Comments on: Numbrosia - Merit Based News

By: I Am Not Posting To Spam My Blog

I Am Not Posting To Spam My Blog — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 10:33:12 +0000

The Rain Man would not make a good newspaper editor.

By: Bob Dole

Bob Dole — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 04:19:37 +0000

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

By: Matt

Matt — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 03:26:01 +0000

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).

By: NickeyD

NickeyD — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 02:55:21 +0000

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

By: Molave

Molave — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 02:17:27 +0000

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.

By: Molave

Molave — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 02:07:08 +0000

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.

By: Jazzter

Jazzter — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 00:50:46 +0000

What kind of cock would even think this could fly

By: Ethan

Ethan — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 00:42:59 +0000

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.

By: BM

BM — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 23:47:02 +0000

@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.

By: Jay Neely

Jay Neely — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 22:32:15 +0000

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.

By: Cyndy Aleo-Carreira

Cyndy Aleo-Carreira — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 22:07:12 +0000

@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.

By: Prokofy Neva

Prokofy Neva — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 21:58:42 +0000

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.

By: BM

BM — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 21:54:40 +0000

Seriously, you are going to ruin Hacker News

By: Andrew

Andrew — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 21:54:16 +0000

Slashdot?

By: jjjj

jjjj — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 21:36:11 +0000

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

By: Boring Market

Boring Market — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 21:05:15 +0000

No more Hacker News reporting for you.

By: Paged mobile

Paged mobile — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 20:59:29 +0000

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

By: Kyle MacRae

Kyle MacRae — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 20:45:01 +0000

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