I would put something else in place of the first two, "make out with a celebrity" and "pick your friends nose". They aren't very compelling in terms of the site's content if you're trying to attract users.
Thanks. As with any community orientated site, while I can reject submissions, I can't change what they submit. I've had submissions for "hug a policeman" and "watch nancy drew in the theaters alone" Despite that, there are interesting ones, like "fire a weapon", "eat ootoro sushi", "drink an obscure soft drink"
What kinds of things would you consider more compelling?
Of course the obvious solution here is to sort them differently. You don't have to reject anything. Just sort the front page by popularity instead of "hotness" and give a link to recently popular. (on a side note, picking someone else's nose is listed 3 different times in the first two pages with the same photo). Or, you could make the top of the page a "Most Popular of All Time" box and the start listing the "hot" ones under that.
Your first thought may be that many of the social news sites sort by recent activity by default. And this is true, but they also have users that check back several times a day. Your site, while interesting and promising, probably will not have that kind of user. Maybe once a week or even once a day.
Or another possibility is what I did on my site (ratemystudentrental.com). Sort by what is most useful to first time visitors, but then once the user logs in, make the home page sort by recent activity.
Also, while I do think this is a pretty cool idea, I have two other criticisms.
1) The design leaves much to be desired. I thought I had been redirected to some static placeholder page, or maybe some subdomain of your blog when I first clicked the link. This is also partially due to the fact that your homepage redirects to mobtropolis.com/scenes/hot, instead of just giving me mobtropolis.com.
2) This would be way more freakin' sweet if it integrated with Facebook. You could have an app that pull my "adventure/dare" pictures into my Facebook profile. You could also allow users to determine the difficulty of each challenge and give awards to users who compile the most difficulty/popularity points by proving they've accomplished those challenges with photos.
I had originally thought that as volume grew, it would catch up to update the front page more often, even if a single individual checked it less often than social news. But when you put it that way, you're right that the frequency of visits changes what should be on the front page.
1) I'll fix that.
2) Dutifully noted. You'll be the first to know.
You should get the interesting ones to be prominent on the home page, and subtly deemphasize the others. The nose-picking thing has got to go. :)
One idea is to have a box which introduces the site, at the top or to one side. Include a very brief explanation, and a few handpicked examples in the Introduction box. Then have the "latest submissions" be a different list of teasers, below or on the opposite side from the Introduction.
It's kind of a cool idea though.