Hi, good questions, I will try my best to answer them:
Preview?
To gain critical mass around an area was our initial intention. By the way, we are not very restrictive at the moment, as long as you request, we will give you a preview invitation!
Downvote?
To stay truthful to the real-world model, we hope to let things die down quietly. In the next version we will be implementing flagging, and maybe consider downvote as needed. This is a good point!
See more before joining?
This is a chicken-egg problem for us now: without large adoption, our content is suboptimal so we are reluctant to open up the experience to everyone; but most people want to see more before contributing...
So at the current stage, we are hoping to target the early-adopter crowd (for example, who would wait 6 hours in the line to get the first iPad), then open it up!
I would love to get some discussion around this if others would like to chime in!
Get location from IP? Good idea, we should give it a try! However, we probably will stick to browser's native support - I think this is cool and might be the future, no? :)
Yes, internet made information instantly available, but it also creates overflow. We need information to be curated (news or portal), or automatically filtered (recommendation sites, Digg, StumbleUpon).
I hope our filtering does not stop the best in the world content to reach your location; we need to tweak our algorithm if it does :)
By the way, we also implemented some "facebook wall", so you can see what your friends are "infected". This helps break the barrier of needing people to travel to, say, a remote location.
Right on with your guess :)
And I agree with "it guarantees good content" part. However, one point we didn't mention is the staleness of the global bucket. For a generic search "funny" on Youtube, most results are 4-5 years old.
We want to focus on upcoming talents, which means we want to bring in new content to the mix, to some people, "fresh + good" is better than "best", and I believe that's why StumbleUpon model is successful.
Preview? To gain critical mass around an area was our initial intention. By the way, we are not very restrictive at the moment, as long as you request, we will give you a preview invitation!
Downvote? To stay truthful to the real-world model, we hope to let things die down quietly. In the next version we will be implementing flagging, and maybe consider downvote as needed. This is a good point!
See more before joining? This is a chicken-egg problem for us now: without large adoption, our content is suboptimal so we are reluctant to open up the experience to everyone; but most people want to see more before contributing...
So at the current stage, we are hoping to target the early-adopter crowd (for example, who would wait 6 hours in the line to get the first iPad), then open it up! I would love to get some discussion around this if others would like to chime in!
Get location from IP? Good idea, we should give it a try! However, we probably will stick to browser's native support - I think this is cool and might be the future, no? :)