21 Comments

dag says...

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

Hmm, how about if we gave diamonds an extra queue slot and in turn lower the "submit from anywhere" level to 100 star?

I feel bad that 100 stars don't have a cool new power on reaching that level, and it would be nice to add more host diversity to the site.

jonny says...

I've only been back around for a week or so, but the queue has only gotten bigger (with all the problems that entails). Anything that makes the queue bigger (more slots, more votes to escape, etc.) just makes it worse. I vote nay on the extra slot for diamonds - unless it's offset with a reduction in slots elsewhere.

But I definitely like the idea of giving the 100 stars a benefit - it did seem perverse to give lots of powers to 50s and then nothing for the next 200 posts.

[edit] Actually, instead of offsetting with a reduction in slots for others, how about reducing the amount of time vids are in the queue from 4 days to 3 days? The 3rd day is mostly useless anyway.

dotdude says...

I don't think we need to make the queue any bigger by adding more slots.

As for 100's, what about bringing channel management down to them. We have 26 diamonds, but there are 58 channels. Aren't some 100 golds still running channels anyway from the old collective system which allowed 50 golds to create collectives?

lucky760 says...

I tend to agree with the point that any such additions/modifications will only serve to increase the size of the queue, thus worsening the problem of queue rot.

>> Too many times I've had to discard a good vid because I found an even better vid.
I think no matter how many slots you have this will always present a problem. It just comes down to a matter of timing and patience.

Sarzy says...

Actually, instead of offsetting with a reduction in slots for others, how about reducing the amount of time vids are in the queue from 4 days to 3 days? The 3rd day is mostly useless anyway.

I'd even go one step further and reduce it to two days. It seems to me like 95% of the votes a video gets either happens on the first day, when it's still new, or the last day, when it enters the expiring soon list. The middle two days are pretty much a vote dead-zone.

jonny says...

I'd even go one step further and reduce it to two days.

The requeue wait period would have to change as well then. I'd like to see that changed to be like saves and promotes anyway, where you get to requeue one of your own vids (expired or not) every N days, except that it couldn't be used to increase your number of vids in the queue like saves do.

kronosposeidon says...

I say NAY, no 7th slot for diamonds. Diamonds can already submit videos from any flash enabled video site, and that's a big enough perk. However, if you insist on giving a 7th slot, just give it to the Diamond-500s. They don't have any additional benefits over the Diamond-250s, so maybe you can give them that. (And for the non-charter Diamond-500s, give them a 4th slot.) But just to be clear, I'm still against extra slots, period.

If you want to give Gold-100s another privilege, how about letting them keep just one video in their queue at a time from a video host not on the approved video-host list? That way Diamonds still have a greater privilege over them, but we still get more variety in the sift like you want, dag. Or maybe make it two videos at any one time in the queue. I'm flexible. What do you think, fellow sifters? And would this be feasible from an administrative standpoint, admins?

Jonny and Sarzy bring up a good point about reducing queue time. I also think two days is long enough, BUT on the chance that I'm wrong let's reduce it to just three days at first and see how it works. If it works just peachy then let's try two-day queue periods. Let's play it by ear. I'd much rather see shorter queue times than higher vote thresholds to escape queue. If we raise it to 12 we'll just see a higher percentage of LOLcat videos being sifted. I've got nothing against a good LOLcat video, but I don't want VideoSift to turn into LOLcat Central.

As long as we're on the subject of improvements, I'll address some other points that have been mentioned recently:

Power votes - Don't like it. I much prefer the simple idea of one man, one vote. I wouldn't want to see anyone's vote being more important than others, regardless of their rank on the sift. High-ranking members already get enough privileges, IMHO; this isn't another one they need. VideoSift is a democracy/meritocracy hybrid, but I want to keep the voting process itself as egalitarian as possible. I like that a Probationary member's vote is just as important as a Diamond member's, and I'd like to keep it that way. And besides, if we reduce queue time (as I mentioned above) most videos won't get caught in the Day 2 and 3 doldrums anyway, thus precluding the need for "power votes".

Bonus for 100 point videos - Against it. Isn't getting 100 votes from one video enough of a reward? But how about this: Maybe when a video reaches 100 votes, how about highlighting the whole entry in the published section, like maybe in yellow? That ought to draw a little extra attention to it. But I think Grimm's idea might be useful for the next idea:

The Sifties - How about any video or person who wins a Sifty award get a little gold, silver, or bronze sieve placed by the video or person's name in their profile? And the sieve could be "engraved" at the bottom with what award it or they won? Is that possible?

Though I disagree with Fedquip's original proposition, I still think this is a *quality topic.

EDIT: Though I've gone on record as preferring a shorter queue period to a higher vote threshold, I'm not against raising the vote threshold some day in the future. I've said before that as the number of users increases we will probably have to raise the threshold anyway, and I still believe that. As of the time I'm writing this we have 934 registered members, and I excluded the banned members from that count. If we're being asked to raise the vote threshold from 10 to 12 to escape queue, you're basically asking for a 20% increase. Therefore I propose that once we have a 20% increase in membership, then we can increase the vote requirement by 20%. By my math that would mean we'd need 1121 members before we bump the requirement to 12 votes to escape queue. For a more incremental approach, we could raise the threshold to 11 votes once membership increases by 10%, which would be 1027. I know the actual numbers seem rather arbitrary, but you get my drift. They don't have to be those EXACT numbers for changes to occur, but as long as we're consistent with how we raise our standards the better off we'll be. To make it easy we could simply say that at 1100 members you need 11 votes to escape queue, and at 1200 members you need 12 votes, etc.

In the mean time, however, shortening queue time still seems like a good idea to me.

raven says...

I think Lucky is probably right, more slots will only bloat the queue... and I gotta agree with his suggestion of patience, a lack of which I have noticed in several of you charters and continually find quite amusing... so in general I have no sympathy when one you starts whining that six slots is not enough. I'm not trying to pick on you Fed, but come on, clearly it is possible to get by just fine with only the 3 free ones.

Also, if its solving queue problems that you lads want to focus on... my votes are: YES to shortening the queue time (maybe three days?), as after 2 my vids tend to not go anywhere... and NO to upping the vote count for queue escape, I just don't think we are there yet, and a lot of the longer non-LOLcat vids are still only getting something like 14 votes typically.

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