The problem is voting. As you might guess, I think a more meritocratic approach to social news (e.g., intelligence testing through puzzles) would give you better results when you have more users.
True meritocracy in online voting situations would be something like giving more importance to votes from people with higher karma. So, the people who get voted up more, then get more power in voting situations themselves. That way, the site becomes whatever the "top users" want, a true meritocracy.
I'm also a fan of giving precedence depending on the "age" of the user. That is, how long they've been a member of the site. This means the site may not evolve as quickly, but it appears that's something people want to avoid anyway. It tends to be the new "influx" of users that comes after popularity that drags a site down, so letting older users have more say could make sense.
That depends on the nature of the puzzle. Not many people can solve Rubik's Cube no matter how determined they may be.
"True meritocracy in online voting situations would be something like giving more importance to votes from people with higher karma. So, the people who get voted up more, then get more power in voting situations themselves. That way, the site becomes whatever the "top users" want, a true meritocracy."
That may not lead to a meritocracy. I think intelligence testing is more reliable.
I don't. The people who post all the political links to Reddit seem quite intelligent, as do many of the people starting pointless arguments. The ability to troll and incite flame wars might even go UP with intelligence.
Perhaps if the puzzles you proposed measured "emotional intelligence" or domain specific knowledge we'd stand a chance, but raw intelligence doesn't prove much. Many of the nicest, most "savvy" people I know are not of high intelligence in an IQ sense, but are still very successful in their fields, and vice versa.
In fact, my next puzzle-based social news site will involve a word-based puzzle, which may reward users more who have high "verbal intelligence".
Indeed, perhaps this is why sites like Reddit and Hacker News were / are such high quality sites at the start of their lives, because only the most informed people knew about them. Once the less informed get involved, it all goes to pot. So testing how "informed" someone is might, effectively, resolve it all.. but I can't help but feel a lot of people would be turned off by such "testing"!
So why do people visit this site?
Imagine turning MightyQuiz into a social news site.
Sure they can. It's algorithmic. Anyone can be taught the algorithm. Learning to solve it without any help would be different.