I consider this project a failure and am posting more as a post mortem of "I tried this thing and it didn't work" than to promote it. My explanation is at the bottom, would be interested in anyone else's opinion.
"If there is a Michael Jordan of hacking, no one knows, including him." Years ago I read Paul Graham's "Great Hackers" essay and was intrigued by his point that evaluating hackers is always local and, because of this, there's no way to find the best hacker in the world. I thought there'd be a simple way to digest this: ask hackers to nominate the best hacker they'd ever worked with, follow the chains, and end up with a handful of contenders.
After thinking about it for years, I finally built the site. Technically pretty simple, two text fields (your name, name of the best hacker you've ever worked with). When you submit, it generates a short copy-and-paste message to send to that person, with their name pre-filled and a code so they can identify themselves. Obviously not perfect security, but cuts down on nonsense.
I sent it to the guy I consider the best hacker I ever worked with. He found it interesting and passed it along to the best hacker HE'D ever worked with, and that guy seems to have ignored it. I sent it to about a dozen technical people I've known over the years and made a LinkedIn post explaining it. Everyone ignored it, except one friend who responded "Are you being serious?" When I confirmed yes, I was, he said "It smelled like a chain mail from the 90's. How's life?"
If people who know me are suspicious of it, the chance of wider traction is pretty slim. So I'm posting what I did so anyone interested can learn from my mistakes. I still think it's a solvable problem with an interesting answer. Curious if anyone here sees a mechanism that would actually work, since the email-virality playbook clearly isn't it.