I have totally pre-Godwinned this.

I say cut them down where they stand.

I have a dream, that one day, probies and sockpuppets will live in a community where they will not be judged by the number of their star points, but by the content of their character profiles

Let freedom ring!

Let freedom ring from Beggar's Canyon to EIA!

^ Sounds abit like communism there son... you a communist? You know what we do with your kind around des 'ere parts?

I'd much rather keep the P-voters so they don't go and sift any random crap they can just to be able to vote again. THAT would surely be sapping our bodily fluids.

So what if a video gets lots of votes from being linked and emailed around the office? It doesn't affect us negatively in the least. If we get even one decent person out of the hundreds signing up to stay and become a regular, wouldn't that count as an overall win? That definately wouldn't happen if they had to wait a week to vote or had to sift something, anything, first.
Why not remove the user ranking system while we're at it? That would surely ruin the incentive of people spitting out sifts by the minute for the sole purpose of getting a better rank, which could be seen as yet another avenue of sift dilution.

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

I'm glad you pre-Godwinned this thread - so I can just cut to the chase and call you Hitler.

Hitler.

Well, if we can be sure that they are not sockpuppets it would be alright, but I don't know what systems are in place to make sure of that.

It seems to be very specific videos that gets heaps of attention from outside sources, while that in itself is fine, if the users voting are not staying and participating in more than the one video vote, their vote should fade away. Because the community is what videosift is about, not the videos.

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

To be honest, in the history of VideoSift - that outside pumping of votes is a pretty rare event.

And we do check all IPs for duplicate votes and do other checks that I can't divulge or the terrorists win.

Alright, so let me propose this alternative, after a long period of inactivity P's votes should "fade" and be removed, or if not outright removed then disabled until the P is active again.

P activity can be measured by anything, comments, votes, etc.

I just think that this behavior breaks the sift.

I do know that there are probies that are here only to view and rate, not to submit videos. I don't want to punish these users, but I think there should be some sort of activity filter on P's, because some users only join and vote for a single video and are never heard of again. This vote dilutes every other users vote, and if they are never seen again their value to the community is close to zero. This should be reflected in the system.

A user who have his (or her) P removed has shown their efforts toward being a part of the community, and their vote should of course count. But there are P's who are as much a part of the community as older users who have left the sift, these should not necessarily be discarded as such, but a sort of activity filter would be a second form of siftizenship test.

Why not make submitting one video obligatory to activate a p account for new members?
It's easy to find a video that is not yet in our catalogue that may be siftworty. This initial activity I think guarantees more community participation (with videos/comments) Of course the p members who want to focus on commenting and/or upvoting can do so..

It's probably before your time gwiz, and I'm surprised no one else has mentioned it, but we already tried instituting a system like this a couple years ago. That was actually how the Probie system started. The problem with it was it made it extremely difficult for well intentioned new members to participate because they'd have to struggle to find a good video to get published, even if all they wanted to do was participate with votes and comments. Needless to say, our new memberships almost flat-lined.

And as dag said, this is a rare event. There is no sock puppetry going on with the Long Gone video. It's just that the video creator has a lot of fans/supporters (just as Jake Shimabukuro did) that he asked to help promote it. Since dag is the submitter (at the creator's request [he actually read the posting guidelines instead of just self-linking]), there're officially no shenanigans to redress.

I see no problem with probies doing this. Said this before, it's the nature of the web and you can't design it out. Let it be and whaddya know, Videosift still works and still provides interesting video to watch.
There are more important things to worry about especially given the rare occurrence of such events.

>> ^dag:
I'm glad you pre-Godwinned this thread - so I can just cut to the chase and call you Hitler.
Hitler.



Shouldn't the appropriate response be that he is WORSE than Hitler?

And I just wanted to burn probies..

But yeah, if there are no shenanigans then I suppose it's ok.

I could certainly see that the new member number would fall drastically if we made it too hard for people to join.

Maybe we can have some of our resident geeks program something to keep track of P-votes/comments, etc. and assign a minimum requirement based on recent activity (with a permanent option in place once certain points are reached)? NOT star points - more like behind-the-scenes participation points. Though maybe something like that already exists...

Zombieater & I were straight-up voters long before we started sifting and commenting, and I personally think that's a good way to get a feel for the environment, so I don't think we should punish these people by disenfranchising them. I'm all for "spreading the wealth."

Well it's not extremely difficult to find a good video..and in my proposal I did not state that it has to be necessary to have a sifted first post to be able to participate: a video in the (personal) queue should be good enough..I think this extra (yet easy) step makes community participation a lot more probable..

>> ^lucky760:
It's probably before your time gwiz, and I'm surprised no one else has mentioned it, but we already tried instituting a system like this a couple years ago. That was actually how the Probie system started. The problem with it was it made it extremely difficult for well intentioned new members to participate because they'd have to struggle to find a good video to get published, even if all they wanted to do was participate with votes and comments. Needless to say, our new memberships almost flat-lined.
And as dag said, this is a rare event. There is no sock puppetry going on with the Long Gone video. It's just that the video creator has a lot of fans/supporters (just as Jake Shimabukuro did) that he asked to help promote it. Since dag is the submitter (at the creator's request [he actually read the posting guidelines instead of just self-linking]), there're officially no shenanigans to redress.

I think we're fine now as is, at least until Jake Shimabukuro covers "Come Together" or "Something" like that.

No vote for Probies. They need to earn their place!

Even if they are probies, isn't their opinion just as valid? I mean what's necessarily wrong with a group sifting, and another group purely watching videos and making comments?

Or am I missing something here?

I mean I understand the tendency for growing video communities to gravitate to more banal, lol-kicked-in-the-balls type material but you're not really isolating that group by focusing on probies.

*Does the picard maneuver*

The issue is that people who are not siftizens should not have the same value as those who are.

The site is built on a community, where people participate in some way, through comments, sifts, talks and so on, but these hit-and-run voters are not participating anything but the dilution of every other vote. The ukulele-jake video is artificially held at an all time #1, when over half of the votes for it are from users who have contributed nothing but that particular vote - not even logged in since then.


I don't want to disenfranchise every probie, but I would like to see these hit-and-run voters quashed. My original method was to punish all probies, but obviously this is a bad solution. Some form of activity filter of probies would be preferable. I think that the drive-by probies are a blight on our otherwise pristine community.

There's tons of ways sifting and participation is encouraged already though, you have additional authority and power, a big plus as you don't usually see that being extended to members in online communities, you have prestige, the prospects of having your own channel someday, etc etc ...

I mean you have to admit that ukulele video's is the exception, usually there's isn't a mass flock of probes, I've never seen anything like that here before you pointed it out. Sure with your average video they make up a reasonable percentage of voting but they're all potential regular members down the track. It's not like the opinions of regulars and non-participants are that different anyway, or that sifting makes opinions more credible. Surely then, encouraging people to stay is more important than the occasional blight on siftscape

>> ^gwiz665:
Does the picard maneuver
The issue is that people who are not siftizens should not have the same value as those who are.
The site is built on a community, where people participate in some way, through comments, sifts, talks and so on, but these hit-and-run voters are not participating anything but the dilution of every other vote. The ukulele-jake video is artificially held at an all time #1, when over half of the votes for it are from users who have contributed nothing but that particular vote - not even logged in since then.

I don't want to disenfranchise every probie, but I would like to see these hit-and-run voters quashed. My original method was to punish all probies, but obviously this is a bad solution. Some form of activity filter of probies would be preferable. I think that the drive-by probies are a blight on our otherwise pristine community.


Oh gwiz, we know you're just dying to perform an illegal discard command followed by a two-week-ban on yourself for your video assassination attempt.

Sorry, I've been reading this book lately.

How odd that a book which exposes the US involvement in assassinating so many people around the world should be so obscure...

^Where is our book repository?