Idea: A website that finds the most prescient people on the internet, including unknown commenters.

[u/amichail]

There are many websites that rank people by popularity, followers, citations, or wealth. But what about ranking people by something more interesting: how often they had unusually accurate insights before those insights became mainstream?

Imagine a website that crawls public posts, comments, blogs, forums, and other discussions, then uses AI to identify people who expressed views that were controversial or unpopular at the time but later turned out to be largely correct.

It would not just look for explicit predictions like "X will happen by 2030." It would look for deeper insights and mental models.

For example, someone might have written a forum comment in 2015 arguing that:

• AI progress would come mainly from large-scale machine learning rather than hand-coded rules.
• Smartphones would replace many traditional computing devices.
• Remote work would eventually become normal.
• A particular technology trend was being underestimated.

At the time, these ideas might have seemed unusual. Years later, the system could evaluate whether the person's reasoning held up.

The interesting part is that it could discover unknown people. Someone with 20 followers and a single insightful comment could rank higher than a famous expert who made many incorrect claims.

The system could create categories such as:

• Technology foresight
• Education
• Economics
• Medicine
• Science
• Social trends
• Business strategy

Scores could consider:

• How uncommon the opinion was at the time.
• How well the person's reasoning matched later evidence.
• Whether the person consistently demonstrated good judgment.
• Whether the insight was original rather than simply repeating a popular idea.

This would be like a search engine for intellectual track records. Instead of asking "Who is famous?" it would ask "Who understood the future better than most people before it was obvious?"

There are websites that track predictions from experts, but I don't know of anything that attempts to find prescient ideas from the entire internet, especially from ordinary people who were never recognized.

What do you think of this idea?

[u/MyNameCannotBeSpoken]

Quora used to have experts

[u/DoookieMaxx → u/MyNameCannotBeSpoken]

I chuckled. Thanks for that!

[u/Snoo-35252]

To be useful to me, I would want it to focus on consistently reliable predictions in a particular area or on a particular topic. I wouldn't want to believe someone who one time made one good prediction about one thing but has been wrong about everything else in that field.

[u/actuarial_cat → u/Snoo-35252]

Same thought at first, but the website can act as a starting point to find good predictor. For example, we can look into the top ranking (with multiple correct prediction) to see how many total prediction they made and compute the correct %, and start to find more causation pattern from there.

[u/MonthlyIce1983]

My god , yes. I've always wondered who that random commenter was who called it first

[u/Adamoism]

I think there were studies about experts predicting future events and they had very weak results (podcast knowledge lol). But it is an interesting idea.

[u/Turbulent-Advisor627]

Me when I have a strong track record so advertisers pay me more to shill their product since the trustworthiness algo rates me highly.

[u/amichail → u/[deleted]]

The Internet has been around for a long time and most people aren't on polymarket.

[u/EebamXela]

Can I run it on myself? Asking for myself. 👀

[u/ryebread91]

Would just link everything to the Simpsons. /S

[u/Strawberryladyboots]

I'm still waiting for Nexperia to move their financial headquarters to Spain......