Numbrosia

Numbrosia is a new, user-edited news site that - like Digg and Yahoo’s Burst - lets users vote for stories and sends the most popular ones to the top. There’s a twist. Users can complete maths puzzles of increasing complexity to give their votes more weight, so the news is biased towards the cleverest, or at least most mathematically gifted, users.

The idea of a meritocratic user-edited newssite seems like a superficially wonderful idea, since in theory it offers some minimum standard of commitment and intellect on the part of the contributors. Practically speaking it comes up hard against the same problem as any meritocratic system - everything depends on what conditions happen to have been initially set as meritorious. On Numbrosia it's a facility for number puzzles. Which means in the long run we're looking at a news site edited by Rain Men for Rain Men. Numbrosia is almost a fantastic solution to a real problem of collaboration but in the end it's a (very) near miss. Perhaps the same idea using knowledge of current affairs as an entry condition next time?

(HT: TC)