Social news for smart people via ongoing IQ tests

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10771

by amichail • 19 years ago

5 15 19 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

amichail5• 19 years ago

Did anyone try such a thing?

For example, to vote/submit/comment, you might be required to solve an IQ test type problem first.

These problems might be chosen at random from ones created by other members of the site.

eli• 19 years ago

sounds like a pretty boring place to hang out.

byrneseyeview• 19 years ago

I like it -- a CAPTCHA for stupidity.

You could do pretty simple problems (like the Project Euler stuff), with a few random elements to keep things interesting -- especially because the smartest people would come up with shortcuts and be able to post more frequently than those who solved it by hand.

timg2• 19 years ago

This is a great idea from a publicity standpoint. Journalists will eat it up.

I will definitely throw this in for one of my upcoming sites.. Are you thinking of building an entire site around it?

edit: see how all of the negative publicity really positively helped hotenough.org recently.

jkush2• 19 years ago

The only problem with this idea is that communities evolve. Who gets to modify the test to seek out people with the new, desirable traits? The site creators? Oldest member of the community?

I think the concept of communities being self-policing still holds.

amichail5• 19 years ago

There is no standard test to be used. The questions are created by members of the community. To vote/submit/comment, you will need to answer one of these questions chosen at random.

If you don't get it right, you might have to wait an hour or so before trying again with another randomly chosen question. And if you get too many wrong, you would get kicked off the site.

If many members start to see contributions from people who are not that smart, they could try to make their questions tougher. And so you would have a higher probability of receiving a tougher question.

If many members feel that the community is too small, then they might make their questions easier. And so you would have a higher probability of receiving an easier question.

amichail5• 19 years ago

Yet another variation involves an IQ filter so that you can filter out submissions and links submitted by dumb people.

You could even do it with votes as well, so that a link submitted by a high IQ user but endorsed mostly by dumb people would not appear for you.

yaacovtp• 19 years ago

Some of the smartest people I know read Us Magazine and People religiously. If you want a certain population of users target what they are interested in.

Once you've screen them with your IQ test, do they really have to prove themselves again before submitting another link?

If you just want to write and take tests go play on okcupid.com.

amichail5• 19 years ago

There are benefits to ongoing IQ testing.

First, this allows the community to raise or lower the bar for continued participation on the site.

Second, it limits cheating whereby you have a smart friend write the test once for you.

Third, this gets around the problem whereby you get an easy test just by luck.

Fourth, it will result in a membership highly interested in solving IQ type puzzles on an ongoing basis.

timg2• 19 years ago

Make people always be required to be in the top 50% of members:) Sounds like an engaging competition to me.

amichail5• 19 years ago

For a domain specific social news site, you could have a combination of general IQ testing along with domain specific knowledge testing.

comatose_kid• 19 years ago

Perhaps the best test would be having two buttons displayed to the user before they post a message:

"Please take an IQ test before you post" and "Post your message"

Since the people who take door #1 demonstrate intellectual penis envy and a lack of judgement on how to best spend their time (a fair criticism of me right now, since I'm responding to this post instead of working), you should only allow people who pick door # 2...

Seriously, I think the idea is a non-starter. Here are a few problems I have right off the top:

1) Big assumption that the quality of submissions and/or discourse is proportional to IQ. I don't think you can use IQ as a lever in this regard.

2) Even if 1) is incorrect, the IQ curve has a normal distribution. So, you'd cut off most of your users pretty quickly as your IQ requirements get higher. Last time I checked, it is a bad idea to actively trim a large chunk of people from your community. Especially by effectively telling them that they're 'too stupid'....

3) I'd be willing to bet that you'd alienate an important subset of people - intelligent mavericks, who wouldn't care to be part of some club based on a number. And I'd also be willing to bet that theirs are the viewpoints that would probably make your site interesting enough to come back to.

4) Adding onerous requirements (even if they are periodic) to allow people to contribute would probably result in a huge falloff in participation, and not just by the 'low IQ' club...

I'm guessing that I'm probably not in your target demographic, since I don't understand what benefit a site like this would offer - beyond feeling good about one measure of your intelligence.

nurall• 19 years ago

It is very important for any Social News website to cater to the lowest common denominator. I agree with some of the comments here that suggest that a lot of people might feel alienated.

It would probably work to abstract out the IQ of the user from the user himself. This means NOT having an IQ test per se and instead using relevant data mining techniques to measure the knowledge of the user based off of the user's posts and the rating that the user receives. I guess knowledge is a more relevant criteria for most people to read a given post, unless you expect someone to solve/crack a problem, rather than add content.

But, at the same time, if the metric (could call it IQ or KQ??)) can be internalized, and used to group people together and in turn used to attract people falling under a given group, might be valuable. A notion of relative IQ (of groups) would probably be more relevant here. (Creating an e-harmony for people in the same group and cater to their needs based on a given metric)

I also agree that this will apply better in a domain specific platform more than other generic social content platforms, simply because it would be easier to measure a given user metric. So, it needs to be as domain specific as possible.

Is anyone working on this kind of a model? Definitely an interesting problem!!!

mauricecheeks• 19 years ago

Someone who's IQ is reasonably high will still say uninformed things. Also, IQ does not change with age... so a 14 year old with a high IQ would fit right into your "elite community" and immediately spoil the party due to their lack of maturity.

Why not just form a blacklist of "stupid IPs". Keep your input productive... or die.

Social news for smart people via ongoing IQ tests

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