Now I am not your father figure, so I'm not going to even attempt to exert excessive influence on the decision-making processes of my fellow sifters. However, I would like to use my newly-endowed diamond bully pulpit to exhort my silver-star and above colleagues to give every lower-ranking member, i.e., bronze star and below, just a little bit of your time by viewing their videos. I'm NOT asking you to auto-upvote everything in their queue; all I'm asking for is just a few minutes of your time every day by viewing their submissions. They deserve that much, and if for no other reason it's because they are the backbone of this little video haven we call home.

We all started off without a video to our names or a single vote upon which we could establish our reputations, therefore we relied on the kindness of strangers who took the time to peruse our submissions to garner the necessary votes to rise to the positions we hold today. Thus we owe it to the future generations of sifters to do the same. ANY community, real or virtual, will wither on the vine without an infusion of fresh blood (and if you've got a problem with my mixed metaphors then you can fellate me, please. And I mean it. PLEASE!) Seriously, how many of us would have cracked the Top 15 New Videos List without the support of members with "P" or bronze stars next to their screen names? My guess? Very few.

The reason I confine this specific request to silver stars and above is because once you have 25 star points or more you basically know what it takes to get a video sifted. You may not LIKE what it takes to achieve this, i.e., submitting LOLcat videos, Ron Paul videos, or using clever titles and/or tags (of which I assure you I am COMPLETELY innocent), but you basically know what it takes to rake in the votes if you decide to choose that path. Whether you choose to post videos that you think are cool or simply copy and past the links from Digg's top videos is your call after that. However that may not be the case with our lower-ranked members, who might simply be choosing videos based on how much they (GASP!) like them.

I'm only taking the time to write this because I believe it is important. Why? Because I remember when I was but a n00b there was a certain diamond member who took the time to rescue one of my videos from oblivion. It was swampgirl, and yes, she is the shiznit. She's taken many a n00b under her loving her arm (including yours truly) and ushered us into a bright, shiny future, full of precious metals and jewels.

And that, my friends, is the goal of this post. I'm not saying that every single n00b must become your pet project. All I'm asking is that you watch videos without prejudice, then cast your vote, and then maybe offer some helpful advice to the poster of the video if that person happens to be relatively new. Whether it's with helping them write better tags and titles or something as simple as telling them that they can vote for their own videos, it ALL adds up.

I was in the Navy, and therefore I went through bootcamp like every other recruit. It was tough, but I made it. Let's get our recruits out of bootcamp and on to becoming fruitful sifters. Anchors aweigh, bitchez!