

Ask YC:  Instead of voting in social news, why not have submitters compete via a game/puzzle? - amichail

If the submitter wants to push his/her submission to the front page, then he/she will need to be quite skillful at a game/puzzle chosen by that news site.<p>Note that the submitted news item may have nothing to do with games/puzzles.<p>Note also that you would need to compete separately for each submission.<p>If the game/puzzle is chosen carefully, then I think you may get interesting results.  For example, imagine what would happen if doing well in the game/puzzle requires strong math skills vs strong verbal skills, etc.
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jey
Waste of my effort if all I wanted to do was share a link. I'd rather just not
share the link and get back to work.

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joeguilmette
nickb is by far the most prolific submitter. many great article everyday are
submitted by him, and users like him who use a bookmarklet to quickly add
links from their RSS feed.

your method, while interesting, would put an end to users like him...

perhaps the games and such would be a better idea if they were related to a
user's class. for instance if someone had stronger verbal skills, their
submissions may have a higher weight, or something like that.

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iamdave
We have an incredibly diverse community of people here. Using that kind of
system would ostensibly create a disparity between users who have the capacity
for such skill tests, and those who don't. We'd have a giant rift, lapses of
communication and before you know it, HN will have turned into Reddit.

And I'm very certain if that happens I'll probably hurt myself.

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joeguilmette
i thought we were having a hypothetical discussion about social news sites in
general.

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mixmax
And the point would be what?

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amichail
To see what people who are strong along some dimension think is interesting
news. It also encourages people to play with the puzzle more.

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davidw
How about to post to the front page, you have to sing one of the solos from
Carmina Burana post it to youtube, and the best one gets the most points...

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ejs
I don't get it, but agree with the other comment that it seems overly time
consuming... But alas I don't understand...?

