Now that we've all been using 4.0 for a while, I'd like to get some feedback on things that you think could use improving. These could be little issues to do with how you use VideoSift that are frustrating or don't work the way you think they should, or just ideas for improvement.
Our own Campion is hard at work tweaking and prodding the UI for 4.1- so now is a good time to let fly with any ideas for little improvements, glitch fixes or issues.
As usual, thanks for your help in improving the Sift.
Our own Campion is hard at work tweaking and prodding the UI for 4.1- so now is a good time to let fly with any ideas for little improvements, glitch fixes or issues.
As usual, thanks for your help in improving the Sift.
1. I still like my idea about country tags. That way there won't be a need to create more regional/ethnic channels, and we can more easily find videos from various countries.
2. Have a way to highlight the accomplishments of new sifters. Maybe make a panel that shows the Top 5, Top 10, or maybe Top 15 new sifters. To define "new" we could say it means anyone who has joined in the past 90 days. Put the panel either below the Top 15 Sifters of the Past Week, or in the rotating panels found in the upper right hand corner.
3. Implement a new way to raise the escape threshold for videos. Right now you're posting polls for it, and that means we'll probably never get above 10 votes no matter how many members we have. I described in detail what I meant by this a few months ago, so I won't create a wall of text by detailing it again. Something like this is long overdue, really.
4. Make new invocations: *channeltalk and *sifttalk. *Channeltalk would remove any Sift Talk post from the main page and place it in the Newest Channel Talk Posts on the side. *Sifttalk would do the reverse - move a channel talk post to the main page. Even though we've discussed this issue numerous times, people still keep putting non-Sift-related posts on the main page, so hopefully this would alleviate the problem. Make the invocation available for Ruby members or higher.
5. I mentioned this a long time ago, but I think it's worth mentioning again: Have Siftbot randomly promote an old video once a day. Let's define "old" as at least six months old, and let's also say that the video has to have a minimum of 30 (or maybe 40, or 50) votes to be eligible for random promotion.
6. From time to time, randomly erase all votes. This place needs a good shakeup every now and then.
This isn't UI, but how about (depending on your finances) Top sifter of the week/month/lunar cycle gets a free Videosift T-Shirt?
Weekly themes are a possible idea. For instance, this week could be "Cold War Week" and all Cold War related videos sifted this week could get their own feature space on front page.
2. Add a way to pop up videos in their own tiny window. i remember asking for this ages ago and it didnt happen but now that I see youtube has this i know i can't be the only one who thinks this is a good idea! Because what I at least tend to do, is if I'm watching a long sift such as a documentary, I'll put it on in the background, and do something else while it's playing. you can already kinda do this in chrome pretty easily by ripping the tab off and squeezing it into a small box and shoving it to the side of the screen, but if there was a simple button to create a neat popup, it'd be so much easier.
3. Add a small drop down menu on each video page, that gives you an option of all the obvious long/short/genres/blocked commands to be posted automatically. Leave it so you can still do it manually too and add some witty comment at the end of it of course. I just think not having such a simple option makes it seem a bit archaic.
3G networks are becoming accessible and a lot of people sport iPhones/Android devices. I check the Sift daily on my HTC Hero and it is a bit painful.
-I recall a while back that campion had come up with a system where, when someone invoked something, instead of a whole new comment, siftbot's response would be nested within the invoker's comment. That seemed like a much better/cleaner way to do things. I don't know if it's possible to implement that for the whole site, but it definitely seems like it would be an improvement.
Uncategorized (for now)
Art - Books - Bravo - Catsanddogs - Comics - Conspiracy - Controversy - Cooking - Drugs - Eco - Fail - Howto - Law - Military - Money - Magic - Meme - Nature - Sports - Spacy - Timeshift - Terrible - Travel - Waronterror - Wheels - Wings
Emotional response:
Cute
Fear
Dark
Happy
Love
Wtf
People:
Femme
Geek
Gay
Humanitarian
Kids
Teens
Sexuality
Eia(?)
Movies and TV (scripted entertainment):
1sttube
Videogames
Woohoo
Scifi
Standup
Actionpack
Animation
Cinema
Grindhouse
Horrorshow
Latenight
Shortfilms
Parody
Mystery
Viral
Commercial
Comedy (may be too big for just the category)
Beliefs:
Cult
Islam
Lies
Religion
Politics
Areas:
Asia
British
Canada
Downunder
Music:
Music
Livemusic
Blues
Jazz
Rocknroll
Wildwestshow (among other things)
Hiphop
Metal
Obscure
Dance
Period/time:
80s
Vintage
Election08
Future
Mind expanding/education:
Brain
Documentaries
Engineering
History
Science
Talks
Worldaffairs
Philosophy
News (perhaps?)
It's also possible to have this activity filter disabled for users over X threashold (silver star perhaps) so that people who have done a lot of good work still can "leave a legacy" of votes, that won't just be deleted. This plays into the idea of a meritocracy, that users should show that their votes have merit.
A similar thing could be done with comments - there's usually a quality difference between a comment with 15 votes and one with 40+, for instance, and it's a shame that this is not rewarded somehow.
PS. Sorry about the many posts in a row, I'm trying to isolate each idea, so there's a clearer image of which people like and don't like.
Make the search function more easily sortable. I would like a drop-down menu after I have performed a simple search, where I can quickly reorder my search according to newest / oldest / most votes / etc. As it is now I first have to "go advanced with my query" and do the search again.
I've mentioned this before and it's a good point. Wherever there's a listing of videos you should be able to filter and sort using easily accessible links. Sometimes it's good to quickly see the most recent videos matching a search to prevent you wasting time with a submission. Right now it's quicker to do the submission and get told it's a dupe.
Use the blockquote tag to quote in comments rather than just italicizing. Wouldn't this comment be much easier to follow if it looked like this?
Nested quotes like that would be good, as long as they don't get too retardedly small. I will stress that nested commenting would be atrocious, though.
kthxbye
Can you guys put the "submit video" button somewhere we can always see it?
kthxbye
YES!
Would be fantastic if the submitter of a duped video got some sort of notification- happens to everyone from time-to-time, and speaking personally I've wasted much valuable sifting time to find out just what happened to some videos.
Personally I get emails about that. I suppose a separate "siftbot messages" that only contained such things would be cool to have on the profile, so you could easily figure out about what had happened to your posts.
I think a little notifications system like you have on Facebook would be nice. It could tell you of new comments, dupes, discards, promotes, etc. I don't know how much overhead something like that would add to the site.
I'd also like a floating comment form that slides out the side or bottom of the browser. See the feedback form in this example video around the 25s mark for an example. It should be { position:fixed; } so that the rest of the content can be scrolled and the comment box stays in view. I like to refer to the video and other comments when writing my own and it's a pain having to scroll between them and the comment form.
I'd also like peace in the middle east, an end to suffering and a pony.
At the risk of repeating myself I want to let you know what a fun site you have in Videosift. I have spent more time over the last several years on the Sift than all of the other good sites on the web combined. I have attempted to partake in many aspects of this community, including t-shirts (got "Once I Was Stoned" a week ago!), developing friendships, seeking advice, offering council (no one listened), and offering a buck or two when I was able. It's been a great place to hang my hat, so I offer the following suggestions not based being disgruntled, but based on my overall satisfaction and with a desire to make the Sift an even better place for people to hang.
1. When a video is a dupe, and the *dupeof command is invoked, I would like to see the comments under the dupe be moved wholesale to the older video. While I have but few ideas on how to delineate them from the comments on the earlier vid, I'm confident that you guys could work it out.
2. Although I've mentioned this before, and received a partial answer, I think that the mechanism with which your program locates dupes during the submission process could use some tweaking. While it finds dupes once in a while, it does so with increasing irregularity as the number of videos increases here. It's a time burner and an incentive killer to Sift videos that already exist only to find that out hours or days later.
3. Create a 'Sandbox' where the cat-fighting can take place. There are an increasing number of personal arguments taking place in public on this site. I, for one, think they ought to remain private. Barring that discretion, would it be possible to consider sending these threads or even one-off posts to a section of the site specifically designated for spats? Diamonds and above could, with the click of a mouse, place the offending post, in a dark recess of the Sift accessible by all, but only intentionally. We have the power to hobble, how about the power to muffle?
4. Lastly, this is more of a question than a suggestion (possible suggestion to follow) if someone were to be known to be using the Sift to promote an agenda, say political or moral, for instance, and this is what they were being paid to do; promote agendas on the web. How do you think that ought to affect the status of their Sifts? In other words, say the Catholics find out that they are taking a beating here. So they pay one of their employees to post videos favorable to the church. That person has all day to do that; write positive posts, place church-friendly videos, etc. That is going to, after time, affect this place and the deciding factor is money.
I realize this discussion took place many moons ago over Fedquip, but I want to know if there is a policy regarding promoting an agenda here as a part of your job; using the Sift to reinforce a position while being paid for it.
Brian, thanks for listening. Take these for what they are: suggestions only. Whether they happen or not, I'll be in the background sifting away.
I sometimes wonder if notable Sifters have been approached for something like this ... Probably a topic for another post.
^Thanks silvercord. On your last point- covert paid shills are a threat on all community sites. We're protected from this a little by not being quite the size and therefore the easy targets of a Digg or Reddit. I know there have been cases on Digg of top users being paid substantial amounts for a front page post.
I sometimes wonder if notable Sifters have been approached for something like this ... Probably a topic for another post.
I was approached by a major multinational corporation...until they looked at my enormous PQ and realized I garner little to no respect here....
Sometimes a person's place of residence is valuable to frame their comments. During my time as campioni's little helper around the 4.0 upgrade, I proposed the following idea to him for 4.1:
Country flag icons
Boom... 247 little flag icons, totally free to use for any purpose.
I've proposed two possible locations for them as shown in that image. Note that I'm proposing one or the other, the image just shows both together.
Originally I figured right next to the username and P/star/gem/crown icon was the logical place for them. campioni thought it would get crowded. I don't share that opinion but nonetheless I proposed the other option. There's dead space under avatars anyway.
I think campioni is of the opinion that it be only on the profile page, but I like the idea of having it right there on the comment. Like I said above, sometimes a person's place of residence puts their comments in a different perspective. I think it's nice to see where they're from right then and there rather than having to go check.
VS White looks fucking ugly.
-make channel order alphabetical, per letter, from left to right.
-the small inverted v that is used to indicate that "recently posted" is selected when selecting sift talk in the menu is rather small..
-URLs with _ and other special characters (often the case with wikipedia links) are not properly displayed in comments/video descriptions.
-some trouble with the (un)ignore toggle (users ignored I did not want to ignore and can't unignore) and bookmarking videos (videos/sifttalks bookmarked without having bookmarked them) (may not be a sift wide issue)