Good call. Can you share with us the value for peak times? Seems to end around 11pm-ish EST

More members are participating now. Raising the threshold of votes was inevitable.

yeah it's 11 pm EST, and I believe it kicks back in at 8 am EST.

Yeah; interesting side-effect though, the new queue has ballooned to 9 pages today and only a few vids made it to front page since the morning.

Man, this is so much a case of applied economics (like the book Freakonomics) ... I don't know what the point I'm trying to make is, but playing with these variables/cut-offs is interesting nevertheless.

Woops - wish we could edit comments here. Oh well, additional comment: the interesting side effect from the 4 vs 5 and 5 vs 6 systems is that videos at 4 or 5 votes get promoted automatically when the cut-off falls when off-peak hours kick in. As a result, if there's a raft of 5-vote vids (I saw a couple in queue), they'll flood onto the front page. Is this a bad thing? I don't think so, but it's amusing to see the wholesale "auto-update" videosift.com undergos whenever that happens.

Edit happened... will explain how.

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It is interesting Krupo - I know you're an accountant - so this should be right up your alley. ;-) I think it's hard to get the right balance. We need to find ways to drive people to the queues more.

That being said, when videos are deleted because they hit the 7 day limit, there are very few of those that I think "Oh ... I wish that had made it out." Sometimes, but not that often. I've certainly had a few of mine expire in the queue.

Can you not edit your comments in the blog? We'll have to look at that. It works for me, but that doesn't mean anything.

It's not so much an issue of fretting over things expiring in queue as it is having things ignored when the queue grows to a v. large size. Of course, the compensating "post per time period" control rears its head if that becomes too much of a problem, I suppose.

Anyway, with respect to comment edits, they work when you go to "your recent comments" mode, but not if you're reading the blog post itself. Interesting discrepancy, really.

[edit]

And suddenly it's 100% functional - buglet fixed by you or simply disappeared? Either way, thanks.

Hmm... after the edit, it worked, after doing a refresh, the function disappeared. How peculiar.

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I think it might be a PEBKAC error.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebkac
;-) I kid, I kid.

How about an alert message on the front page stating "The queue is up to # pages. Would you mind looking there first?"


A mandatory "You must review the queue before you go anywhere" or "you must vote X # of times first" might be too much . . . . I was in a school system not long ago.

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That's a great idea dotdude, maybe we could have like "Alert Levels" based on how full the queue is. I don't think mandatory is the way to go either, but it would be nice if we could somehow reward queue sifters.

You rank folks with number of votes garnered. Maybe you need to rank those who vote the most too? Getting out the vote?


Instead of stars for the ranking . . . colored sifters in the same colors as the stars, i.e. bronze, silver, gold . . . after all that is what the voting does . . .


How about Madonna grinding a sifter? 'Just thought of the 1992 campaign spot she did wrapped in a flag. : )

LOL, I know the PEBKAC joke, but hadn't seen it in acronym form.

Anyway, the results of tonight's "experiment" are in - a half dozen videos got an "auto-promote" by sitting at 5. Not bad, really - the lower threshold was a big part of the reason for last night's flood.

LOL - like that: "Queue Status:Full (85 videos) Start Sifting "

Rewarding heavy voters sounds nice, but I don't know how useful that would be: voting is easy (I foresee massive potential abuse?), but finding good vids is hard, and that's what I infer the star system is designed to reward.

Wow, that was a quick "Queue Status" add-on!

we could perhaps reward queue voting, but again people could just spam vote the videos in the queue. The biggest problem I think is that a lot of people simply never make it in to the the queue.

Just some more thoughts:
--Perhaps the queue status could be more prominently displayed (next to the main banner?)
--Or, when you first visit the site, automatically start in the queue
--Can videos in the queue be arranged by #votes (high to low), rather than time posted. Maybe those in the front are more likely to be seen, and voted up and out...

firefly

I have been thinking about a possible queue algorithm, that would bump up videos that have been voted on recently, and demote ones that are stagnant, it would also probably randomly place some videos on the front page. This is still just a theory, but to me at least it seems like it would fix a lot of the problems.

Maybe, just maybe, a team of people, selected by rank or star colour; but people who can be trusted, could be assigned as "Official Sifters". They would be given the "*discard" option and maybe even a "Super Vote", which could send a video to the front page or the top of the queue.

Just an idea.

Oh, and by the way, sorry for my little rant on my Atomic Bomb post, im just tired and frustrated.

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Yeah, I like the idea of a team of super-sifters darksun, and also the idea of rejiggering the order of the queue vids FireFly. James and I will put our heads together and see what the minimum amount of work will yield.

How about a periodic automatic random shuffle of the queue? The VideoSift Shuffle . . .


As for the voting . . . I still favor trying to involve more of the lurkers so that a spectrum of members are reflected rather than just a small handful . . . my two cents.


By the way . . . are you guys thinking of doing some kind of promotional viral vid for VideoSift?

I like the idea of SuperSifters, perhaps limit it to those with the "100" status, as they are clearly the well-seasoned and experienced veterans

Is there any way to count how many different people have viewed a video? Perhaps there could be a system on which the least viewed videos in the queue are put to the front for more people to see...?

Also, just to ask about the downvoting system... could there be a 'Numbers of up votes' and 'Number of down votes' counter, because a video that gets minus votes when its posted first would be removed, but that doesnt give other people a chance to see it.

I don't really know much about website technicalities and communities, so just say if my ideas suck

I'm impressed by the longevity/depth of this conversation. Nice.

I love the term "Videosift Shuffle"... wonder if the Mac people would be upset by use of that term?

I was thinking of making a suggestion about the "new queue" button (moving it up) but it's already pretty prominently featured, eh?

An "early boost to front page" button for super-users would tie in nicely to a "resurrect from the past"/"blast from the past" button to return an old classic for another tour of duty on the front page...

also, auto-sort high-to-low vids would be clever... doing it so new vids aren't "lost" at the bottom would be a good corollary...

I think if the "New Video Queue" were somewhere apart from the list it would remind people to look there. Maybe at the top, right before the "Published Videos"...because the eye goes there first. Right now it seems to disappear against the white background.

I love the new "full" feature...but maybe that could be a little more apparent. Does it run a tally all the time? Maybe that could be displayed over the "Published videos" line...because when people see that it's getting full, they would think to start sifting.

The way it is now, if someone wants to post something, they might vote for just anything close to let it get through so that they could have room to post. And that's kinda contrary to the idea here.... just a thought.

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That's a good idea Daphne - maybe a box on the top middle of the page, we could even give alert colours, like Homeland security. Orange, purple, red, vermillion.

lol...that's perfect! ("Vermillion" always makes me think of the vermicious knids. ) Instead of colors, though, it would be funny to have thumbnails from popular videosifts...like the ukelele guy is "everything is smooth" down to the big electric thing sparking.

But you'd have to get the mahna mahna in there...just so we could think, "The queue is at mahna mahna! I'd better start sifting!"

I shouldn't drink so much coffee.

If there is, i will have to cry out "Red Alert, Red Alert! Batten Down the hatches! Run to the bunkers!" everytime i saw that.

When I made the suggestion of having an alert message, I was thinking of Mr. Scott's pleas to Captain Kirk.


"We need more sifting, Captain!"

Discarding this video (discard called by gold star member darksun)