reposted from the other thread...

how about this: change the "expiring soon" sidebar. that idea works great for day 4, so why not spread it out to cover days 2 and 3 as well?

have 3 different ordered assortments, one each for day 2, day 3, and day 4. "top 15 queued videos submitted yesterday", "top 15 queued videos submitted monday" (or feb 19th, or "two days ago"), and of course "top 15 videos expiring soon". have one of the three sidebars show up randomly where the "expiring soon" sidebar appears now.

this would increase the visibility of near-miss videos on days 2 and 3. sure, it would also make it a bit harder to find the about-to-expire stuff, but maybe more of it would be getting published earlier, or getting additional votes sooner, meaning there'd be less of a rush at the end.

As I wrote in my other post in the escape limit thread:

My suggestion is for a mix of time-ordered and randomized videos, staggered, for the queue. I think it'd be nice to have the combination, since the time element is nice (for breaking stories, as you pointed out), but it'd also deal with queue rot to some degree. The randomized-order list could be one for all of VS that refreshes every hour, and displays to everybody, not a personalized list, making for better sift cohesion.

Also, if you wanted to make the breaking story thing a feature, you could include a *hot or *topical gold-star ability, that would place such sits into a sidebar collection of such.

the trouble with any mixture is that you're never sure when you've seen everything. at least with the time-stamped queue, you can go back through it until the last thing you remember, and know you're caught up.

the other problem with randomizing is that you lose some of the contextual information from seeing how many votes a post has next to its chronological neighbors. 5 votes in an hour is impressive, 5 votes in 3 days is not.

i'm sure i'd be using the drop-down box to put the queue back to time-submitted, if it ends up being randomized -- so either way...

The time and frequency of the votes are important in measuring the 'viralness' of a video, as James stated up top...and to me there's the fun of watching one jump.

I do choose to go random when I have time, especially if I feel I've missed alot of submissions.

To deal with the traffic/popularity problem, let those viddies, that have the potential to soar, or are already soaring other places, have a special viewbar....perhaps a "rising stars" or some clever...nova, supernova,white dwarf etc. scale of progress.........this will keep the chronological page from burying potentials
Hell, put vote-timers on the viddies to solve the mystery of how many how fast....one can get a clue most of the time, what has the potential to soar..... The top 15 already, if you did miss them the 1st time around, gives us all the option to see the showcase...

Ok, so then how about creating a smaller randomized video link underneath each time-based, full-sized video. That way we could easily distinguish what is a new post and what is random, while still exposing sifters to the middle-page videos.

Choggies post reminds me of somebody's suggestion of "Vote volatility", or some such, a little while back, as a function of votes/time in queue. But we'd still need to have initial exposure to such videos to allow them to surface quickly, anyways.

Maybe just get rid of the right hand side tool bar altogether, and just have a whole page of thumbnails and underneath them the title of the video, with the number of votes in brackets next to it.

Like the 'Video hotness' factor? I think this was discussed before and put forward by Ren.

The only way to accomplish true random queue and give weight to high flyers (which I think is important to do)..

Is either sort queue by >24 hrs old THEN randomized

Or, I like the idea of weighting queue submissions. Some formula like (# votes)/(24 hrs) + random number. Then sort by random number. So "hot" videos are more likely to appear at top of queue, but still relatively random. So if we decide 4 immediate votes would keep it hot and on the top of the queue, so let's say 0.7 + random (0.0 to 0.99) would assure it stayed on the top. Then, let's say no one votes in the next 6 hrs, then it bump down to a 0.0 + random and be back in the random fray.

Maybe just get rid of the right hand side tool bar altogether, and just have a whole page of thumbnails and underneath them the title of the video, with the number of votes in brackets next to it.

another vote for thumbnails!!!

Thumbnails wouldn't work because of the technical reasons. First of all the APIs for thumbnail grabs is not consistent through all the video hosts. Google Video doesn't have small ones like Youtube, neither do I believe do some of the others.

That would mean a bespoke solution by VS, and with the amount of videos we see posted and the amount of removals by the video hosts this would be counterintuitive.

I do still think it would look amazing and cool, though realistically can't see how we can make it work properly without overcoming some technical hurdles.

The way you make something more manageable is to break it down.
In this case we have a large queue of videos. Few people are going to want to sift that queue. Look at the various tabs - most of them are geared up to show popular, published submissions.

What I would like to see is the queue broken up into various channels. This will make me feel it's less like a lucky dip and I will end up viewing more videos than usual because I save time clicking past pages of video I don't fancy.

For example, I'm not a huge fan of pet videos. But if it's been a day since I sifted anything, clicking on "View Music queue," for want of a better term, would be an attractive option.

In a way we already have this with collectives. I might check out some Science videos using that collective and there would likely be some queued items in there.

We just need to extend this thinking to all queued items. In my opinion the queue would be more manageable and older items would be closer to the front in each "mini queue".

Deano, it's already broken into channels. If you go to one of the channels and hit queue, you get the queue for that channel.

Try a simpler solution: increase the default number of videos listed per page from 10 to say, 15.

i like the way videos drop down into the queue and you see the hotly sifted post. the queue works. my sift routine is generally to sit on the queue as stuff drops. i usually remember the last thing i ve seen and i go back to that point when i log in. whats the deal??

Thanks James, I wasn't aware that tab buttons could be multi-functonal like that. Not sure how obvious that would be to new sifters, given that I never knew about it. Would it not add value if that was exposed through the main queue tab when you first load up the site?

So whenever you hit Queue, you can then choose from a channel, rather than Channel/queue? That way you visibly filter the queue and you could summarise the state of each queue, indicate how long it was, the oldest item, item with the most votes so far etc.

Deano, no it's that the channels are separate subdomains. When you click on a channel you are in a MUSIC only videosift.

ie.
http://www.videosift.com/queue
http://viral.videosift.com/queue
http://music.videosift.com/queue

So click on a channel, then click on the queue tab.

" Thanks James, I wasn't aware that tab buttons could be multi-functonal like that. Not sure how obvious that would be to new sifters, given that I never knew about it. Would it not add value if that was exposed through the main queue tab when you first load up the site?

So whenever you hit Queue, you can then choose from a channel, rather than Channel/queue? That way you visibly filter the queue and you could summarise the state of each queue, indicate how long it was, the oldest item, item with the most votes so far etc."

We have talked about a "widget" in the past that would let you select a channel from an ajax window, the concern has been that we can't duplicate it for people who have ajax disabled. Currently all the ajax functionality stuff degrades nicely.

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

I'm in favour of a non-drastic change as mentioned by Theo, of increasing the length of the page. Although as a primate, I am partial to base 10, so would prefer 20 posts per page as the default. Members who are having trouble with performance could of course adjust the posts per page size down to a suitable level.

Knowing this is useful for me, I'll keep separate URLs in my bookmarks for the channel queues.

BTW I was ok with 12 posts to get something published, it's not a drastic increase and it might make one think twice about how good a video is before submitting.

Why, thank you, dag.
My solution was both elegant and simple, don't you think?

I'm surprised nobody has gone for PMs solution. Let me second that idea. A top15 submitted yesterday, two days ago, three days etc. I think that is the best answer.