

Merit-Based News has arrived: Social news fueled by the submitters' puzzle solving abilities. - amichail

There's no voting here. Rather, the point score of a submission is equal to the submitter's Numbrosia Puzzle score from the last 24 hours divided by the number of submissions made by that submitter.<p>http://numbrosia.com/?cmd=puzzle_n<p>http://numbrosia.com<p>Note that it makes sense to delete submissions so that the set of submissions associated with you is not too large (so that the score for each submission is not too low).
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angstrom
It's an interesting concept, but practicality wise it looks like a stillborn.

Why not just tie it to their FICO score for yet another more random solution?
At least the person can have a life outside of solving esoteric puzzles all
day long.

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mixmax
Interesting for a proof of concept project, but totally useless in the real
world where one of the obstacles to get a successful social news site up and
running is to get submissions.

Besides I don't see a strong correlation between users ability to solve a
puzzle and their ability to find and post interesting content. Which would
result in a pretty random front page...

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sanj
What is my motivation to spend time solving puzzles?

I've got my hands full starting a company.

I hate to sound negative, but I don't think that the folks who have that time
to solve puzzles have the appropriate judgment to figure out what I might want
to read.

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amichail
Some of the Numbrosia Puzzle players obviously have very high IQs and it would
be interesting to see what they think is worth reading.

Moreover, if they have lots of time to play with puzzles, maybe they have lots
of time to keep up with the latest news as well.

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mechanical_fish
Mensa has always been the canonical example of a Groucho Marx punchline: A
club that I don't want to belong to, because it would accept me as a member.

This looks like more of the same. I'm not interested in pretending that the
ability to solve puzzles is some sort of overall mark of quality, instead of
just a specialized skill that is irrelevant as often as it's relevant. I've
had more than enough of that attitude. I spent _years_ in high school and
college being exalted for my skill at constructing complex solutions to toy
problems, as if SAT scores were the true measure of wisdom, or competence, or
virtue. They aren't.

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bkrausz
Interesting idea, but the problem is many people use social news as a quick
way to view/post/discuss things. The time involved in solving puzzles offsets
that convenience, i.e. it can discourage posting because of the time necessary
to make your post heard.

Though it would be funny to see porn sites have you solve a puzzle to view
some pics :)

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joshwa
That's actually a common method for breaking captchas...

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gaika
Imagine hordes of offshore spammers solving this puzzle all day long for fun
(and profit).

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amichail
How smart are these offshore spammers though? Presumably smart people would
find better work?

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gaika
Based on what I see on my site they are pretty smart and very determined.

I think you should make it truly merit based - submit a bugfix or a feature
patch to an open source project to post a link :)

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amichail
You can vary the task based on the sort of news site you would like to have.
To compete with programming.reddit.com, you could use merit-based news with
your suggestion.

As for puzzle solving, you can make the puzzles really difficult to eliminate
the vast majority of spammers.

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henning
What's wrong with voting?

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amichail
It's easily gamed and does not consider the intellect and/or knowledge of the
voter/submitter.

Moreover, as suggested by gaika, one can use merit points from useful
contributions to society instead of puzzles/games (e.g., contributions to open
source projects).

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Spyckie
It looks like this can be brute forced because its in javascript...

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adnam
The homepage is scary.

