VideoSift

Last updated
VideoSift
Type of site
Video Community
OwnerBrian Houston
Created byBrian Houston and James Roe
URL www.videosift.com
RegistrationFree, but with optional Charter Membership
LaunchedFebruary 2006

VideoSift is a video aggregator designed to showcase unique and interesting videos, the name of the site being a direct allusion to the metaphor of sifting wheat from chaff. It was founded by Brian Houston in February 2006, who was joined by James Roe and Rommel Santor as co-creators. [1] Members submit embedded videos from other websites, such as YouTube and Google Video, which are then ranked according to a social-voting system similar to and inspired by Digg. Nicknamed the Sift, VideoSift aims to provide its users with the best available online video content through a consistent and attractive interface, responding to the problems of videos being scattered among many different sources, each having arguably difficult or unintuitive user interfaces.

Contents

Concept

Members submit videos from a limited selection of approved hosts, these videos are then entered into a queue where other members may vote them up or down. If a video receives the requisite balance of positive votes it is published to the front page and remains available in the site's archives; if it fails to achieve this within 2 days it is moved to the users profile in a "personal queue". A broad range of videos may be posted; only those with entire episodes of television programs, pornography, fatalities or racism are expressly prohibited. [2]

While in its infancy the site was loosely organized; the site founders allowed any user to submit videos, subject to an ever-changing limit depending on the volume of traffic. With the exponential growth of the site's popularity over the course of 2006, upgrades were introduced leading to VideoSift 2.0 and later iterations that required new users to graduate through a "probationary period". This was meant to mitigate sockpuppet (internet) and astroturfing abuses that became more tempting for outsiders considering the site's increasing popularity.

Routine administrative functions such as discarding expired videos are carried out by a bot named Siftbot. [3]

VideoSift has a policy of "no self-links", which means contributing videos that the VideoSift user ("Sifter") created themselves. In addition to functioning as a means to prevent astroturfing, it allows for an extra step of "sifting" - a third party must first approve of the video by selecting it for submission before the original creator can cast a vote for it.

In response to Sifters' desire to showcase their own videos, occasional Siftoffs have been held, with the first in May 2006. Videos in the Siftoff are uploaded to a separate queue where users have a month to decide, through the normal voting mechanisms, which video of this subset group is most worthy. The siftoff has since been removed again.

The ability to permanently ban members who self-link is given to those who have gained "gold star" status within the VideoSift community. Two users must both invoke the *ban command, which will make the system ban the offending member. This is often used for those who spam, or self-link videos to the site and has been known to be used swiftly and effectively by senior members of VideoSift. [4]

In January 2008 an instaban feature was introduced, that allows users with diamond level membership to instantly ban a probationary member without confirmation from another user. [5]

Curatorship through seniority

One of the unique aspects of the VideoSift community is that the volunteer members receive de facto administrator powers with long term commitment to the website. After accumulating 50 star points, members gain such abilities as discarding posts in violation of guidelines or flagging videos NSFW. [4] [6]

The ability to "downvote" a video was introduced in June 2006, [7] allowing the Sifter with a moderate seniority level - those with a bronze star meaning 25 star points. [4] [6] , to police against videos they consider unworthy or unappealing. Downvoting met with some controversy as users adjusted to the phenomenon, and set informal guidelines on usage. [4] [6]

Members help to shape and mold the future of VideoSift by suggesting new feature requests and existing feature changes. Often streamlining the site and making it very versatile as well as retaining a simple interface.

Technology

VideoSift used to be based on an open source content management system called Pligg, which is in turn a port of software written by Ricardo Galli . His software received much of its inspiration from the popular technology site, Digg.

Prominent and skilled users have been invited to join the original two founders throughout the Sift's history. Rommel Santor became the Development Manager later in 2006, contributing his skills in coding to add extensive new features to the site's codebase. [1]

In Summer 2007 VideoSift 3.0 launched, breaking away from the Pligg system to use its own software. The new program was written by Rommel Santor and is called VaroCMS.

In January 2008 VideoSift 3.1 launched, still using VaroCMS, but bringing many sweeping changes. [8]

Accepted video embeds

For compatibility reasons VideoSift accepts only videos in the Flash format, and only from the following websites: YouTube, Break.com, Revver, Vimeo, MetaCafe, Google Video, iFilm, Myspace, Onion, VideoJug, Yahoo, Dailymotion, LiveLeak, VSocial, Fora.tv and Grouper.

Comedy Central submissions were banned after Comedy Central's decision to block non US-based viewers for their content (region blocking), but the ban was reversed and is under an ongoing discussion. Members who have achieved a 'gold' status can submit other flash based video content such as CollegeHumor or Adult Swim videos

Video organization

At heart, VideoSift is a video organization site. Videos are organized by their tags and channels, which an inputted but the submitting user and can be changed and/or amended by senior users of the site. Channels are unlike many other sites, not generated in advance, but created by users when they reach a certain level of membership, diamond or more, which is then sent to the administrators, evaluated and approved/rejected as the case may be. Some channel suggestions have been considered too close to other channels, such as tech, which was too deemed close to science and geek.

As of September 2010 the following 98 channels are available: Animation, Art, Actionpack, Asia, Anatomy, Blues, Books, Bravo, British, Brain, Comedy, Cute, Canada, Catsanddogs, Celtic, Cinema, Comics, Commercial, Conspiracy, Controversy, Cult, Cooking, Downunder, Dance, Dark, Documentaries, Drugs, Debunked, Election08, Electronica, Eia, Equality, Eco, Engineering, Fail, Femme, Fire, Future, Fear, Gay, Geek, Grindhouse, Horrorshow, Happy, Hiphop, Howto, Humanitarian, Health, History, Islam, Jazz, Kids, Latenight, Law, Livemusic, Love, Lies, Music, Mystery, Military, Metal, Money, Magic, Meme, Nature, News, Obscure, Politics, Parody, Philosophy, Religion, Rocknroll, Sexuality, Scifi, Science, Shortfilms, Sports, Standup, Spacy, Teens, Timeshift, Talks, Terrible, Travel, Videogames, Vintage, Viral, Worldaffairs, Waronterror, Woohoo, Wilhelm, Water, Wtf, Wheels, Wildwestshow, Wings, 1sttube and 80s. [9]

Earlier organization

As soon as a video receives the required number of votes it is published to the front page, which is arranged in reverse chronological order. Videos can be further filtered by the user according to most votes in a year, month, week, 24 hours and all time.

With the launch of VideoSift 2.2 'channels' were added to browse by and filter out videos by their respective categories. [10] Currently these are: Animation, Art, Comedy, Cute, Geek, Music, Nature, Politics, Vintage, and Viral. A video may be in as many channels as are applicable.

Additionally, VideoSift now allows senior users to create collectives of users to sift even more specific niche videos.

Decline in quality

It has been argued that given the growth of the site, the quality of the videos within will inversely decline in quality. The way the voting system works, a video with more votes is considered of higher quality than one with fewer votes, thus equating quality with popularity. Like Wikipedia, there are many high-level users, who work to uphold the quality and integrity of the site, so that things like astroturfing and spam are kept to a minimum. Users are allowed to have their own agendas, political or otherwise, so for an outside viewer it may appear that the site is a launchpad for these opinions, when in fact the discussion forum "Sift Talk" debates these things. [ citation needed ]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kuro5hin</span> Technology-related discussion website (1999–2016)

Kuro5hin was a collaborative discussion website founded by Rusty Foster in 1999, having been inspired by Slashdot. Articles were created and submitted by users and submitted to a queue for evaluation. Site members could vote for or against publishing an article and once the article had reached a certain number of votes, it was published to the site or deleted from the queue. The site has been described as "a free-for-all of news and opinion written by readers". Around 2005, its membership numbered in the tens of thousands.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Internet forum</span> Online discussion site

An Internet forum, or message board, is an online discussion site where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages. They differ from chat rooms in that messages are often longer than one line of text, and are at least temporarily archived. Also, depending on the access level of a user or the forum set-up, a posted message might need to be approved by a moderator before it becomes publicly visible.

Plastic.com (2001–2011) was a general-interest internet forum running under the motto 'Recycling the Web in Real Time'.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">YouTube</span> Video-sharing platform owned by Google

YouTube is an American online video sharing platform owned by Google. Accessible worldwide, it was launched on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim, three former employees of PayPal. Headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States, it is the second most visited website in the world, after Google Search. YouTube has more than 2.5 billion monthly users, who collectively watch more than one billion hours of videos every day. As of May 2019, videos were being uploaded to the platform at a rate of more than 500 hours of content per minute, and as of 2021, there were approximately 14 billion videos in total.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Reddit</span> American social news and discussion site

Reddit is an American social news aggregation, content rating, and forum social network. Registered users submit content to the site such as links, text posts, images, and videos, which are then voted up or down by other members. Posts are organized by subject into user-created boards called "communities" or "subreddits". Submissions with more upvotes appear towards the top of their subreddit and, if they receive enough upvotes, ultimately on the site's front page. Reddit administrators moderate the communities. Moderation is also conducted by community-specific moderators, who are not Reddit employees. It is operated by Reddit, Inc., based in San Francisco.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wii Menu</span> System menu for the Wii

The Wii Menu is the graphical shell of the Wii and Wii U game console, as part of the Wii system software. It has four pages, each with a 4:3 grid, and each displaying the current time and date. Available applications, known as "channels", are displayed and can be navigated using the pointer capability of the Wii Remote. The grid is customizable; users can move channels among the menu's 48 customizable slots. By pressing the plus and minus buttons on the Wii Remote users can scroll across accessing empty slots.

disney.com Official website of The Walt Disney Company

disney.com is a website operated by Disney Digital Network, a division of The Walt Disney Company, that promotes various Disney properties such as films, television shows, and theme park resorts, and offers entertainment content intended for children and families.

A review site is a website on which reviews can be posted about people, businesses, products, or services. These sites may use Web 2.0 techniques to gather reviews from site users or may employ professional writers to author reviews on the topic of concern for the site.

A social news website is a website that features user-posted stories. Such stories are ranked based on popularity, as voted on by other users of the site or by website administrators. Users typically comment online on the news posts and these comments may also be ranked in popularity. Since their emergence with the birth of Web 2.0, social news sites have been used to link many types of information, including news, humor, support, and discussion. All such websites allow the users to submit content and each site differs in how the content is moderated. On the Slashdot and Fark websites, administrators decide which articles are selected for the front page. On Reddit and Digg, the articles that get the most votes from the community of users will make it to the front page. Many social news websites also feature an online comment system, where users discuss the issues raised in an article. Some of these sites have also applied their voting system to the comments, so that the most popular comments are displayed first. Some social news websites also have a social networking service, in that users can set up a user profile and follow other users' online activity on the website.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Digg</span> Social media/news aggregator website

Digg, stylized in lowercase as digg, is an American news aggregator with a curated front page, aiming to select articles specifically for the Internet audience such as science, trending political issues, and viral Internet issues. It was launched in its current form on July 31, 2012, with support for sharing content to other social platforms such as Twitter and Facebook.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">OVGuide</span>

OVGuide was a website aggregator which allowed users to find online video content. The company was acquired by FOTV Media Networks Inc. for over $10M in 2016. -OVGuide is no longer available-

Fotki is a digital photo sharing, video sharing and media social network website and web service suite; it is one of the world's largest social networking sites. As an image hosting service, Fotki licenses photo-sharing software for global companies such as Telecom Italia, Alice.it, Sears, Mark Travel, Vegas.com, and Funjet.com, among others.

3 in the UK offer a Mobile TV service across most of their range of phones. It is provided by 3 and independent companies and offers the main genres of: Comedy, Entertainment, Music, Documentaries, Kids programming and user-submitted content. Some channels adopt the branding of well-known channels such as MTV and Nickelodeon, but their programming consists of a repetitive loop that is typically refreshed once a week. This differs from the complete range of content offered by digital television and cable services.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Everything2</span> Web-based community

Everything2 is a collaborative online community consisting of a database of interlinked user-submitted written material. E2 is moderated for quality, but has no formal policy on subject matter. Writing on E2 covers a wide range of topics and genres, including encyclopedic articles, diary entries, poetry, humor, and fiction.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Xtube</span> Pornographic video hosting and social networking site

Xtube was a Canadian pornographic video hosting service and social networking site based in Toronto, Ontario. It was established in 2006 and is notable for being the first adult community site to allow users to upload and share adult videos. Xtube was not a producer of pornography, instead it provided a platform for content uploaded by users. User-submitted content included pornographic videos, webcam models, pornographic photographs, and erotic literature, and incorporated social networking features.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hacker News</span> Social news website

Hacker News (HN) is a social news website focusing on computer science and entrepreneurship. It is run by the investment fund and startup incubator Y Combinator. In general, content that can be submitted is defined as "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Like button</span> Communication software feature used to express support

A like button, like option, or recommend button is a feature in communication software such as social networking services, Internet forums, news websites and blogs where the user can express that they like, enjoy or support certain content. Internet services that feature like buttons usually display the number of users who liked each content, and may show a full or partial list of them. This is a quantitative alternative to other methods of expressing reaction to content, like writing a reply text. Some websites also include a dislike button, so the user can either vote in favor, against or neutrally. Other websites include more complex web content voting systems. For example, five stars or reaction buttons to show a wider range of emotion to the content.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">The Powder Toy</span> Falling-sand game

The Powder Toy is a falling-sand game originally created by Stanislaw K. Skowronek. It is now developed and maintained by LBPHacker along with various other contributors on GitHub. The Powder Toy is free and open-source software licensed under the GNU General Public License version 3.0. A total of 185 different in-game materials, each with custom behavior and interactions, are available in the game.

Yik Yak is a pseudonymous social media smartphone application that initially launched in 2013 and relaunched in 2021. The app, which is available for iOS and (formerly) Android, allows college students to create and view discussion threads within a 5-mile (8.0 km) radius. It is similar to other anonymous sharing apps such as Nearby, but differs from others such as Whisper in that it is intended for sharing primarily with those in proximity to the user.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pornhub</span> Pornographic video-sharing website owned by Aylo

Pornhub is a Canadian-owned internet pornography video-sharing website, one of several owned by adult entertainment conglomerate Aylo. As of February 2024, Pornhub is the 13th-most-visited website in the world and the second-most-visited adult website, after XVideos.

References

  1. 1 2 "VideoSift Contributors Staff List". videosift.com. Retrieved 2008-03-24.
  2. ↑ Posting Guidelines videosift.com
  3. ↑ "Siftbot". Videosift.com. Retrieved 2008-03-24.
  4. 1 2 3 4 "Star powers". videosift.com. Retrieved 2008-03-24.
  5. ↑ "Instaban". videosift.com. Retrieved 2009-02-05.
  6. 1 2 3 "Star points". videosift.com. Retrieved 2008-03-24.
  7. ↑ The Power of the Down Vote videosift.com
  8. ↑ "Videosift3.1". videosift.com. Retrieved 2009-02-05.
  9. ↑ "VideoSift Channels". videosift.com. Retrieved 2010-09-08.
  10. ↑ "VideoSift 2.2 Channels!" . Retrieved 2008-03-24.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.