What about a way to test that people are "worthy" of it? "Only people bothered to go beyond the popular social networks go there" is a decent approximation for quality. However, it would be nice to have that and a larger audience. HN is great, but what if we could scale it up and make it more general? We would need some other way to measure and filter for that kind of person - shameless elitism, yes. I can't think of any right now, though. IQ tests would be a very weak because someone can be intelligent but still not civil.