Reading through this post and the answers, as well as chatting with @Sylle today, spawned two little ideas:
1. “Verified awesomeness”-badges for video-verified performances 
Sending in a video-verification of your performance is completely optional, but those that do would get some kind of “verified awesomeness”-badge next to their name, or score, on the ML website (for the discipline in which they have verified their score). Each verification could then be valid for a certain range of scores. For example, if you recorded yourself memorising a deck of cards in 33 seconds, then all your cards times of e.g. 30+ seconds would have this badge (small buffer since it’s not reasonable to always record your best result). Of course, this buffer should become smaller and smaller the faster you are. For people that have competed in official physical memory competitions, maybe it could also be reasonable to count their performances in Speed Cards as a verified result in Cards (but they’d have to prove their identity + apply for it → can’t expect Memory League to do this pro-actively).
Pros:
- Not mandatory for anyone
- Fun thing for people to try to get verified + sets their performances apart from un-verified ones
Cons:
- Someone has to check the verified performances. That can take a lot of time if many people do it. Perhaps there could be a limitation that only scores beyond a certain threshold are eligible to be verified, e.g. sub-45 seconds for Cards, or top-50 athletes in the discipline.
Whether or not to have these video-verified performances public or not is another question. I think it would be very interesting for the community to see them, but for privacy reasons it could also be an idea that only the Memory League-team gets to see them.
2. “Recommended opponent”-badges 
Did you like playing against your opponent? Was (s)he a nice and fair person? Then give them a thumbs up!
This idea spawned from the question “What if we could give ML-players ratings, like in Uber?”. However, we quickly realised that this wouldn’t be very optimal, since some players would receive very bad (but maybe fair) reviews of themself. The first thing that came to mind was that @AndreaMuzii’s reviews all would look like:
“did not enjoy the experience of getting trounced at both system-based and natural-memory events - 1/5 stars”
With a “thumbs up”- or “I recommend this player”-system, you only have the ability to give positive reviews. This could perhaps encourage people to be more nice to others on the site just to get that thumbs-up (and to not crush them in every game, like @AndreaMuzii ;-)). In order to prevent people from creating multiple accounts to give many recommendations for themselves, it could also be possible to only make it possible for paid members to give recommendations.
(I realise that this second idea is not per se a solution for what’s being discussed in this post, but thought I’d write it here anyways, since it was this thread that spawned the idea)
Thoughts? 