Numbrosia: Merit-Based News Submissions

Posted by Cyndy Aleo-Carreira on March 16th, 2008

Tired of the news you are finding on Digg and Slashdot? Convinced that you are smarter than the combined user base of those two and Fark? Numbrosia thinks they have the solution: merit-based news submissions.

With Numbrosia, gone are the “everyone votes” models of Digg and Fark, as well as the editorial control of Slashdot. Instead, your submission gets floated or sunk based on merit. Users earn merit points based on their daily score earned completing the logic puzzles on the site. The more time you spend (and points you earn), the more likely your submission is to make it to more eyeballs. Of course, your score is divided across your submissions, so you are better off picking one and really making it count unless you want to spend hours on the site.

Aside from the hilarious mash-up of casual gaming and somewhat social news, Numbrosia may actually have the tiny germ of an idea somewhere in that ugly, ugly site. The posters at Hacker News note that most people using social news, they want a fast way to read news, share items, and discuss current events. They really don't want to spend hours figuring out a logic problem.

galka at Hacker News has an interesting suggestion. If you combined the concept of Numbrosia with an Open Source project, and rated merit based on some combination of commits, bug fixes, documentation contributions, etc. you might actually see some real-world value to user-submitted news. While the idea behind sites like Digg is that voting will raise quality to the top, their algorithm changes show that the site can be gamed. Imagine if all those people who spend time figuring out how to game the site were instead contributing to a project. (And before I get arguments about this idea, while not everyone can code, just about anyone can contribute to evangelizing or documenting a project.)

The hippie in me thinks of more globally-aware applications as well. Imagine Digg user votes weighted by contributions to charity or documented volunteer work. What other possibilities for this model are there?

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