I guess I should ad that the queue almost matches the front page (ie. tha majority of queue submission are collective submissions also)

So I'm not saying the queue is tons of videos and only the collective ones make it to front page.

But, it certainly is influencing the videos people are submitting. And I wonder how this will work with new members of non-collective folks. Maybe eventually Collectives will replace Channels and we will have Owners/Moderators of Channels/Collectives/Categories. Which could also work well.

But I wonder how this will work with a new member submitting an 80s video, and it can't be included in a collective... I dunno. Will all members be bulk invited so get as many as possible?

Maybe I should try that. Agressively invite new members maybe flood the site with YouTube Response videos.

By the way, maybe this starts to smooth out when we have more collectives. Currently, we should have 40-50 collectives (hypothetically) instead of 10-12.

I guess you'd better grab your good ones while you can before it becomes like a dot-com rush to domainnames. So see my previous post on categories to pick one out.

I believe also that collectives will lead to growing pains. However I also believe there is space for collectives creating specialized venues of video content. Besides the aformentioned horror flicks, athesim videos and such, I must say the other collectives are much more interesting in development.

However I do think there is a problem of creating blanket collectives such as the 80s and the Cute. Because as you said new poster could sumbit something that should really be in the collective.

I think over time the collective should become more specialized. The Arts collective ran by PM is going to be pretty radical and I like that it allows me to sift alot of artsy fartsy shit that otherwise would in all honesty die on the sift otherwise.

However I do not believe in adding as many members as possible to a collective. To me I see them as being personal venues of interest, that should have some definitive guidelines. Like PMs current Arts list directly goes against the Arts channel. But I know that the collective would probably have better content, or a more refined taste.

Each collective really needs to find it's niche and calling. The Horror show is pretty great, its niche but honestly the content will run out in a while. But Halloween will be far easier to celebrate on the Sift.

The power of the sift will still continue despite the collectives. No where have I seen a collective owner send out a mass call to promote or block a particular video...yes, there's a potential but there'd be a huge backlash. Most of us are members of most of the same collectives. Private profile comment politics? Sure, but I bet that's been going on long before the collectives began.

The collectives are a way to explore genres. Take today's surge of Horror movie trailers, they've always been out there, today we are just celebrating them. And you're right, I don't think I'd have ever posted Dirty Dancing: The Last Dance if I hadn't been prompted by membership to the '80s collective. Ultimately, it did make the front page so I'm glad I posted it after all.

I've tried to split my submissions up so that I don't only post Rock & Roll. I do bet that I'm not the only person who realizes that doing so would ultimately make my posts (me) boring and repetitive. God forbid.

Anyway, the elitist angle has been brought up before. I've already invited new members whose submissions matched my collective, and will try to automatically invite any more comers. Maybe others could do the same?

If a new member to VS is interested in joining a collective and sends the admin a message, then any new member should be allowed to join. The gift of the collective (especially for the more obscure or esoteric videos) is that it brings interested viewers to your posting. There is no way that my recent Hans Richter posting gets five votes without a collective.

The collectives should not be a gold star country club and it would be sad if this function evolves that way.
Besides, the collective creator can always kick members later if they post specious, idiotic, off-topic videos.
The collectives are another source of fun inspiration to me. Can I find a wonderful b-boy video tonight? Maybe, maybe not.

Maybe I should rephrase my concern. In the past, as far as I can tell, the queue was made up of hundreds of submitters, and a handful of people sifted out the good ones.

It seems now (since Collectives only have 10-40 members) that half or more of the submissions are from a few dozen members. Who also now are very active in sifting.

This site has transitioned from a wikipedia model to more of.. I dunno. It is true that I cannot find a video that hasn't already been submitted, so we have a critical mass of people covering just about every video in the top lists on the internets. So I like Collectives in that it makes you think about different kinds of videos that haven't been submitted (ie. not the latest top video on a dozen fark type sites).

In my estimation, there needs to be a separate queue for collectives. And only the top videos from those collective votes make it to the front page. And the collectives should be more narrow as farhad points out.

Hmm, I see now.

The idea for a separate queue does make sense. But if that is the way, then isn't it better to just resolve all these issues by separating the collectives further from the sift, they become full on separate featured communes. The easiest way to do that is give the choice back the user.

Say when a user who hasn't registered visits the site, he sees the entire sift or just sift minus collectives if the concern is that it doesn't fulfill the needs of being Net relevant, and Wiki in it's structure.

However at the same time, in the corner will be say 5 highlights from random collectives, and a small flash touting blah blah collectives blah blah register blah blah vote etc. Then when the user registers they can select on or off collectives like they can sift categories at the moment.

This allows us to push for more people. And allows the sift to be how the users really deem it.

This of course will bring up the publish concerns. However currently I would prefer that we see how it goes with sift publish rate as most of the community wants to keep the level at 10.

why is narrow good?

if a collective is broad-minded, that leaves lots of room for someone to start an overlapping group, or one based on a particular niche.

so in music, right now there's "rock and roll" and "hip hop" (benjee's b-boys). then there's music showing up in "arts" and "history" (spanning time) and "80s", depending on the aim of the poster. you can also imagine a "tech" group that focussed on geek equipment and included electronic music, or a "pop" group that included only blockbuster stuff from music, movies, TV or wherever. the list could go on and on.

and there's nothing wrong with that.

someone could still start "animation" and try to cut that out of "arts", or "japan" and try to cut that out of "asia", or "politics" and try to cut that out of "history". etc, etc, etc. it's a marketplace. the best groups with the best content will no doubt do better, no matter what the setup.

(split into 2nd comment for clarity)

it occurs to me: people here are used to comparing videosift to digg or slashdot or whatever. maybe a better model for the long-term growth of the site would be flickr.

new visitors to flickr get a heavily edited presentation of selected content -- the analogy would be having the daily or weekly top 15 list appear as the initial page for non-logged in visitors. return visitors get to see their own profile page, from which they can easily visit the users and usergroups they're familiar with. obviously, everything's interconnected, and it's easy to follow your friend's favorites or find the posts of someone who's upvoted your submissions, etc. the end result is much, much closer to the "my.videosift.com" ideal that someone mentioned ages ago (wasn't it you, joedirt?) as a good long-term target for the site...

I prefer the broad collective model as well.

And I am very pleased so far with the submissions to my spanning time collective precisely because they allow for a sort of loose, conversational dialectic between "histories" - cultural, political, musical, cinematic, ad infinitum, ad nauseum. Too often, we pretend and are taught that "history" is only armies, prime ministers, kings, and presidents. And for Canadians, history is merely a long, quiet sustained period of nice (unless you count the Quebecois).

Net culture seems predisposed to either the search engine or the niche. What is great about this website is that I can break free from my cultural comfort zones and see things that are new and extraordinary well outside of my "niche". It is also good to be able to jump back into very particular and familiar niches like the HorrorShow.

I posted about weighting in the "random queue" thread. But what if in our profiles we had a slider to weight "Collective" videos so they were more likely to pop up. Or even channel videos.

Instead of hide all videos that are solo "music" channel, we could have sliders and tune in to our own queue random weighting.

Ie. Collectives preference, music channel preference, viral channel preference, nswf, long, etc. You could adjust how likely you want to encounter those video in the queue sifting. (anyways, just another idea)

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

I'm pretty happy with the way Collectives are developing too. I think if you took away the collective icons on the front page - you wouldn't notice anything strange about the content there. What I mean is, I don't think that having collectives has altered the general mix of posts that much.

Collectives for me, are just another way to find the stuff that I'm most interested in. It also allows me to approache the queue sideways to find the queued videos that are up my alley.

Any genre community building is a bonus - and I think that will evolve over time.

i look at this the same way as mlx ... i realized within a short period of time after creating my collective that i could not over-saturate it with videos of my preference ... i'm pacing myself like a marathon runner!

it's still very early on with a new toy ... and you do remember what most kids do with new toys, right?!!?

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... play with the box it came in?

Tags, Categories and Playlists are just Metadata. Collectives are Voting Blocks - a group with its own motivations, namely to propogate its memes and popularity. Not in an evil way, it's just their nature.

I post to different categories. I can't be bothered to know/join/submit to the different collectives -- too much work. I'm sure my submissions will suffer as a result. Orphan vids are at a structural disadvantage, and Collectives will/have raise the vote minimum.

One of the cool things about the Sift was always its egalitarian nature. All items in the queue were equal, and there wasn't anything structurally to reinforce power laws. Collectives change this.

I predict in a month, 90%+ of posts escaping the queue will be to Collectives.

Yes, kids with new toys, that is the best way to phrase it. I think once more collectives have been made and we've all tired of the novelty, things will even out. I know right now it seems like every other vid is for the horrorshow, or features a puppy or a kitty, but that is just because collective members are racing to submit their favorites right away... once everyone has posted their favorite slasher flick or their favorite kitty vs technology vid then we'll have to look harder for vids that fit within the collectives and things will slow down... that's just how I see it anyway.

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OK Winkler, I'm going to hold you to your prediction - We'll check it 30 days from now and see. I think the number will be closer to 50-60%.

It's a deal. I generally have the "OMG, they killed Kenny" reaction to Sift changes, then grow to like them. Hope that's the case here too.

As collectives grow, it will be more like a dial on a radio...many choices.
I'm not worried that folks will post only toward their collective favorites. Yes, maybe this week we have but it IS a new toy!

Hey, I love my cats and dogs, but I posted a few and had to move on to the others. It's fun to find content for the different collectives. Who knows? I might offer my collective up in a couple of months to try a new one. With so many possibilites, I hate having only one

Is this changing VideoSift? Yes. Is this hurting the Sift? Hell no! We have TONS of great content here already, and more daily. This place is just going to get bigger. The collectives are a positive addition.

Maybe the title is too literal. I didn't mean to imply this is necessarily a bad thing, but Collectives have broke the sifting. The queue and front page are very different now, and the front page is radically different than a few weeks ago.

It may not be a bad thing if there is critical mass. I worry about the appeal of this site to the anonymous non-user surfer, and the the appeal to new members. Technically VS may appeal more to videogame replay video nuts, or other such niches. I just was bringing up my observations.

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Henny Penny! It's good to remember that VideoSift still has less than 10K videos posted in total. Our appeal, since the content is not really "ours", is that we do a better job at categorizing and classifying and promoting good videos. These 10K videos are the crème de la crème from our hosts.

I would say that the collectives will help us classify and promote the crème de la crème of horror clips, space videos, er ... kitten videos - well you get me. I haven't seen any shitty videos promoted to the front page yet. On the contrary I'm seeing more esoteric items that I have not run across before.

Unearthing these hidden nuggets is something else that the Sift is good at - the Collectives make us even better at it.

We hit 10K of published videos a few minutes ago, dag.

I see your point, JD. It's hard in general for a new member to launch off here. The best ones lurked here before going at it.
I'd like to look at these collectives as a way we can include newcomers....new members that are commenting and posting that is.
Collectives could give an opportunity for a new member to focus on something instead of searching for that mass appeal sift.

I've sent invitations this past week to newer and non-star members that have stood out this week in commenting. I would love new members that intend on sticking around to join and post. .

Did anyone raise the idea of having a higher queue escape level for collectivized vids?

Oops, guess I just did.

Only a week has gone by. There will be more collectives created. The Sift has quite a few gold stars these days. It's a bit early to know how exactly all this will play out.

Yeah, but everyone is thinking at the speed of light, leading to questions and concerns being raised in advance of actual problems.

Which, of course, is a Good Thing.