Don't Take Downvotes Personally
So, I've taken notice to the amounts of people unhappy with the quality of videos obtaining the vote threshold and making it onto the front page. Also, I have noticed people are unhappy with the lack of the more obscure being able to make it to the front page. It has dawned on me that anything you do to change our system to help one of these issues, will adversely affect the other.
For instance, we currently have a personal queue. That gives obscure videos the ability to marinate until enough people think that it's sift-worthy. However, that also makes it so that videos of less quality can eventually find the attention they might not deserve.
If we were to change the pqueue and make a time limit on videos (the old way), we would be holding some of the lower quality videos at bay, but it would hold back some of the more obscurely beautiful videos that already struggle.
As far as adding more votes to the threshold, that would do nothing but fatten up pqueues and put a longer time incubation period on a video's escape time (crappy or obscure).
Here's what I offer as a solution. This solution was brought up by farhad in this comment regarding the elevation of escape threshold votes and I think he's dead on. We must change our culture to value and use the downvote more. Not maliciously or just because the video is not your cup of tea, but to protect our own personal voice of what this site should be.
Think of it this way, if everybody were to recondition our methodology to use the downvote more often to control the content of this site, it would increase the value of the upvote and the optioned nonvote. So please don't be offended by anybody's downvote.
And, to beat blankfist to the punch, go ahead and downvote my pqueue if you find something you don't think should be on this site.
For instance, we currently have a personal queue. That gives obscure videos the ability to marinate until enough people think that it's sift-worthy. However, that also makes it so that videos of less quality can eventually find the attention they might not deserve.
If we were to change the pqueue and make a time limit on videos (the old way), we would be holding some of the lower quality videos at bay, but it would hold back some of the more obscurely beautiful videos that already struggle.
As far as adding more votes to the threshold, that would do nothing but fatten up pqueues and put a longer time incubation period on a video's escape time (crappy or obscure).
Here's what I offer as a solution. This solution was brought up by farhad in this comment regarding the elevation of escape threshold votes and I think he's dead on. We must change our culture to value and use the downvote more. Not maliciously or just because the video is not your cup of tea, but to protect our own personal voice of what this site should be.
Think of it this way, if everybody were to recondition our methodology to use the downvote more often to control the content of this site, it would increase the value of the upvote and the optioned nonvote. So please don't be offended by anybody's downvote.
And, to beat blankfist to the punch, go ahead and downvote my pqueue if you find something you don't think should be on this site.
25 Comments
joedirtAlso, and more importantly, do NOT upvote pqueue ever. Basically any stagnant video sitting in a pqueue can sit there for six months and eventually make it to the front page. If people use a beg or promote, that is different.
But enough of the "upvote everything in my pqueue". That should be an offense worth suspension. If it's bad and ban-worthy to downvote an entire pqueue then the same logic should apply to upvoting arbitrarily based on your clique or other bullshit people use to justify the absolute nonsense that takes place.
rasch187I like your (farhad's) idea, rottenseed. Some people take downvotes as a personal insult. Just remember that I love you all, even if I may hate your occational videos.
*quality
siftbotAwarding rottenseed with one star point for this contribution to Sift Talk - declared quality by rasch187.
rottenseedWell joedirt, I think that should remain on the discretion on the of the member. Sometimes there may be gems waiting in those pqueues and due to certain reasons (time posted, time zone, etc.) they might be overlooked. While I do agree that "upvote everything in pqueue" can be damaging to the quality control of this site though.
kulpimsdownvote if you will but give them a chance first. some of my pq went totaly unnoticed. it's funny cause sometimes I killed a lot of them immediately if they didn't get more than 3 votes, but then I saw them coming back and straight to front page...
blankfistIf you support the rights of gays to get married, please upvote my comment! If you hate gays and don't think they deserve rights, downvote my comment.
rottenseedAs you can see from blankfist's comment, this new ideology can be applied to comments as well
siftbotFeel free to downvote your fellow meat puppet's comments, but you will never downvote mine! I control your illusion of quality.
EDDCOPYCAT! I was encouraging downvoting before it was popular. Hell, before I'd registered I carried out ddos attacks whenever I'd find a crappy sift on here.
EDD>> ^siftbot:
Feel free to downvote your fellow meat puppet's comments, but you will never downvote mine! I control your illusion of quality.
Impotent site bots have no power over me.
rottenseed>> ^siftbot:
Feel free to downvote your fellow meat puppet's comments, but you will never downvote mine! I control your illusion of quality.
yea yea yea, we all know you're here sifty.
*god, what an attention-whore*
blankfistDownvote party over here: http://www.videosift.com/video/iPhone-s-Prototype-Software-before-the-iPhone-was-released
"Upvote everything in my pqueue" party over here: http://www.videosift.com/member/joedirt/pqueued
SagemindOK, I have killed a lot of stuff that I have posted, especially if it didn't get any votes fast enough. I have watching a one-vote-video sitting there waiting to be voted on. I'm impatient. Plus we all experiment with videos we find, just to find out we really didn't like them that much either.
But what if there is a video that I think is "just awesome" but for some reason or another it doesn't get seen by the right people before it gets pqueue'ed? There isn't much opportunity to get that video back out there again unless we beg. Sometimes we don't have the time to focus on all the videos, all the time. (I'll beg latter - attitude)
I just think the Queue is a great place to store our posts until we have time to beg / promote them.
What I think has to happen is everyone just needs to spend some time here and there letting go of a few Pqueue'ed vids, 'killing' the ones that are stale and we don't care about any more. I'd hate to think, that some great posts (in the eye of the beholder) will get deleted because of a computerized countdown. Don't give in to the idea of giving over all the control to Siftbot (AKA - the Sift-meister)!
Just take some responsibility for your own PQ!
SagemindAnd yes, we can all take a few down-votes as well.
Also, I don't see anything wrong with mining someone's PQ to see what's in there, just don't vote on everything your buddy posts because, yes, we ALL agree it hurts the sift and defeats the purpose! (as said by JoDirt)
EDDIrony: funnily enough one of the worst feelings I've had while sifting was when I recently discovered somebody had upvoted my entire PQ without exception.
In contrast, if there's one thing on the Sift that always makes me smile is when people react to a downvote of mine by downvoting a video or two of mine.
rougyI personally think the down-voting is kind of destructive.
I won't do it any more.
I think to down-vote without giving an explanation is just kind of shitty.
kulpims>> ^joedirt:
Basically any stagnant video sitting in a pqueue can sit there for six months and eventually make it to the front page.
that is how blankfist earned his crown
eric3579Cut the amount of videos one can sift in half. My guess is that will improve the quality of videos.
blankfist
rottenseed>> ^rougy:
I personally think the down-voting is kind of destructive.
I won't do it any more.
I think to down-vote without giving an explanation is just kind of shitty.
Why would we need to explain? Do we need to explain why we upvote?
ElJardineroAntsifting?
gwiz665You just made an enemy for life!!
oxdottirI downvote. I downvote when I REALLY don't like the idea of something being on the sift--that is, when I would be embarrassed to show it there as I show off my wonderful videosift. I know, others may well overrule me, but I make my up and downvoting mean something. I've had people ask me to only downvote stuff once it makes it out of the queue. What? What's the point of that?
yoghurtWell, I downvote a lot more on other sites with a larger user base (perhaps due to a sense of more anonymity), but here is a smaller community so people take dvoting more personally. Actually, I just went on a down voting spree here for videos that I consider "meh" as an experiment. I'll report how many revenge downvotes I receive.
gwiz665The problem with what oxdottir's example, is that the way "hotness" works means that an early downvote almost certainly breaks any chance the video had of being sifted. The same way, if two upvotes are given immediately after it's posted, it stands a much larger chance of going though, simply because of exposure. This is why I don't like the hotness as default sorting.
I get annoyed when people downvote soething I've posted that only has my own upvote, because it's essentially a death sentence. I've scoured rasch187's sifted and queued for things to downvote with a vengeance a few times (because of his constant family guy downvotes) but I can never fucking find something I don't like. Everything that man sifts is fucking gold!
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