Algae is the answer to our energy problems
Not sure if or when there's going to be a VideoSift 3.2 or 4.0, but I thought I'd mention a few things that I'd love to see on the site — some minor, others more significant.
Thoughts? Other ideas? Leave your comments here.
- This is a minor one, but it would sure be nice if there was the option to auto-select the 'Email me when...' checkboxes when submitting a video. I always select those.
- After submitting a video, the 'Possible duplicates' page shows five existing videos on the site. I think this number needs to be increased now that there are so many videos in the database — it's getting harder to find the dupes.
- The '< Modify' button on that page takes you back to the Submit page, but all of the previous data is gone (at least in my browser).
- I'd love to see more done on the site with playlists. It would be great to see which playlists a video is in right in the expanda-playlist box under the video, rather than way down at the bottom of the page. Also maybe a playlist could be featured on the Hot page, based on which has received the highest number of recent votes?
- It would also be great to have more listing options on the Channels page — I miss the days of being able to see all the channels listed by popularity.
- The Unsifted Videos 'newest queue date' sorting is still broken.
- I think the queue time should be shortened down to 2 days again. Videos never get any votes on the 'in between' day after they've dropped off the first few pages of the queue and before they appear in the Top Unsifted Expiring Soon. They just sit there taking up valuable space in our personal queue.
- I know this has been raised before and shot down, but I think it might be time to reopen the idea of having some more 'social' features on the site. The reality of any large community is that certain personalities gravitate towards one another, while others gravitate in other directions. I think it would be nice to have a way for social groups to form within the site. Not sure exactly what form that would take, but I'd like to reopen the discussion.
Thoughts? Other ideas? Leave your comments here.
- Auto-select for email: Great idea. People can still uncheck the box if they don't want it, but the vast majority I'm sure would keep it checked.
- Expand possible duplicates list: Another capital idea.
- 'Modify' button problem: I don't have that problem at all, and I've used Firefox, IE, and Opera. Therefore your computer is insane. I understand you use Linux, which is an operating system still in its adolescent phase of development. You know how defiant teenagers can be.
- More playlisting around the site: Ain't nothing wrong with that. Good idea.
- More listing options on the Channels page: You're on a roll. Another primo suggestion.
- Fix 'Unsifted queue date' sorting: Without a doubt, brother.
- Shorten queue time to 2 days: Damn, your roll just came to an end. I think 3-day queues have worked out great, and I paid active attention to mine for a while when the 3-day queue went into effect. I think the second day is crucial to third day success. Sure, the second day is probably still the slowest, but I notice that if my videos get at least 1 or 2 votes during that time then they stand a much better chance of being sifted. This is ideal for music videos, which almost never get that many votes anyway because people here have so many different tastes. Without that second day I believe a lot of music videos will slip through the cracks. Then we'll just have more LOLcats (playing jazz in their sleep
- More social features: Well at least we're ending on a high note, because I agree wholeheartedly. I've been longing to find a sifter who's as interested in shirt buttons as I am, so this would be fantastic.
Maximize player size: From my recent Sift Talk post, we should all know that our videos can be bigger if we want them to be. When we're submitting videos I'd like to see a box that's already checked or 'auto-selected' (and can be unchecked if one so desires) next to a function called 'Maximize player size', and what this would do is proportionally increase your video size so that it fills out to the maximum 540 pixels width for video players.
Because bigger is better.
Right below the 'NSFW' and 'Long' check boxes, we need a third check box with this next to it, which will let the viewer know that the video is good for viewing during altered states of consciousness.
(This feature needs to be permanently disabled for Fedquip and kulpims. I don't believe any explanation for this is necessary.)
*quality
http://www.videosift.com/talk/Video-Resizer-2-Alpha
The second day videos do get votes. Would be interesting to see an interactive real-time graph of VS-posts featuring their quantity of votes over time;), maybe this will give insight about the optimal queue-time.
I personally don't have problems with the
-Modify button
-Unsifted Videos 'newest queue date'
(I have Firefox 2.0.0.14)
I think the social features of the site can be improved by introducing a neighbour system like they have at http://www.last.fm: on VideoSift this would mean you become neighbour of an x-amount of sifters who have voted for most for your videos (edit: ..and have a similar voting pattern/taste).
Can we reassess the way videos go into the Top 15? I've seen a few videos get published after a •beg or two, and then quickly get 30 or 40 votes, but no hope for the big time. While others sit in the Top 15 seemingly forever.
How about if the Top 15 counts from when the video is first published, rather than submitted, and keeps them for two or three days from then? That will level the playing field for those vids that got unlucky in the queue.
Maybe there could also still be a bonus time given to videos that got published quickly.
-a "short" (under 30 seconds) box to complement "long" (over 10 minutes)
-Personal Top Channels and Overal Top Channels should display more than 10 channels as we now have many more channels..
It would be »DEEPLY AWESOME« to have a Stats page with all kinds of live updated statistics about the site.
Kronosposeidon, I actually made a greasemonkey script that will auto resize youtube videos a while back. I was going to expand it to other hosts and make it detect the currently used css file to scale dynamically with page width but it didn't seem like there was any interest.
http://www.videosift.com/talk/Video-Resizer-2-Alpha
Cool! I must have missed that post. Of course you posted that back when I was fairly new here, and back then I rarely checked Sift Talk. Maybe then interest was low because most videos at that time had crappy resolution, so making them bigger would have only made them look worse. Now that higher-resolution has become the norm your little greasemonky script's time has come.
You were just too far ahead of your time, dude. Not a bad thing. Is it possible for something like this to be incorporated into the site that works for all video hosts? That would be the shiznit.
Lots of really good fixes and ideas in here. Keep 'em coming.
Translation: Yes, my puppets, keep on pretending this is a democracy
Here's one feature I'd like to suggest:....
Because bigger is better.
No, its not. What about videos with crappy quality and shitty compression? They would look like absolute SHIZNIT... so I'm not sure its the greatest idea to make them all huge...
I generally see the same thing as arvana, that middle day is just a waste.
If we can choose (with an adjustable default in our profile), then we could have the best of both worlds.
Okay, now read:
Whatever number we decide to raise the escape threshold to, going forward I'd like to see that number being changed on a more mathematical/scientific basis. A while back I mentioned the following, but now seems like a good time to mention it again:
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.
*unsticky