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We would also probably stop people from even getting to the submission page if they were over their quota - to alleviate the frustration of pasting your embed code and then being denied.

It might help good vids get thru too. There are some good ones that get posted, but never get a chance to get promoted because it gets flooded to the back of queue in no time.

I don’t want to see us discourage members who are non-gold stars or no stars at all. In my opinion, too much emphasis is being placed on a hierarchy. It undermines the community sensibility. In some comments, some folks have expressed annoyance with the higher ranked. I’d like to suggest going to two posts a day for all of us.

I’m sounding Huey Long-ish here: “Every man a king.” “A chicken in every pot.”

With school starting up again for some, I’m wondering if we should hold up until we’re sure what the normal volume is before making a decision.

While I’m thinking about it . . . what has been the highest and lowest volume for the queue in the last two months? That might help this discussion.

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I agree, SG, the sifting is not optimum at the moment, I'm thinking this will help. My only concern, is that it might mirror a national economy - where the high stars get higher more quickly than than new members because of their higher quota - which could be a little discouraging.

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I agree for the most part dotdude. I would like VS to be as egalitarian as possible. I see hiearchy only as a tool to shape VS into the best service possible, and not an end in itself. I don't have firm stats on volume, but I think the queue got up to 130 at one point yesterday, which is just too much.

Do you really think school will have a negative effect on volume? I see it potentially as increasing it.

"Do you really think school will have a negative effect on volume? I see it potentially as increasing it."


I guess it depends on the work ethic of those members (who will be in school) we've picked up.

Since I have been a teacher, I thought I should point out that variable. Our public school system started today – a week earlier than normal. One local college pushed "starting time" back to September, instead of August, because of the hurricane season.

I realize that the site is still new and it is going to be hard to gauge the norm. Having the queue grow so large is probably discouraging to even our “diehards.” Sifting does take time.

Maybe there needs to be a maximum number limit for the queue - no new posts until the number goes down again.

2 posts each per day should be lots. maybe not by calendar day, but by 24-hour periods? like, you can't post again if you have 2 posts less than 24 hours old.

or else, you could expand the "discard" feature so that anyone can discard their own posts. then you could limit each member to a maximum number of posts in the queue (maybe 3 or 4). so if you post several videos at once to the queue and they get promoted quickly, you're rewarded by being able to post again. but if your videos aren't picking up votes, you have to decide whether to wait and see or discard and try something else.

or else, you could have a 48-hour vote limit inside the queue, so videos that don't "make the cut" after 48 hours (maybe 3 votes?) are deleted right then. right now there's 10 videos in the queue that are more than 2 days old and have one vote or less.

i agree that it's important not to give more posts to members with higher star rankings. but i think you could have a system that gives more posts to members whose posts get promoted quickly. that way, new members with good selections aren't held back just because they're new. and the overall quality of the queue would likely improve if first-time posters couldn't put up three videos in a row from the same TV show.

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That's actually a pretty good idea PM. So, if we set a universal limit on the number of vids a member can have in the queue at any one time.

Perhaps you could take the total number of people who’ve submitted in the queue and determine a quick average of posts per person to the queue. Maybe that would be a place to start.

The top fifteen are all gold members now. There are still many that are not yet gold members. Even if you had a limit of three at time for a group of thirty, that is still 90 in the queue.

Imagine if there was a surge in participation worse than the 130 this week. YEESH.

dag: i don't think it will work unless there's some way for everyone to discard their own videos. otherwise you have to wait for days until your post expires, when you can see right away that it's never going to be popular enough to get promoted. of course, if you *want* to wait to see if people discover your post, you still can...

dotdude: mm, but if the top thirty members all submitted 3 videos each you have to guess that some of them would be good enough to get promoted, right?

one other idea: there could be a "new user" status, where new members can only post one video at a time until they get a video promoted. after that they "graduate" to the same status as everyone else. not sure if that would make much difference...

maybe i just hate seeing a new post to the queue get bumped down by 3 different episodes of the same TV show...

Feel free to chide to me for asking such a stupid question, but why should an upper limit of queued videos (presently set at > 100) be considered a bad thing?

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I think mainly HamFist, because those videos that have been pushed down to page 12 don't get the attention that perhaps they deserve. At least that's my thinking.

Ah the queue.

One obvious solution is to allow / encourage more DOWNVOTES and that'll weed out a lot of the queue.

Along those lines, I think it might be good to experiment with one more sift rule. If a video still has 0 or 1 vote after, say 24 hrs, dump it.

I like the new users can only have one queue post until they make a frontpage post. But I also like the idea of limited number of total vids in the queue. I might just go ahead and nuke one that is stagnating. Maybe *selfdestruct could be allowed for bronze users, etc.

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I like the idea of having a different cull for those vids that have 0 votes after 24 hours, JD.

As far as encouraging down voting, one idea - that was suggested by DeathCow - was to make down voting anonymous, and just to provide a count of down votes, instead of outing the down voters.

anon downvoting? Are you also going to pull the submitters name off the video lists???

I do have a good idea though. Seriously, can you just allocate music.videosift.com to be the same frontpage and functionality, but only list vids that are tagged music???

And another for tv.videosift.com.

You can use the same backend, code, logins, it would just be a customized way to work with music videos, etc.

I dislike the idea of limiting the number of submissions to star level. That's a power law in the making, where only the gold stars stay on the leaderboard. The new users will never have a chance.

Also, just because someone has a gold star means that they're the only folks with the good submissions. We do ourselves a disservice by denying their submissions.

So, the main problem we're trying to solve is to keep the queue small. To keep it small, you need to get people to look at it. That's something I don't have the numbers for. However, I think we can steal a good idea from some other sites: display a few "recently submitted" videos on the main page.

Idea: add another box on the right-hand side with some thumbnail-sized pics of the videos and descriptions of those submissions.

Brainstorming. I'm not saying these are good ideas, I'm just saying that these /are/ ideas:

Idea: add another box (same location) with the top five videos that are close to escaping.

Idea: add the close-to-escaping videos at the bottom of the front page instead, at full-size.

Idea: you could even inline a few random selections from the queue on the main page, intermixed with the rest.

Hope this is clear. It's late and I'm off to bed.

PS I love the idea about preventing the use of the submission page when a user is over their submission limit.

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That's a good point JD, we would probably have to remove the record of their vote in the profile. The music.videosift.com is a stellar idea.

I like the ideas of the boxes oohahh, but we are low on screen real-estate. This probably gets more towards the idea of a re-design, which we are actually planning.

The input I'm getting is that we don't like the idea of assigning a larger quota to higher starred members.

I like a lot of the ideas here - we will take these and synthesize something that combines many of them in the next couple of days. BTW We are approaching our 6-monthiversary on the 16th!

If you guys make a dedicated page for music, you should still make total number of posts for a member one number to share between both queues.

Also, making downvoting annonymous is a bad idea. Accountability is necessary to keeping the integrity of a vote.

Members having more control over their posts is a good idea. A member may post something that didn't get promoted well because of a crowded queue. That member should be able to discard it themselves or repost it as one of their 24 hour posts. If we repost a vid currently in the queue to repromote it tho, we lose the votes it has won, and it starts from scratch.

Number of posts should be the same for all. 1 to 3 in a 24 hour period ..the number being determined to how full the queue is. Limiting the amount of posts in the queue should be limited too. If a member has a total of say 5 total in the queue at one time, they could discard one that isn't doing well in favor of posting a new one in it's place or reposting the old one.

I love this site!

PM's original suggestion re: limit of videos in the queue is pretty good. Couple that with self-discard or a shorter cull for 0/1 vote vids would be good.

Agree with swampgirl that anon downvotes don't sound good to me. And setting a queue post limit based on queue size is also a good idea.

And yeah, we can be more egalitarian in terms of limits, instead of favouring the golden.

In response to oohahh's comment on "list those close to escape": we already effectively have that feature: choose "most votes" under new queue, and you'll get an instant look at those vids.

Egocentric question: I wonder how much my temporarily part-time involvement on VS has added to the queue size inflation?

Though I do not grasp how it addresses the original problem (an ever growing queue), I'm a proponent of joedirt's idea to allow for videos to be associated with a core category and to setup FQDNs (music.videosift.com, for example) strictly for finding and displaying videos in that category.

Other than the obvious code changes required to make available a new level of video association, I think the FQDN thing would be best implemented with Apache's mod_rewrite, which allows you to sneak additional query parameters into the user's request before it is handled by PHP.

but if you do the separate catagories like music.videosift.com among others, would there still be one main front page representing best of all video sift catagories?

For example: Say there were 3 VS catagories, all of which need 7 or more to escape their queues to their respective front pages... then say they need...15 or more votes to escape their catagory to a main page showcasing the most popular of all?

sound too complicated?

In the way I imagined joedirt's idea working out, category sites filter from the primary queue videos which were associated with a specific category. The same amount of votes would be required for the video to escape out of main the queue, at which point the video would appear on the frontpages of both the main site and the category site.

The concept of categorical association addresses the issue dag originally wrote about by splitting the queue up into other queues, though the new queues in the implementation I outlined are soft and could more accurately be described as "psuedo-queues" or "filtered views into a single queue". Another implementation (which your questions illuminated) is to extend the categories into fully fledged queues, each separate from the primary one until a video reaches a certain threshold of votes and it is moved to the main site.

Thoughts on this?

I see that if that happens HM, then the main page would get a bit overloaded, if Sifters post, say two videos per site, then videos may get pushed off the front page too quickly.

Even if Sifters were only allowed two or three posts on all the seperate sites, i see that members may forget about the other sites, or just think of it as too much hassle to swap from site to site.

VideoSifts simple layout is a god-send in the vast void of the World Wide Web. If a Re-Design of the site could keep it simple, but also get people to visit the extra category sites and the queue, then i think extra sites would work.

On the subject of the queue, and too many videos, then maybe some kind of award system would work. Like the stars, but they would only be displayed in that members profile. A system i thought of was if a member voted for a video, and that video went on to be promoted to the front page, or the top 15 list, then that would count as one video promoted, and that would be displayed in the members profile.

Would it work?

what about a percentage post limit on the queue?
queue = 10 vids (shyeah, that'll happen) = 3 posts per member.
queue = 50 vids = 2 posts per member.
queue = 100 vids = 1 post per member.
queue = 150+ vids = 0 posts per member.

this would prevent the queue from going much higher than 150, and would maybe encourage emptying the queue so that you could post.

also, what about an 'abstain' vote? this way we could 'mark' the videos we've already seen... would be the same as a non-vote, but would take the voting buttons away.

and last idea, how about a way to view vids you haven't seen yet? view all vids not voted on or something... would make the queue easier to look at as well... this would tie in nicely with the 'abstain' vote, if you wanted to make sure you didn't see vids that you didn't have a desire to vote on, but don't want to see again...

Ok, like HAM said, my idea was something that require almost no additional work or maintainence. The other catergory.videosift.com sites would just filter this front page and display the music videos only. I suppose you could also have a new video queue, also filtered and only show music videos in the queue. This might be cool, but say you had a strong readership on one category, then technically the front page would start showing more of these types of videos.

Another similar idea is a checkbox at the top that would Display All, Display Music, Display TV, Display Ads, Display Weird, Display Other. And you could check ones of interest. But not as simple or clean.

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The queue size thing is a bad idea to go to 0 posts. Cause lets just imagine 100 new members join in a day. They all post new videos. Guess what, the queue is full and no one can submit. And if its busy, it'll be a camping type thing, one in everytime a video expires. So people will downvote possibly good videos just to be able to post.

One idea is to tell all gold stars (and everyone else if self-discarding is allowed for all) to dump your stale videos when the queue gets big. So after 3 days, you still have 2 votes, well just nuke your stale submission. The honor system. That'll help with maybe like 30% of the overfull queue. I don't find anything wrong with a large queue. It just means the site is growing. Make the time-in-queue shorter. Or make it the staggered time formula.

>2 vote after 24 hrs --> dump
>4 votes after 36 hrs --> dump
>6 votes after 48 hrs --> dump (numbers and times are only examples)

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We've also had a call to make a NSFW filter. I like the graduated dump rules JD. I agree that completely locking down new posts if the queue is full is not a good idea. Better to clear out the unpopular stuff.

I also very much like the graduated queue/cut-off time limit.

Given the 7/8 level cutoff, I suggest that videos above 3 be exempt from the accelerated cut-off. Once they hit 4 it's good to give the vid time to see if it's going to pick up the crucial 5th/6th votes. I'm probably not the only person who, when busy, will only check out whatever's highly ranked in the queue, so that'll definitely help.

And, of course, whenever the # of 5/6/7 vids is low, it encourages people to check out the lower ranked ones - so 3's and 4's should still get plenty of time.

2 and down, though, are usually goners if they don't get much action within the first day or two; allowing the queue to automatically jettison the 1's and 2's (and maybe the 3's) will do the discarding which would otherwise feel 'inappropriate'.

how about a system that makes people actually go through the queue and vote a couple times before they can post more videos wouldn't this help sift the queue faster?

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It would work, but the feedback I'm getting Obsidian, is that members would rather not be forced to do stuff, (understandably).

The Graduated Dump sounds painful, but I like it. I'll also do the Self Dump for our own videos that need flushing.

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Not too painful, we'll put it in soon, explaining it is probably the most painful part. ;-)

While I am still very much a fan of adding category associations and category-filtering subsites (more on that in another blog post), I think pho3n1x's graduated submission throttling idea is the best so far in terms of keeping a reasonably sized queue.

With that said, one of the problems bound to be introduced by throttling is voter haste. Suppose you have a video or two you really want to submit but the queue, being at maximum capacity, accepts no new entries. You may then be compelled to give videos an up or down vote more hastily than you would otherwise.

In concurence with graduated submission throttling, I would also suggest that two new ordering algorithms be added to shakeit.php:

* Order by Most Interesting
* Order by Least Interesting

In this suggestion, 'Interesting' is a measure calculated by [aggregate vote value]/[number of page views]. This would address voter haste by allowing them to quickly identify the videos most likely to exit the queue one way or another.

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I like it HamFist, but I think the complexity of it might lead to a lot of questions being asked about why something was ranked interesting, because page views are not something that are visible to the average user.

However, maybe they should be. I could see a lot of benefit in tracking the amount of times a page has been viewed by unique IPs.

It is sort of doubling up on the voting concept though, and in a lot of ways is not as accurate. We get a lot of links directly to videos from outside sites. A single link from a high-profile site to a so-so video would boost it's page views tremendously.


The beauty of the vote means that even though the page was viewed, if you didn't like it, you don't have to vote for it. I think James mentioned that in one of those interviews, popularity is not a good judge of quality.

That is a good point, dag. Could it be addressed by limiting the conditions under which the number of page views is incremented to when 1.) the viewer is logged in and 2.) the user has not already viewed the video?

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Definitely we could, but I think this only proves that the title was good enough to seduce a member into watching the video. ;-)

You are right in pointing out that 'a compelling title' and 'an interesting video' are two different things, but I disagree with you as to what information unique views captures. Put more accurately, the metric represents the scenario in which a user COULD have voted and from the difference between it and the total number of votes, one can also infer the elusive 'in-between' vote.

Without providing a separate "click here if you thought this video was interesting" link, this is best gauge of interest for a particular submission and I still think it could be incorporated into a better way for users to sort through the queue.

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That's a good point. High registered member view count / low votes = not popular.

It would be kind of like a passive down vote.