Videosift is a "video voting community" founded by Brian Houston in February 2006, who was quickly joined by James Roe as a co-founder. 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. Also called the Sift for short, Videosift aims to provide it's users with the best online video content available.
Concept and early history
The concept of Videosift is that members submit videos found on supported internet providers to the site, where they are entered into the queue. Other members then may vote up or down for videos, in the queue the following conditions apply for each submitted video:
- The video must fall within VideoSift Posting Guidelines.
- If the video receives enough votes from members it gets published to the frontage.
- If the video receives more then 3 down votes, it is automatically discarded.
- If the video does not receive more then 3 votes in 24 hours, it is automatically discarded.
- If the video does not receive enough votes from members in a 4 day period, it is discarded.
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 which forced new users to graduate through a "probationary period". This was meant to mitigate sockpuppet and astroturfing abuses that became more tempting for outsiders to engage in considering the site's increasing popularity.
Technology
VideoSift is 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.
Curatorship through seniority
One of the unique aspects of the Videosift community is the fact that the volunteer members receive de facto administrator powers with long term commitment to the website. Some of these invocations or commands are listed below:
- *discard - Throw a video out because it's a duplicate or in violation of guidelines
- *promote - Republish an older video back to the front page. (Limit one per week, not your own submission)
- *blog - Send a video to the blog because there may be a problem with it (technical or guideline violation)
- *return - Return a video to the front or queue after it's been reviewed in the blog
- *siftoff - Send a self-link to the SiftOff
- *save - Push an expiring/expired video up to the top of the queue for one more chance to escape. (Limit one per week, not your own submission)
- *nsfw - Flag a video as being not suitable for work
- *nochannel - Remove a video from all channels (not your own submission)
- *[channel name] - Add a video to the specified channel (not your own submission)
- *dead - Flag a video as being dead
- *undead - Remove the dead flag from a video (also for non-gold stars)
- *ban - Nominate and second a member banination (only for non-starred member posts)
This system works through recording how many videos a user has had published to the frontpage:
- 0 Published Videos - Member is in Probationary Status, only one video can be submitted.
- 1 Published Videos - Member is off Probationary period, 4 videos can be submitted.
- 5 Published Videos - Bronze Level Member.
- 10 Published Videos - Silver Level Member.
- 50 Published Videos - Gold Level Member. All administrative invocations can be made.
- 100 Published Videos - Gold 100 Level Member.
- 250 Published Videos - Diamond 250 Level Member.
Accepted Video Embeds
Videosift currently accepts Flash videos embeds from the following websites:
Youtube[1] Break[2] Revver[3] Vimeo[4] MetaCafe[5] Google Video[6]
International Sifts
In response to user interest and the availability of volunteers, VideoSift Poland and VideoSift Latina were also set-up in 2006. The sites cross-link to each other, sharing videos that have cross-cultural appeal while maintaining separate identities and user groups in relation to each other.
Video Organization
Videos are published to the front page as soon as they receive the required amount of votes. Going chronologically from the first video that was published. Videos can be further filtered out by the user according to most votes in a year, month, week, 24 hours and all time.
With VideoSift 2.0 five 'channels' were added to filter out the videos by their respective categories. Currently these are: Comedy, Cute, Geek, music and Politics.