My fellow Sifters - I come before you tonight to tell you that the state of the Sift is stronger than ever.
No, seriously - things are good. I know some of you have noticed that it feels bigger around here lately- it is. VideoSift is receiving more traffic than it ever has before. Some of you are nostalgic for the days when the Sift felt like a small group of friends - me too.
We have to make VideoSift work as a bigger group of friends. I think for the most part it is - but we're open to hearing ideas that might help in this area.
We passed 1 million unique visitors for the month of November. It's just a number, but it's an indicator of how this community is growing. Here are the exact stats for the month:
Unique Visits: 1,023,757
Pageviews: 2,713,436
Up Votes: 49,039
Down Votes: 800
Comments: 19,368
videos posted: 1,554
We also banned 45 members. I'm not proud of this - but it shows that our unique moderation system works pretty damn well- thanks to all of the vigilant Sifters who use it and keep the Sift free of self-interest and crap.
We are facing some challenges. Sometimes our servers start melting. During one peak day in November we were serving 10,000 pages an hour and the smell of burning silicon was in the air. We're going to need new hardware. At the moment we are on a single dedicated dual xeon web server with a similarly speced database server. We will undoubtebly need to throw more hardware at the problem soon. Please upgrade to charter if you haven't already - the Sift needs your support- "ten thousand points of light" to keep the flame of VideoSift's fire going.
We have lots of ideas for the next few months. We're thinking of starting a VideoSift online film festival- harking back to the old Sift Off days. We may also start allowing members to upload their own videos to VideoSift (in a way that doesn't violate the self-link rule).
So, from Lucky, James and myself- thanks for being a part of what is, I can say truthfully without any bias, the best community on the web.
Goodnight and may God bless / Darwin evolve / Cthulhu devour VideoSift!
PS. We've outlawed Digg forever and we begin bombing in 5 minutes.
No, seriously - things are good. I know some of you have noticed that it feels bigger around here lately- it is. VideoSift is receiving more traffic than it ever has before. Some of you are nostalgic for the days when the Sift felt like a small group of friends - me too.
We have to make VideoSift work as a bigger group of friends. I think for the most part it is - but we're open to hearing ideas that might help in this area.
We passed 1 million unique visitors for the month of November. It's just a number, but it's an indicator of how this community is growing. Here are the exact stats for the month:
Unique Visits: 1,023,757
Pageviews: 2,713,436
Up Votes: 49,039
Down Votes: 800
Comments: 19,368
videos posted: 1,554
We also banned 45 members. I'm not proud of this - but it shows that our unique moderation system works pretty damn well- thanks to all of the vigilant Sifters who use it and keep the Sift free of self-interest and crap.
We are facing some challenges. Sometimes our servers start melting. During one peak day in November we were serving 10,000 pages an hour and the smell of burning silicon was in the air. We're going to need new hardware. At the moment we are on a single dedicated dual xeon web server with a similarly speced database server. We will undoubtebly need to throw more hardware at the problem soon. Please upgrade to charter if you haven't already - the Sift needs your support- "ten thousand points of light" to keep the flame of VideoSift's fire going.
We have lots of ideas for the next few months. We're thinking of starting a VideoSift online film festival- harking back to the old Sift Off days. We may also start allowing members to upload their own videos to VideoSift (in a way that doesn't violate the self-link rule).
So, from Lucky, James and myself- thanks for being a part of what is, I can say truthfully without any bias, the best community on the web.
Goodnight and may God bless / Darwin evolve / Cthulhu devour VideoSift!
PS. We've outlawed Digg forever and we begin bombing in 5 minutes.
I'm not advocating any special powers or more bells and whistles. I'm just suggesting a few more ranks that state these folks were generous enough to donate more. Then somewhere on the Sift, have some kind of patron recognition of their names or screen names.
And I'm not trying to open up the advertising issue. I'm merely proposing some folks might not mind giving you more. In no way would I want to upset the egalitarian sensibility around here. However, if some sifters have the means to give more support, shouldn’t we let them.
Some more stats:
Down votes: 800
Number of those that were ant's: 649
We feel that with our growth- we have a "critical mass" and we should be able to attract sponsors. I'm not happy about our current advertising strategy. Google ads don't work that well. Sifters don't click cheap, cheesy ads. It's a reflection on the sophistication of our members.
So, we'd like to phase Google ads out in preference to site partners and sponsorships. Something like this.
If any sifter works for a company or has contacts with one that would like to sponsor us - please get in touch. We are terrible entrepreneurs so you can take total advantage of us.
size != strength
see american empire for details
I eye the future with reserved cynicism.
It's more about the casual non-members that are coming here because we have good taste and our community works well.
"WE'RE BIG AND THAT'S REALLY COOL!"
"BUT WE'RE NOT BIG SO DON'T WORRY!"
10K registered users is a lot, farhad and i are worried about Dunbar's number... We're way past that.
wikipedia
Fundamental question: Who benefits if we get bigger? Sounds like google and the server company are the ones reaping the rewards at the moment.
Extrapolate: What would it be like with 100K users? Why aim there?
basically: WHY VIDEOSIFT? (can i have that on a tshirt please)
Yes, there are downsides to getting bigger- but there is an upside too. More Sifters means more editors, more source material, more people to vet the queue. More people in comments sticking their hands up and saying "I know something about that". or "I speak Swahili" etc, etc.
We love this place- and it is going to continue to grow- but in a good, sustainable way.
Or maybe VideoSift has jumped the shark - let's all pack up and go home. I'll turn off the lights. (sometimes you people depress the hell out of me)
"More people in comments sticking their hands up and saying "I know something about that". or "I speak Swahili" etc, etc. "
that is undoubtedly a very nice advantage of getting bigger. Unfortunately if you are so big the swahili guy never even finds the video because it died in the queue and the search doesn't work properly and people are bad at tagging and the good users are swamped by the bad users... then you are back to square one. I guess strength comes from having a high good/bad user ratio, perhaps regardless of size. Size is a distraction, and is not necessary, especially if you are a bad entrepreneur who doesn't like adverts
But with size, you have a nice easy statistic you can track and applaud... other stuff harder to measure.
but the problem with youtube is that it's totally unmoderated, so it can't possibly be better.
having a large quality site is possible, but of course it's difficult.
the important thing is as user base grows, money incomes should grow too, otherwise there's a problem.
A serious-level interpretation: well digg takes potshots at us - well, a few snarky bitches have done so, saying "duh, ignore the middleman, here's the original YT link" when a link from VS gets posted there. This ignores the maintenance and care that us "middlemen" (and middlewomen) put into making sure the video gardens are groomed properly.
On the idea of special icons for heavier donaters, I always thought (for the past 3 minutes) that a little "moneybags" icon in addition to the star/gem would be appropriate.
Speaking of that wonderful little pledge of shirts to the top 15ers, I would gladly send an electronic envelope in the direction of the Sift for an extra shirt - I mean, if you'll have a shipping cost anyway, might as well make the most of it...
I think distributing power such as banning sure helps to propagate community norms. An example: the 'intellegent design' spammer getting his ass bounced. Distributing power seems to scale up well and resist most attacks.
All hail Siftbot!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zv13ZnkpWos
It just links to a chat window with Siftbot. That's where we ask it nicely to do stuff.
You can raise the charter amount, I'll be there !
Or make a "second level" subscription, more expensive, but which gives access to some extra privilege like *tazer or so ...