first question i would have is, what would your request:

"Can we please remove all the rewards
for the quantity of published videos in excess of 100?"

...actually do?
is there a better remedy, for the issue you go on to describe?

I suspect lots of people are grinding to 250 in the hopes of getting a channel, instead of just sifting for the love of sifting, if you know what I mean. And I suspect further that this is decreasing the quality of the content. If all gold star and up users are treated equally, that problem is reduced. But then what better way do we have to decide who gets to make channels? I don't know. Maybe channel creation should require a petition of 6 members and approval by the benevolent dictator.

ok. that was one of the things i was driving at, yes. channel creation.
and maybe it is more of a carrot, than i think, to some sifters, as you say.

another thing i frequently did while reading your post, though?
was mentally insert, with some fair frequency...

[citation needed]

Or ditch some of the stuff that gets the mediocre videos through in the first place. Beggar's Abyss has no value, and probies really shouldn't be voting.

I've been saying something similar for quite a while now; that the competitive aspects of VS are decreasing the quality of the submissions. The MMO-ishness has the same effect. I haven't proposed any solutions, myself.

I also feel the same about "so bad it's good" content. See my comment on a somewhat related discussion from 8 months back.

If someone wants tons of horrible videos, browse YouTube.

>[citation needed]

It was truthy when I looked it up in my gut.

does anyone think raising the siftvote instead, would be a better way?

say, from 10 to 12?

the site now has about 1000 non-P accounts, after all.
at least a quarter of those are here daily.
and there's generally about 50 of those accounts on here at a time.

I do find that there's more video now that I won't upvote and I do have a reasonably broad range of interests.
I'm in agreement with my15minutes. Raise the threshold to 12. It'll make the fringe stuff I submit virtually impossible to sift but what the hell.

I like Beggars Canyon and have found some interesting material that clearly the submitter thought was worth spending a power point on.

Raising the vote threshold is only going to continue to choke the site with TDS, ZP and other stuff with a ready following. If you want to improve the quality of the videos, improve the quality of the voters.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

Removing voting power from P's is an interesting idea. So we'd give all the power to old Sifters and the quality would trickle down to the P people. That's some Voo-Doo Siftonomics.

I would imagine that the perceived drop in quality is more of a byproduct of the large increase in users now versus a few months ago. What I mean by that is that the bigger the community gets, the wider the scope of videos is going to get -- weirder stuff that may not interest most people probably has more of a chance of getting through now than before. Also, as the community gets bigger and bigger the "lowest common denominator" factor gets bigger and bigger.

I think that this community is growing and evolving, and I don't think any amount of grousing or trying to change the way the site works is going to bring it back to "the good old days". In some ways the site is better now than before, and in some ways it's worse. But that's the thing, isn't it -- you have to take the bad with the good. What are you going to do, tell people which videos to vote for? Stand over their shoulders and say "NO, that video's stupid, don't vote for that"? Isn't it a tad elitist to say that what's popular on the site right now is "irrelevant bullshit" just because it doesn't meet your standard of what's good and what's bad?

I'd say another part of this equation is the whole "camaraderie" factor. Whether you like it or not, there are a number of cliques and a fair amount of friendships that have developed on this site. This can have an effect on the personal vote. So what do you we do to offset that? I say ban anybody who becomes friends.

But seriously, we need to look at changing the dynamics of the personal queue. For example if a video has a number of unique views but under a certain amount of votes, it bypasses the queue altogether and is discarded. Pretty much, you have to maintain a ratio to the video to not be discarded at the end of it's unsifted lifetime.

for example...if you have 30 unique views your video must have 3 votes. 40 unique views, 4 votes and so on. Of course these are just examples.

The only problem I foresee is friends voting videos up just to save it from sudden death.

Sarzy nailed it down completely. This happens with any site that keeps growing, and like Sarzy said, you have to take the bad with the good. At one point I became upset about this situation too and distanced from the site, but now I don't care, I will keep posting whatever I think deserves to be watched, if it gets to the front page, fine if it does not, then fine. If at least a few people watch it and like it that's enough for me.


We have tools to filter a lot of stuff here. I have had to use them more often as the site grows.

I don't know if the option is there or not, but is there a way to just list the Pqueued posts of everyone? if there isn't one then I think it would be a good idea to do that, instead of just beinh able to view them on the profiles.

One thing that makes me sad is seeing how if you go to the top videos of all time, more than half seem to be about the election or video games wtf is up with that? matt damon is among the best videos ever submitted here? he was talking about Palin, I mean come on.

But yeah, as the site grows we end up having to videosift Videosift.com if you know what I mean. I just hope it does not get to the point where we have to videosift the videosift of Videosfit.com!!!

Don't get me wrong, I am not saying we should just leave this problem alone, but realize what happens when a community gets bigger.

I'm against removing voting power from Probies -- That's how I started here, after all. I signed up for an account to vote on videos, then a couple of years later, I got tired of my red 'P' and sifted a video of a guy building a homebrew handheld SNES. Now I'm a few points away from silver star, and while my videos are not all highbrow art, I think there's some good stuff in there. I doubt I would have gotten involved on the site without probationary voting.

Personally I think the site should be moving in a direction of greater customization rather than trying to control the type of videos that get promoted and the culture of the site. Decide on what kind of stuff you want to show the public (unregistered accounts), and then make the site very customizable for registered accounts so it's easy to find what you're looking for. I think VideoSift already does a good job of that, but I'd rather continue walking down that road rather than trying to otherwise restrict what gets promoted.

If grinding up stars for powers is really a huge concern, then maybe the solution is adding other requirements to gain those powers. Some of that already exists in charter memberships -- Some powers are only available to donors of the site. Perhaps a member has to spend a certain amount of time on the site before they can create channels, or view a certain number of videos, or own an existing channel before they can create a new one.

I want a channel, I'm going for 250. But I don't really go at a break neck pace, I've been here for 2 years and still only have a Star-100. Some people are just more crazy than others.

I dig the site as is.

Farhad has a site called videocult where only moderators can submit videos and there is no voting. There is a possibility they might even let you join if they deem your sifts worthwhile.

From my observations artsy or educational videos tend not to get sifted. The funny stupid videos last 10 seconds get a laugh and an up vote. We could require everyone to pass an art appreciation test before they can vote on videos.

The main problem I think is the amount of videos that are in the queue at one time: it's no longer possible to do proper quality control. The pace is too fast and less mainstream videos are having great difficulty getting 10 votes, especially when posted at times when sifters in the United States working or are asleep.

This means:
-lowering the maximum amount of videos in a member's queue
and/or
-increase queue time of submitted videos
and/or
-lower the amount of votes needed to get a video sifted

edit: (additional measures, trying to make a more comprehensive list)
-decrease the amount of members allowed to vote
and/or
-make it harder to have an x amount of voting power
and/or
-limit the amount of votes per x time unit
and/or
-start curating (additional to sorting in playlists/channels and voting) a part of the site by (a) group(s) of members

>> ^Eklek:
The main problem I think is the amount of videos that are in the queue at one time: it's no longer possible to do proper quality control. The pace is too fast and less mainstream videos are having great difficulty getting 10 votes, especially when posted at times when sifters in the United States working or are asleep.
This means:
-lowering the maximum amount of videos in a member's queue
and/or
-increase queue time of videos
and/or
-lower the amount of votes needed to get a video sifted


to add to that, does it not make sense to increase the amount of queue time for long videos?

Longer amount of content, should go hand in hand with a longer amount of time in queue, because people watch 2, 3, 4 videos in the same amount of time it takes to watch a SINGLE long video and are able to see if they are worth a vote because they are short; then it is only fair to give long videos more time so that more people have the chance to see them in their entirety and decide if it deserves a vote or not.

I still contend that 10 votes are hard to get.

Matters of taste in videos are going to vary around here. Individual definitions of quality are also going to vary.

Personal Queue - um, doesn't the word "personal" mean it's up to individual sifter how many vids are kept in there?

^rottenseed


Well, that wasn't funny at all. Be funny again. Entertain me. What's with all these serious posts from you? Say something funny, puppet. Dance for me. Make me laugh.

What if we had a 'cream of the crop' section, reserved for truly exceptional videos, nominated by Gold Stars and above?

Would cat fart videos be allowed?

I don't think changing the queue escape threshold will have the intended effect. Lowering it will allow everything to get through, raising it will result in only the lowest common denominator videos through.

How about we limit the number of votes each user can cast per day (or week). That would hopefully cause users to consider their votes much more carefully.

Initially, I was thinking we could make it a progressive scale (1/day for probies, 3/day for non-stars, 5/day for bronze, etc.). But after reflection, I think that would undermine some of the benefits of reduced voting.

Also, I would really like to see the way channel filtering works reversed. Instead of filtering out the channels we don't want, I think it would work much better if we selected the channels we do want. It's not a perfect filtering solution, but I think overall it would work better than the current system. Credit goes to looris for this idea - he suggested it over a year ago, but it never got much traction.

One thing Eklek said I found thought-provoking:

-lowering the maximum amount of videos in a member's queue

That MIGHT relieve Sift congestion, and therefore it MIGHT improve overall quality. I don't have a crystal ball, so I don't know if it would work or not. Still, if we lower the maximum amount of videos in a member's queue, this should lower the total number of queued videos at any given time, correct? With less queued videos, members MIGHT take the time to view videos they normally would skip over, and then be pleasantly surprised by a gem that would have otherwise gone unnoticed by them. (Yes, I'm talking about Eklek's videos.)

Mind you that this is all conjecture, if the all-caps MIGHTs weren't enough of a tipoff. Still, I'd be willing to see queues drop from 3 to 2 for non-charter members and from 6 to 4 for charter members for maybe a month or so, just to see what would happen. However I'm pretty sure I'd be in the minority on that, because once you give someone a benefit it's hard to take it away. So feel free to cast aspersions on me, my family, my pets, and my country if you disagree.

I like how things work now.

>> ^kronosposeidon:
-lowering the maximum amount of videos in a member's queue
That might relieve Sift congestion, and therefore it MIGHT improve overall quality.

I thought about this one for a while. I think the benefit would be minimal, similar to reducing the queue lifetime. Prior to the change to 2 days, there were typically about 300-320 vids in the queue, immediately afterwards that dropped to around 260-280, and it quickly rose back up to about 300. It's a diminishing returns thing - as time goes on, we'll be back where we are now. I'm not saying it wouldn't help at all, just that it would be a minimal benefit. Like KP, though, I don't have a crystal ball - this is just an educated guess.

Selfishly, I wonder if the charter members would be willing to start the idea. Would charters be willing to drop to 5 vids in the queue, while leaving the non-charters at 3? Again, I think the benefit would be minimal, especially considering many charters rarely keep 6 vids in the queue. Just thought I'd throw it out there, though. It may give an indication of how well the larger idea would work without as drastic a change.

I disagree with this post, you can never have too much Bill Oreilly, the more you watch him the smartur you get.

I personally like how things are but, if there is a problem, it's not the submissions, it's the votes. Changing the queue sizes won't affect that. Especially if they're decreased by the same ratio for everyone. Same goes for changing time that it's queued or votes that it needs to sift. If only one cute kitten video (or whatever it is you think is not SiftWorthy) can be published at a time, then it will, if people vote for it.

>> ^my15minutes:
ok. that was one of the things i was driving at, yes. channel creation.
and maybe it is more of a carrot, than i think, to some sifters, as you say...


If people have the channel carrot hanging in front of them and they're after it, I think that's a positive, and the way it was intended. It means they're interested in being a part of and having an impact on this site. You certainly can't get one overnight, it takes quite a few months at the very least, and anyone who hits 250 deserves one.

>> ^gorillaman:
Or ditch some of the stuff that gets the mediocre videos through in the first place. Beggar's Abyss has no value, and probies really shouldn't be voting.


Beggars canyon does have value. It's not just about getting mediocre videos through. It's another chance to get some attention for your submissions that others might have missed. I've had several videos sifted by using it and once they published they got decent votes. It's also the only thing, besides *.beg that you can spend a power point on until you are gold (unless you buy points or are charter). You may be right on probies voting, though I'm certain a lot of people do come here to just enjoy the videos and vote on the ones they like. I think VS would lose significant traffic if they couldn't.

Not everything on this site has to be the best of the best. Sometimes people just need to chill out and have a quick laugh. If they're enjoying whatever the latest idiotic video is, there's nothing wrong with that.

There's tons of filtering options and ways to view this site. I think the default listing for unsifted videos should be changed to newest queue date so that people who are interested in catching up or doing "quality control" can just scroll through the submissions as they were posted. I also think people need to get over down voting. If you really have a hard on for videos that aren't good enough to be here then vote them down. If the community agrees with you, then problem solved. But, I'm sure if I looked I'd find every one of us has voted for stupid shit.

I have a more radical suggestion: Increase the value of the vote. Think of votes as currency. We're suffering from inflation here. We've got an unlimited supply of votes to spend on anything and everything. From the voters' perspective, there's little to no reason not to vote something up.

Cap the total number of votes each sifter has per day. Suddenly those votes have value and voters will want to use them more selectively. I suspect that under such a system, downvote would be obsolete.

I realize this would be a radical change to the way the Sift works, but think about it. How radical the change is could be controlled by how many votes-per-day are allowed. Something ridiculously low, like 5, would cause people to be really stingy with those votes and would be a drastic change. Something ridiculously high, like 500, would have little to no impact at all.

The problem at the core of the corporate media is thus: to cynically produce whatever the most people will swallow, even when the producer knows better.

^videosift has the same problem.

are we really still having this debate? the structure of the sift favours bullshit impulse funny videos, and fiery debates on news programmes... so that's what you get. this attracts more bullshit members who vote only for that kind of video. these members are promoted by collecting votes from the other retards on here.

it's called a feedback loop and it's not pretty.

this has all been known for many years.

just about every change that the admins have made since getting rid of collectives has worsened this problem. it IS possible to make a system that sifts better, but they are not interested in doing that, as has been stated in a million threads about "the good old days".

the fact is most people are morons and if you let them all in to boost your traffic numbers you end up with worse content on your site.

now we even have fucking escalopter.com jesuschristinabucket.

I post a group of videos, with one thrown in that isn't particularly interesting to see what will happen.

However most of the posts I send in are videos that I think will arouse good discourse. However my wife sometimes asks me to post cute kitteh or animal videos.

HEnce the kitten talk one that i posted ... a year ago.

I think once someone hits 500 star points, they should be removed from daily Sift activity and placed in the Sift Hall of Fame, where famous Sifters go to die. Then once a year, on Yom Kippur, we all take a field trip (if our parents sign the permission slips) to see the old-timers in all their glory. After returning home, we can lock the probies in dungeons made of cat fart videos, and not let them leave until they promise to submit a thoughtful, inspiring video of the quality that is expected on the Sift. Anything less, and they will be subjected to waterboarding until they realize the error of their ways. Once they submit a video of the highest quality, they will be allowed out of the dungeon in order to vote on a few videos per day. But only a few. That way they don't get a big head and try to become a Bronze Crown overnight! We must control the population through sifting sterilization and enhanced interrogation techniques. After all, I imagine these probies know of other probies who are lurking around, waiting to find a Bill O'Reilly video to vote up. Oh, the humanity!

A great improvement to the sift would be to give me the 90's channel.

The top 15 is so consistently poor that I've actually started watching TV again.

The Art of Sifting.
1. Seems the shorter a video, the more views/voting.
2. The more you sift and comment, the more friends/enemies you'll make, thus more views/voting.
3. A serious election year will inevitably and justifiably mean more political videos; cut the hogwash bellyaching.
4. Comedy is king.
5. Music is the opposite of the aforementioned.
6. Employ a nifty avatar.
7. Rock the boat.
8. One hand washes the other.
9. The tenth vote is crucial.
10. Beggars canyon is a dark and dreary alley, chalk-full of despair, disappointment, loneliness, and regret.

>> ^MrFisk:
The Art of Sifting.
1. Seems the shorter a video, the more views/voting.
2. The more you sift and comment, the more friends/enemies you'll make, thus more views/voting.
3. A serious election year will inevitably and justifiably mean more political videos; cut the hogwash bellyaching.
4. Comedy is king.
5. Long is the opposite of the aforementioned.
6. Employ a nifty avatar.
7. Rock the boat.
8. One hand washes the other.
9. The tenth vote is crucial.
10. Beggars canyon is a dark and dreary alley, chalk-full of despair, disappointment, loneliness, and regret.


Fixed.

Take the voting power of the Piggers then we'll at least get rid of stuff like http://www.videosift.com/video/The-most-amazing-ukelele-playing-you-will-ever-see-Jake-Shimabukuro and similar aberrations. Piggers aren't real sifters, anyway. Their bodies are more adept at ocular labor than sifting. We should make a Pegrosift, only for P's where the colors are inverted.

Damn Piggers.

^Hmm, I was semi-serious and semi-laughing my ass off while I wrote that. I do think that we could make the sift better by taking away the voting powers of P-members, so that they have to earn it like downvoting.

>> ^xxovercastxx:
I have a more radical suggestion: Increase the value of the vote. Think of votes as currency. We're suffering from inflation here. We've got an unlimited supply of votes to spend on anything and everything. From the voters' perspective, there's little to no reason not to vote something up.
Cap the total number of votes each sifter has per day. Suddenly those votes have value and voters will want to use them more selectively. I suspect that under such a system, downvote would be obsolete.
I realize this would be a radical change to the way the Sift works, but think about it. How radical the change is could be controlled by how many votes-per-day are allowed. Something ridiculously low, like 5, would cause people to be really stingy with those votes and would be a drastic change. Something ridiculously high, like 500, would have little to no impact at all.


I've been thinking something along the lines of this too, though mostly in a sarcastic, tongue-in-cheek way.

What we need is false scarcity! Let's make it so "votes" work like money. Posting a video is free, and each vote your video receives goes into your "bank". You can vote for a video as many times as you like, each one subtracted from your bank, but you can't vote for your own videos.

You can downvote videos, but it'd still count as an "upvote" in the recipient's bank, it'd just lower the vote count for "quality" purposes. You can downvote as many times as you like, though it may ultimately be counterproductive.

There is no such thing as pqueues, promotes, begs (they're socialist anyways) and the front page is Top Sifts, not Hot/New.

That way free market principles will surely allow choice to bring us the highest quality videos possible.

Then we just change the site to "LibertarianSift", and siftbot's name to randroid, and we're good to go.

Getting back to seriousness though, I do think we should look into increasing vote count and queue time both, and shifting the default front page to newness instead of hotness. I think the hot = frontpage is exacerbating some of the problems people are complaining about (i.e. too much sensational, not enough sublime).

A way to get more quality, is to value many votes rather than many sifts with average votes. If a given sift also gave a starpoint at 50 votes and 100 votes and so on, perhaps the quality would improve.