It's been almost 5 months since the release of VideoSift 3.1 - and we're getting that itchy feeling again.
We'd like some ideas, criticism and discussion around what to put into the next major VideoSift release. To start things off, here are some questions:
We'd like to de-clutter the sidebar on the main site. Which panels do you find the least useful from those in the sidebar?
How can we improve the design and layout of the site to make it easier to use?
What feature is under-utilised but really useful if only people knew about it?
From an aesthetic standpoint - how can we make VideoSift more attractive?
(this last one is a toughie - because it's subjective, but many of us spend hours a day looking at this site - so there's no harm in thinking about the fluffy stuff)
Looking forward to a good (positive?) discussion.
We'd like some ideas, criticism and discussion around what to put into the next major VideoSift release. To start things off, here are some questions:
We'd like to de-clutter the sidebar on the main site. Which panels do you find the least useful from those in the sidebar?
How can we improve the design and layout of the site to make it easier to use?
What feature is under-utilised but really useful if only people knew about it?
From an aesthetic standpoint - how can we make VideoSift more attractive?
(this last one is a toughie - because it's subjective, but many of us spend hours a day looking at this site - so there's no harm in thinking about the fluffy stuff)
Looking forward to a good (positive?) discussion.
As far as aesthetics go, I think the site looks great. It has one of the best interfaces of all the other video sites that are out there. As far as sidebars go, the "useful pages", "video hosts", and "subscribe" I think could all stand to go. Although useless the donor boxes are nice because they recognize the Sifters who go the extra mile to help the site.
"Top 15 users" ... now that one could probably stand to go. That list never changes and is easily assessable from the top of every page.
The same goes for the tag cloud. I know I never use it, and it is huge.
The "hot tab" still bears the flaming red ass, but is it still beta?
Thats all I can think of for now, but I'm sure I'll have more to say on the subject later. Thanks for listening.
[edit] Please, just no frames.
I feel a lot for the neighbour system they have @ the last.fm community..it would be great to have it @VideoSift
*As can be read in a recent thread, I and others like VS to become a more mature community where members want to stay and new members feel welcome.
----
*Declutter the sidebar:
-Maybe the donor sidebars could be made smaller/integrated into one?
-The "recently discarded" bar these days often contains discarded dupes
*Layout/design:
-Some of the sidebars are quite long..maybe make the content small and have 2 rows in one bar.
*The advanced search is very versatile and I think underused.
(the only thing I miss now is to be able to seach in a channel or multiple selected channels (e.g. all dark+fear+geek posts)
*Attractiveness
Maybe do something more with the logo/top menu bar.
Chalk up another vote for the tag cloud; get rid of it.
...until I'm on it.
Um, I'd have to say the recently discarded is a meaningless sidebar thingy. How about the ability to watch a random video by the push of a button. Also, this feature would be cable of channel filtering.
video host list: auto hide upon getting gold since you can get from any host by that point
A VS members page would cool. Call it "Community" or something.
-- You could have the full ranking of the site on it plus other stats like most votes this week, fastest rising member of the month, highest rated comments, expanded donors list, users online etc...
You should tighten up the real estate on the front page. The front page should be ALL about attracting visitors and being user friendly to the light users of the site. Think FUN!
--Trim up the front page. I know the donor part is important, but one list is enough plus the donate button, and more could be put on the "community" page ::wink::
--Only the Top Users of the Week should be on the front and the Top 15 well... would be on the "community" page along with everyone else.
--It would be nice to move things around on the side to fit how we use it.. drag and drop sort of thing
OR
--Instead of scrolling down down down to see everything on the side, you could have it wrap up neat and compact under videos.
Oh and HUGE YES on being able to add comments in a drop down w/o having to open a new window. Quicker commenting would be more fun.
--Along with the quicker commenting, a jump arrow to the bottom and top of the page would be very handy. We check on these long threads all the time and we scroooolll
hmm... sidebar... yeah that could use cleaning:
video host list: auto hide upon getting gold since you can get from any host by that point
For those of us that enjoy reading these... again a "Community" page would solve all of this.
reinstall 2.0 (just kidding, sorta)
remove comment voting.
remove "ignore member".
raise sift threshold to 20 or 30, or whatever is proportional to the number of users a year ago. who cares if some people moan... read the title of the page, it says "quality control" not "we want you to be sifted as much as possible so you can get a gold star in 3 months with cat/clinton videos".
give me a favourite sifters list. i don't use RSS. and please don't then derive some rube goldberg "popularity metric" from the data.
flag adhom, it's worse than spam, and it's the only thing comment voting was supposed to combat anyway, and the only thing that should be "ignored/censored/downvoted" rather than challenged with actual words and intellect.
stop making deals with shitty advertisers. you'll get more donations anyway if you stop acting so retarded.
understand that growth is not necessarily good. if you lose 50% of your members it would be no bad thing (depending on which 50% you lose...) and at least the server would cost less. Reduce stress on the server, rather than adding to it. Focus on quality control, not handwringing inclusivity. Value your best members, not "the cloud", and learn to live with Dunbar's Number. Then you will find more people donate more because they will actually give a shit.
do as much as possible to restrict access and page requests and serverside processing for leeching lurkers and Ps. Participation should have rewards. You don't need thousands of more new users anyway, only the dedicated ones. If, as a P, all I could do was watch the top 15 every day and try to post my P-busting Sift, and that wasn't enough to make me want to join the community and see what's inside, why would you want me here anyway? Why give me all the candy for free and let me upvote crap and comment on shit with my tiny inactive nonparticipatory mind? How many users do you actually NEED? Do you think you can actually sell this crap to microsoft for $40 a share or something? I know you don't. Better to just try and have fun and find nice videos, even if that means (god forbid... elitism!) restricting membership to "only those people who try hard for a long time". Ban Ps who don't Sift. put a little "zzZZ" inactivity logo next to people who have had an empty queue for more than 2 weeks. Ban them after 6 months. Use it or lose it.
enforce proper tagging. badly tagged sifts should be suspendable by senior members. why should we have to edit the tags just because some noob is too dense to understand that "star, wars" is retarded tagging? why allow noobs to be lazy? "oh fuck it, some gold star will fix it or maybe he can't be bothered to fix it because he is busy posting his own videos and i will get away with my crappy data entry..." ... just give seniors a "bad tags" button. If people abuse it, ban them or demote them to bronze. If people think their tags were good, they can PM the guy who suspended them, and find out the answer. Job done. I would spend time to explain this to a noob, but i am not just going to fix it for him. Give a man a fish... etc.
introduce a time capsule for all sifts where we can add info to help resurrection if the clip dies. sometimes i don't want to spoil the joke or the ending, or clog up the description with boring details, but i do want to leave future undeaders enough info to find the clip.
calculate star points by posts and undeads ONLY, not freaking "applauded comments" and all that other crap. people seem to consider "100 posted videos" to be a "real" gold 100 anyway, so formalise that consensus.
don't worry if people complain that it's harder to get clips sifted. FUCK IT. who cares if you get sifted? Who cares if you only just joined and now the threshold is raised to 30. Who cares? it's just a game. fill your pqueue. share clips with your friends. You can't all be on the damn front page every day. (and the people who think about rankings all the time are shitty sifters anyway, so why encourage them?)
DO worry if senior dedicated quality members complain about the level of quality on here. Don't just sit back and say "hey that's freedom and the wisdom of crowds"... FIGHT that information meltdown. Do something about it. This site is POINTLESS if it's hard to find good videos here. The fact that there is an emergent consensus that cats are cute is NOT a laudable achievement of your algorithm, or a fair reflection of the tastes of the community. It's just more proof that cats are cute and perfect for short low res movies. 10 upvotes from a for ANOTHER cat video and you get a star point? wtf? What have you added to the archive or the community?
Explain "Hot" to me.
I remember when it was a fascinating game to see which videos would sift, and which would not. I felt like I was testing my intellect against the finest minds on the internet. The quirky vids that didn't sift were anyway applauded by the friends that mattered to me. Now it's just bullshit. Cut the dead wood.
Your name is VideoSIFT. your slogan is QUALITY CONTROL.
So let's have some more sifting, quality, and control.
Ignore member is a bad thing.
I'm here as much for the comments as for the videos, and the top comments help with that.
Mink: "do as much as possible to restrict access and page requests and serverside processing for leeching lurkers and Ps"
That's just foolish. There are twice as many lurkers as there are contributers.
Many of the boxes in the right bar need to be removed, to clear up clutter. Basically all the static ones, imo.
These days you need to browse through 50 videos just to find a few you want to watch.. you may as well go straight to YouTube and browse around there for things you are interested in [or type random words into the search engine and maybe find something unusual]
There's barely anything in the top 15 that I like, and the number of published videos is insane... the sifting net appears to have a large hole in the bottom!
God help you if you leave it a whole week before checking the site.
Anyways, raising the number of votes required before something sifts = good thing. if you want to check out all the videos that have been posted, then you can visit the unpublished page! Maybe then you are also more likely to catch the interesting videos that haven't been making it...
It might also have the advantage that turnaround of a person's queued vids will slow down.... meaning 'major submitters of videos' will have more time to browse the Sift or look for the real quality videos elsewhere.
In terms of comment voting, I like the idea of being able to see who liked/ disliked your comment.. it's nice. (comment voting is broken on youtube but it seems to be ok here for now)
However, I dislike the fact that you can get star points from comments (especially when people keep getting star points just for typing something like "Congrats!" into one of the 'hey, such and such is a gold member now!' threads. The warm fuzzy feeling/ getting your comment featured should be enough for you.
I'd like the ability to fix embed code even though I am a lowly member..
The 'cloud tag' and 'Current Users' could go.
Star points should only be good for earning promotes or trading like currency.
I think I'm not the only old head around here that felt a twang of guilt when we earned our last high rank before actually publishing that amount.
Raise the publish limit to 15 (or 20) votes to escape the queue. Since we have our pqueues now, we still have our loves available for viewing.
We could use the challenge. Lets make it tougher to get them published. We'll work harder for the good stuff and the front page will be more interesting... more exciting
current users, donors, top 15 users (both), comments and blog section can all go under some sort of separate community page like swampgirl suggested. i also like the idea of separate tag cloud page and eklek's idea of a neighbour system (last.fm is indeed a good example).
i'd leave top 15 expiring videos, top 15 new videos by vote and videos being viewed right now in the sidebar. and loose the "beta" on hot tag. as for design - i like it clean, simple & functional.
I also agree with mink on the issue of getting stars for commenting and sift talk posts. instead i propose some sort of rating system that would be independent from video voting.
i like the idea of tagging inactive user. temporary ban after 6 months and instaban in another 3 is not so radical, I think.
threshold - raise it to 12 and see where it takes us.
promoted videos should have more weight than the rest. the more video was promoted, the higher rating (+ number of total votes, also take into account number of downvotes in the equation). I also propose each member gets a chance to promote one video per day that is older than 6 months. use powerpoints for self-promote and promoting newer videos. I found lots of gems that deserve promotion just sitting there not getting any attention...
one thing about the dead videos that bothers me - every once in a while i feel the urge to undead some good videos from the deadpool. make it so that you can fix as many videos as you like (i don't know why but sometimes, when I've already been awarded star point for the first fix, i get these 403 messages - what is that?). loose the gold star awards for fixing dead videos (same thing as with comments, integrate this into separate award system and put it all under "community" page... but you could give out another 48 hour queue slot for bringing back from the dead 5 videos in a week or something like that. same could go for comments and sift talk quality awards.
tagging is sometimes terrible. and senior members are not excluded from this. if you want an example of good tagging look for eklek's posts.
you should read Fedquip's article on VS it would be super awesome if we could somehow post other related videos in the comment section. if such link is then recognised by the community as relevant and useful (again, some kind of quality control would have to be put in place) the video would then get permanently embeded in the comments section. maybe this could be also extended to pictures and audio files but that's pushing a lot, i know...
edit: forgot one thing - dupes. people should be responsible for posting them. there's too much of that happening just because people are fucking lazy and I for one would like to see them squirm a bit - maybe shorten their time in queue for one of their unsifted videos ever time they fuck up? it happens to all of us but some people never learn.
-Threaded comments would be nice.
-A quick access friends list would help to more quickly navigate to a particular sifters page without having to randomly search the site or bookmark. Yes, I am lazy.
-It would be nice to have some way of being alerted to new comments on old sifts.
and even though I've been against raising the escape limit beyond 10 in the past, there simply may be no choice but to raise it (15 or 20 is a bit high though, try 12).
Sorry about the length. Hope you guys find this useful.
I know there's a lot of wild stuff, but instead of self-censoring/limiting, I thought I would put it all out there and see what can happen.
Suggested Changes:
Suggested Commenting functionality
Suggested Ajax add-ons:
Suggested Right pane management:
Suggested Main menu tab list:
It's growing - and maybe facing growing pains, but some of these items are similar.
I see sift-related tabs, community-supporting tabs and user-specific tabs.
Perhaps a two-rowed tabs would be better?
I know there is already a pseudo-2nd row there right now...these items (Submit a video, Support) should be gathered into a box in the right pane as they do not change with the tab (gives a false sense of tab-specific functionality)
I suggest the following break-down of 4 Main tabs (more like 3 + search) and tab-specific Second tab menu hierarchy:
No sense in having public users access the community if they do not have a user account, right? Plus also it just may confuse anonymous/public users to see playlists and the talk pages and the blogs when all they want to see are videos.
I suggest anonymous/public users see a tab that says "Open an account", and when they do, they see the following two tabs:
(this is always good to have everywhere)
Stars Ranking order names (The "Second-to-last section, I swear" section)
This may be just opinion, but I think the stars ranking can be more logical. If using the theme Bronze, Silver, Gold,, then continue as such: Bronze Diamond, Silver Diamond, Gold Diamond, Bronze Crown,. I know, it's just the Gold 100 that throws it all off, but I wonder if there are others scratching their heads as to whre the Gold Diamond is.
Bonus! Last section! Siftbot!
Perhaps added invocations, using a separate invocation character (#perhaps?) for users with stars Gold and above to request information on a video from Siftbot. Like #dead to find out if the video has been dead before, how many times, and when was the last.
Perhaps there should be a dynamic drop down (uses css:visible call) for users to 'sift-out' invocation responses from Siftbot. These can be lengthy.
OH NO! Another one? Please stop! [Facebook thumbnail]
Gotta fix the thumbnail embed when people post on Facebook. I share stuff on Videosift with friends on Facebook, and VS (or Facebook) never gets the thumbnail right. It's a slew of other videos, or I can use the VS logo. If this could be fixed, I (and others I'm sure) wouldn't have to get the original YouTube URL (or whatever source) to share on Facebook (and perhaps other social networking sites?).
The current 10 votes to be posted / 2 days in the queue is not satisfactory.
12 votes may be a solution and put more focus on the quality of videos, but then again I also think it has become harder to find good videos. As there are more videos in the pool, the niche videos need more exposure:
What about having both the new sifted and unsifted (via a clickable tab that opens this list) videos in the individual channels?
I like MINK's time capsule idea, meaning hidden spoilers tags I guess?
Bad tag policing may work, but I think one could also make it obligatory to fill three? separate tag spaces with at least 1 tag of max. x characters when submitting a video. Those 3 are published as one string of tags.
What about a separate site statistics page, where we can see e.g. top (15/overall) members (of the week), new non-starred members, tag cloud, recently discarded posts, recently promoted posts, amount of views/hits per dag/week/month, an interactive real-time graph of VS-posts featuring their quantity of votes over time et cetera.
Transform SiftTalk into the proposed Community page, where there's this forum, who's online, latest blog entries, recent channel talk and on top of the page an introduction? text/links..
flag adhom, it's worse than spam, and it's the only thing comment voting was supposed to combat anyway, and the only thing that should be "ignored/censored/downvoted" rather than challenged with actual words and intellect.
what's the worst that can happen, we discourage arseholes from posting arseholey comments? (myself included)
Maybe something like a new tab that would go through the old sifts (8+ months?) pick a good one and put it at the top of he list.
Indeed: advertise "Open an account!" to lurkers and new visitors!
I just read the second comment of Fedquip's post: it seems that some people somehow don't know anyone can sign up!?
Not sure if we need to hide the community part to visitors.
Also a (subscribe to) friends system may have undesired consequences as discussed in the "ignore function" thread. I'd prefer only a neighbour system.
We don't have to wait on that. We can raise the queue escape level to 20 now. Who's with me?
We don't have to wait on that. We can raise the queue escape level to 20 now. Who's with me?
I'd say 15, personally... doubling the required votes seems kinda drastic in one step. Though if that still isn't enough then yeah 20, or even higher...
After reading through everything - one thing I'm hearing very clearly is that the queue escape level is too low and not enough filtering is happening.
We don't have to wait on that. We can raise the queue escape level to 20 now. Who's with me?
I'm with you dag!I misread. I thought he was talking about comment upvoting.
I'm not with you dag!
I'm imagining a type of slider on the main page - that slides to sensitivity of the votes to appear - where videos are sifted from more or less depending on the 'granularity' setting of the sift slider.
We're almost going there anyway, with the Sift, Unsifted, Hot, Top, PQueue, Promoted...
Have the users use a slider, I say. (Maybe with checkboxes, to show pqueues, promoted, already/not voted on,)
For now though - I count ~50 sifted videos in the past 24 hours. Do we have an idea how many videos is the target for a 24-hour timeframe (I know this number fluctuates day to day, esp. weekends). If so, let's aim for that and have the # of votes follow. If we want to aim for 30 videos...15 votes?
(i.e.: 50 videos @ 10 votes, how many at 15? 20?)
Oh and HUGE YES on being able to add comments in a drop down w/o having to open a new window. Quicker commenting would be more fun.
I concur.
^some statistics would come in handy in this discussion - guys?
[dodges tomatoes]
It's been gone for a while, but I still miss it.
For example, every half hour, a video can get published, based on whichever vid in the queue has the highest votes. Or perhaps the highest votes per unit time in the queue.
I'm pretty sure that's what most of the bigger social media sites do.
Rather than the never-ending need to keep adjusting the queue escape level, how about publishing videos algorithmically?
For example, every half hour, a video can get published, based on whichever vid in the queue has the highest votes. Or perhaps the highest votes per unit time in the queue.
I'm pretty sure that's what most of the bigger social media sites do.
We will not be defeated by machines!!!!
Another Idea would be to make the "Hot" Tab the new front page, exposing popular queued videos to the main audience
On a side note, we should call the next incarnation Videosift Me.
http://i306.photobucket.com/albums/nn258/Knemidokoptes/VideoSiftMe.jpg
If we are REALLY serious about quality control around here then lets go for 20. We will not see the amount of change in quality we're asking for with 15. I for one would love to see the front page slow waaaaay down for a change.
We still have the unsifted queue to play on and comment and since the sifts will last in member's pqueues, there's no loss. Only the very best of the submissions will reach the front page. That's what we want correct?
Considering the average amount of votes more obscure videos have, a 20 votes treshold is too high. I think we simply don't have enough voting members to justify this number. Less members would be satisfied with what gets sifted.
More votes = popularity, not quality. I'm baffled as to why people continue to think otherwise.
*never
If you raise it to twenty then you might as well raise it to 40.
I like the idea that it would take 20 votes to escape the queue, but anything that's remotely obscure or esoteric would be lost. When the only thing you have going is popular vote, then the lowest common denominator is a force to be reckoned with.
Here here! This is exactly what I was thinking on the subject.
I did have one kind of radical idea around the queue escape. Instead of having a set queue escape level, we could just publish the highest voted post in the queue every 15 minutes.
This would give us a constant flow of posts to the front page at 4 an hour or 96 posts a day.
Of course we could play with number after a while, make it every 10 minutes or every 20 minutes - but it would give us a lot of flexibility.