Bill O'Reilly's Producer
It's a Sunday in the US, and the oldest post on the bottom of the front page has been published for all of 44 minutes.
We are getting LOTS of volume. Should we jack the queue escape level to 11 or even 12?
My feeling is that the weave in our Sifter has become pretty wide. Big chunks of unsifted flour are falling into the bowl.
We are getting LOTS of volume. Should we jack the queue escape level to 11 or even 12?
My feeling is that the weave in our Sifter has become pretty wide. Big chunks of unsifted flour are falling into the bowl.
What kind of flour are we sifting anyway? White, wholegrain, or germ? I hope it's wholegrain, because that has the bran fiber. Guys our age start to need that, buddy.
For example, let's say we raise the threshold to 12 starting tomorrow, and over the course of the next few weeks that number seems to work out pretty well for quality standards. Then dag, lucky, or James needs to take a statistical snapshot of the membership at that time. For example, let's say we have 300 active members at the moment we go to the 12-vote threshold, and let's define "active member" as any member who's at least voted once during the previous two weeks, just for the sake of argument. ("Active member" could be defined in many different ways, of course, so the definition can be debated now but must be firm if we implement this new process.)
Therefore we will have a 12-vote threshold, for an active membership of 300 people. Doing the math that works out as:
300 members/12 votes = 25 members-per-vote requirement.
Then for a designated period of time, let's say every 3 or 6 months, another membership snapshot needs to be taken by the admins. So let's say 6 months down the road they find we have 340 "active members" (see definition above). By the math it would work out as:
340 members/25 members-per-vote = 13.6 votes, rounding to a 14 vote threshold.
Once this new figure is determined, it can be posted in Sift Talk and profile-messaged to all active members two weeks before the change goes into effect, that way everyone has plenty of notice.
I think if this new process is implemented it would both ensure quality is maintained and hopefully reduce the amount of bitching that inevitably comes whenever a major change takes place. You can point out the numbers to everyone to justify your decision, saying that we're trying to keep things similar to a representative democracy here, so if they don't like it they must be an enemy of freedom and should be sent to Gitmo.
If you can't win them over with reason, then fear is a workable substitute.
Of course this would probably mess up coding but it's just a thought. I have no idea if the system is even plausible, but it might give a more widespread balance before making front page, that way regardless of volume you still get to the quality.
*At 12 hour intervals, the videos posted between 2.5 and 3 days ago will expire, and only the top 20% of those will make it to the front page. This automatically compensates for fluctuations in activity.
*make the threshold higher for short videos than for long videos. The sift has only 12 *long videos above 100 votes. The current reward structure promotes splitting up long documentaries into little sound bites, which is kind of bad. Long videos tend to be of higher quality but a lot of people don't have time to watch them and skip upvoting them.
But when I think about it, the nice thing voting is - it's simple. The more complex the strategies we use to manage a voting system- the more confusion, errors and frustration will emerge. I think now everyone knows that it's 10 votes to escape, so it's a clear goal.
You know the questions that we get on "why did my post suddenly drop off the top 15?" - imagine that cubed if the queue escape was based on an arcane formula.
Upping the escape to 12 alone would slow the publishing rate, but also keep more good videos hiding in obscurity.
The only sure way to keep output at a respectable level is to limit input.
[ed] My solution? I would consider cutting the number of queue slots for everyone by one. And limiting videos going into the personal queue to those with at least 5 votes. Limiting the amount of promoted video could help as well. Perhaps re instituting a time limit on when a published video can be promoted to say 2 months.
i had had quite alot of my videos sift in 2 and a half day though...
No harm in trying this though
Oh, and everything that fails to sift should always go to PQ. You can of course choose to discard your own video if you think its a lost cause, or does not belong
kp had some good ideas there already. maybe it is also a good idea to take the votes/views ratio into account and to measure something like the popularity within a timeframe (the 2 queue days)