This subreddit is missing several things that made the Final Exam successful: changing the subreddit to more closely resemble it may improve its chances of success.

Not really, and that's the problem. The circumstances that made the HPMOR Final Exam work were very specific. It worked because:

  1. There were 7,000+ individuals on the subreddit, and probably as many as half were contributing in some way, if only by upvoting ideas they found compelling.

  2. The masses were working on a single idea-set for a long time. The story was 5 years old by the time the Final Exam was issued, so the /r/HPMOR had some time to mature. Yudkowsky has mentioned a few times that when he issued the practice exam on chapter 80, the subreddit hadn't yet become a super-intelligence.

  3. /r/HPMOR is also highly specialized for figuring out HPMOR. The source material had thousands of eyes going over it chapter by chapter identifying anything that could be considered a bug or discrepancy.

  4. The culture was very mature and intelligent compared to the vast majority of internet forums.

Many of these factors existed because HPMOR attracted smart, genre-savvy fans or taught it's fans to be smart and genre-savvy. And HPMOR got so many fans because it was novel and well written. The Great HPMOR Super-intelligence happened not because thousands of smart people came together and decided to form a super-intelligence, but because HPMOR was enjoyed by thousands of people and taught them to at least try to be more rational AND reddit provided a platform for those people to discuss the story and it's ideas.

I think trying to replicate the Final Exam's success is going to be extremely difficult because even if everyone from /r/HPMOR came here, it would take years to adjust to the new problems and learn everything relevant to solving the problems. (Remember: in HPMOR the ending was foreshadowed, the real world doesn't work like that.) And you have to keep those thousands of people focused on the task for however long it takes.

Add to that that many of the problems up for discussion here would already have had a lot of people working on them, from professionals to bloggers, that without a guarantee that the problems have a solution, people will assume that the low-hanging fruit is already picked.

TL;DR: The /r/HPMOR super-intelligence had vary narrow parameters that won't generalize well. You need a guarantee that there is a solution or you won't be able to create a hive-mind with enough individuals with enough time and knowledge to solve fuzzy problems.

/r/FinalExams Thread