March 16, 2008

Numbrosia - Merit Based News

Michael Arrington

18 comments »

There’s some chatter today on Hacker News and Profy about a new site called Numbrosia. Unlike Digg, stories are not ranked via user voting.

Instead, users solve math puzzles that get progressively harder. The higher their score, the higher their submitted news items appear. The exact number of points for an item is the recent score divided by the number of submitted links, so it makes sense for users to submit just a single story.

There’s no business here, and we’ll likely never touch on Numbrosia again. But I like the creativity, and sometimes seeing something like this creates the seed of a new idea in others. Plus, puzzle addicts will likely waste an afternoon on the site.

Perhaps intelligent testing could help other sites reduce spam or otherwise improve their service.

Sphere It

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Kyle MacRae

March 16th, 2008 at 1:45 pm

Here’s a back-of-envelope idea for filtering web content meaningfully on the basis of content quality: http://www.scunnered.com/?p=26
Paged mobile

March 16th, 2008 at 1:59 pm

If you like puzzles, here is short one which is (as a side effect) extremely useful on mobile devices:

Browsing the web can be considered as a series of puzzles. For example to visit rememberthemilk.com, enter remk at pa.gd website. To visit techcrunch.com, enter tech there (tech as a shortcut needs 8 keypresses instead of 31 (!) on a mobile phone with 12 keys). The shortcut comes from the web address, so no need to remember it. The details of the “puzzle” can be found at pa.gd website. Approximately 120 countries and 11000+ shortcuts included.

Paged mobile is web based, so no need to install it on the phone. For more details, please visit pa.gd website.

Imre
Boring Market

March 16th, 2008 at 2:05 pm

No more Hacker News reporting for you.
jjjj

March 16th, 2008 at 2:36 pm

good attempt to weed out the rubbish and click mentality that is part of digg but its too much effort to solve puzzles.
Andrew

March 16th, 2008 at 2:54 pm

Slashdot?
BM

March 16th, 2008 at 2:54 pm

Seriously, you are going to ruin Hacker News
Prokofy Neva

March 16th, 2008 at 2:58 pm

This idea is seriously evil.

Cover the news, deliver it, make it easier to find — but don’t manipulate it this way by elites, Michael.

If social media does something MENSA-society like this, they are proving the totalitarian tilt that social media already has in it will prevail.
Cyndy Aleo-Carreira

March 16th, 2008 at 3:07 pm

@BM Sorry, my bad. I read it too.

@Prokofy Forget the MENSA eliteness (although I had to stop myself at Level 4 just to get a screencap) and think of the other applications for a merit-based system and how it could apply to other sites. Not with puzzles as the earning mechanism, but Open Source contributions as one of the HN commenters suggested, or other types of donations, volunteer contributions, etc.
Jay Neely

March 16th, 2008 at 3:32 pm

It’s unfortunate that Numbrosia chose to misnomer themselves as “merit-based news”, and even more unfortunate that lazy media coverage is parroting that description.

Numbrosia is clever, entertaining if you’re a number/puzzle lover, and a creative take on how to improve submission quality(by measuring the logic skills of submitters). But it *isn’t* a test of merit of any of the news content itself, and it’s misleading to imply so.
BM

March 16th, 2008 at 4:47 pm

@Cyndy

I didnt mean numbrosia was killing HackerNews I meant techcrunch exposing hacker news to the web is invariably going to degrade the quality of the discussion there.
Ethan

March 16th, 2008 at 5:42 pm

Is it just me, or does intelligence not necessarily correlate to the submitting of relevant news stories? Some could argue people using digg have above average IQ’s and look at the rubbish that gets submitted.
Jazzter

March 16th, 2008 at 5:50 pm

What kind of cock would even think this could fly
Molave

March 16th, 2008 at 7:07 pm

Don’t y’all get it? Michael’s not saying that all news voting sites should hide their best material behind increasingly difficult calculus problems. He’s pointing out the idea that voting isn’t the only way to rate entries in this type of site.

Hopefully this type of “seed” concept will spur other out-of-the-box thinkers to create new systems that rank stories or products (or whatever) in exciting, and hopefully useful, new ways.
Molave

March 16th, 2008 at 7:17 pm

For example, a Paris Hilton fan site may require visitors to answer quizzes about the celebrity, and the higher they score, the better their privileges and permissions, including the visibility of their posts.

Yeah yeah I know this particular example is idiotic. But silly ideas should be expected from attempting to think out of the box.
NickeyD

March 16th, 2008 at 7:55 pm

I kinda like this idea, although I suspect the real factor will be the game balance. They could learn a lot from Vegas.
Matt

March 16th, 2008 at 8:26 pm

creepy… i’ve recently played with an idea not near as cool as this but still something i thought was untouched… the idea of having a math problem instead of a captcha… solving a lot of accessibility issues with captcha while trying to maintain an element of ruse via a mixture of dynamically evolving independent factors like js, css, html tags, etc… so the math problem was never a plain math problem in the source, keeping bot’s guessing, but would still be easy to read and understand right on down to textbrowsers (though not as clean and cut to the chase on textbrowser still doable to humans.) this concept is certainly in the same sandbox…

thanks mike for a link i probably would have never otherwise found. on to play with it (and probably lose myself for the remainder of the eve, lol).
Bob Dole

March 16th, 2008 at 9:19 pm

I think this is a sweet idea…like mike says…as a “seed”…digg/readdit etc could effectively implement a similar algorithm, but without the puzzle…they might already do…so if you digg an article…well before it becomes popular…this could be a sign that you are of “intelligence” and can pick a good story..

they could cause a revolt and give you as an intelligent digger 2 diggs for your smarts…lol
I Am Not Posting To Spam My Blog

March 17th, 2008 at 3:33 am

The Rain Man would not make a good newspaper editor.