Giving the unregistered lurkers a vote!
So I'm thinking about all the unregistered lurkers we have and I wonder what would happen if they could vote! You are probably thinking "wtf grspec! have you gone insane?" possibly but hear me out on this.
Showing lurker votes would be kind of cool becuase you could see how the video fairs in lurker land vs the votes it received from sifters. These votes would have no effect on a video getting out of the queue but would serve as another statistic for the video. If you wanted you could even show a top 15 lurker videos.
You might be thinking "why then would the lurker sign up if he can vote!" What I would propose is to give each lurker only 5 votes or 10 per day. That why they can get a taste for voting without becoming a member, I think this might possibly increase their chances of signing up to receive the rest of the fine features available to members.
Showing lurker votes would be kind of cool becuase you could see how the video fairs in lurker land vs the votes it received from sifters. These votes would have no effect on a video getting out of the queue but would serve as another statistic for the video. If you wanted you could even show a top 15 lurker videos.
You might be thinking "why then would the lurker sign up if he can vote!" What I would propose is to give each lurker only 5 votes or 10 per day. That why they can get a taste for voting without becoming a member, I think this might possibly increase their chances of signing up to receive the rest of the fine features available to members.
13 Comments
eric3579I like it.
dagComment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)
So you mean unregistered lurkers? It's cool idea, vote-rigging might be a bit harder to detect.
ravenmaybe, in theory it seems interesting... but I think it might just complicate things and/or deter people from signing up for a real membership... it kind of takes away that initial phase-one stage that compels people to go through the formality of becoming a registered user... I mean, that's the only reason I signed up, just to vote on a few things I cared about, to feel like I had a say. I never intended to sift anything, but then, once I had the vote privilege and that had been fun for a while, then it was like, oh, but if I post a few videos and get a star then I can... and so on and so forth and now I'm a total addict.
so... I guess I think y'all should leave the system as is, people will get hooked either way.
grspecI see what your saying raven and I agree the goal is to get them to sign up but there are a lot that wont ever sign up just to vote. With what I propose you are giving them a taste of what they can have. There votes will merely be token and can't move a video out of the queue. It will also give a better feel for how many people are watching and voting on videos and hopefully sway them to sign up.
ravengood points there... it would be interesting to see what the lurkers think...
rembarGiving them a taste of the real stuff, then taking it all away to get them to do what you want? Hmmm, now where have we heard that one before? ....*quality, in an unscrupulous kind of way.
siftbotGold Star member rembar has awarded grspec one published post for this quality Sift Talk contribution.
karaidlSounds good to me. Dag might have a point on vote-rigging though. How about if they try to vote for the sixth time, a little bubble pops up and says they can only do that if they sign up?
J-Rova says...I second raven's comment; additionally, it really doesn't take much time at all to sign up. It's so easy, in fact, that I still consider myself a lurker, even with a membership, for two reasons: A) I got the freebie membership, and B) because I'm way more interested in watching videos than posting them. It's hard to post stuff from abroad when VideoSift is the only video site I find all-around worthy of poking around randomly, thanks to the minimal chance of finding absolute garbage and feeling like I wasted x minutes of my life.
joedirtBrilliant!!!
Dag, this would be a great concept (and help with stats on pageviews of viewers vs. registered members). Non-logged in should be able to vote up (only?) and one logged per IP address. This could be combined with regular votes for some type of total score. To prevent being gamed by YouTubers..
total votes = VS upvotes - VS downvotes + (anon votes)
where (anon votes)=[votes * scale factor] < VS upvotes so peg the most influence anon votes can have is to double the upvotes. In addition the scale factor would have to be adjusted depending on how many anon voters we get on average. There might also be noise level of random upvotes, so average videos get 10, but good videos get 500.
(I'm a big fan of providing non- registered site useability.. to not provide it is dumb, regardless of the 'simple signup' argument.)
grspecAnd that was what got me thinking about this in the first place jd, so many users but only a fraction of those we even see. They just show up and watch a video. It would be nice to utilize and leverage some stats from the non-logged in/non-registered user, which there appear to be a lot of. In the end I think you will get more registered users than not from it.
grspecand yes karaidl, when they try to vote more than the x amount of times they get a small window that says they need to register in order to vote more and also pimp the other fabulous features they get with becoming a VS user.
karaidlI have to say, I would be very curious if this would actually work. Because, in my thinking, most lurkers are probably just looking at the top 15 and maybe a few front page videos. Do you guys think that the top lurker videos would actually be different from the regular top 15? I'd be concerned that it would just be two lists with the exact same videos.
Not to be discouraging. By all means, I'd like to see this.
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