ageofish

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.

Exactly, some content might not be globally popular, but will be very viral locally - and good examples!

Thanks for the suggestions and support!

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.

Sorry, this was meant to be a teaser, apparently not well thought through :) I added links to our blog and home made video! Check them out!