercord. On your last point- covert paid shills are a threat on all community sites. We're protected from this a little by not being quite the size and therefore the easy targets of a Digg or Reddit. I know there have been cases on Digg of top users being paid substantial amounts for a front page post.
I sometimes wonder if notable Sifters have been approached for something like this ... Probably a topic for another post.


I was approached by a major multinational corporation...until they looked at my enormous PQ and realized I garner little to no respect here....

Good example of needing to sort videos. Throbbin mentioned the magic word PQ and I rush to check it out. Would be so nice to quickly sort by most votes and then I could see what's garnered the most attention.

One of the things I like most about this site (and the internet in general, for that matter) is that it's international.

Sometimes a person's place of residence is valuable to frame their comments. During my time as campioni's little helper around the 4.0 upgrade, I proposed the following idea to him for 4.1:

Country flag icons

Boom... 247 little flag icons, totally free to use for any purpose.

I've proposed two possible locations for them as shown in that image. Note that I'm proposing one or the other, the image just shows both together.

Originally I figured right next to the username and P/star/gem/crown icon was the logical place for them. campioni thought it would get crowded. I don't share that opinion but nonetheless I proposed the other option. There's dead space under avatars anyway.

I think campioni is of the opinion that it be only on the profile page, but I like the idea of having it right there on the comment. Like I said above, sometimes a person's place of residence puts their comments in a different perspective. I think it's nice to see where they're from right then and there rather than having to go check.

Please make VS black the DEFAULT UI appeareance for the site when a new user comes to it.

VS White looks fucking ugly.

Some small issues I mentioned earlier:
-make channel order alphabetical, per letter, from left to right.
-the small inverted v that is used to indicate that "recently posted" is selected when selecting sift talk in the menu is rather small..
-URLs with _ and other special characters (often the case with wikipedia links) are not properly displayed in comments/video descriptions.
-some trouble with the (un)ignore toggle (users ignored I did not want to ignore and can't unignore) and bookmarking videos (videos/sifttalks bookmarked without having bookmarked them) (may not be a sift wide issue)

Very minor, but I'd like to see the number of * amazon invocations I've made in my profile. And maybe a little reward for diligent work, though that might lead to amazon spamming.