Today we call for every Community Choice participant’s attention: we have released an update of the refined rating system that is designed to fix one very specific problem that was priorly used by many to exploit our voting protocol unfairly.

Originally, the Community Choice allowed every participant vote for or against any campaign presented at KICKICO, which is a healthy representation of how it shall work in an open market: anyone is welcome to share their opinion, give feedback and thIus let us adjust our marketplace conditions to the users’ preferences. Namely, according to our Community Choice initial release, the project that reached the top of the rating was further transferred to the upcoming campaign list and prepared for tokensale launch. Of course, we clearly understood the first version was an attempt to introduce our vision of the Community oriented and influenced platform, which was apparently destined to be adjusted and further upgraded.

So, in order to raise their position and accelerate the launch, every project was offered to invite their community member to sign up to KICKICO and support their favourites with their votes.

Previously, we had several parameters affecting the actual Voice Weight of a user, which included the account age, the total sum of pledges contributed to previous campaigns at KICKICO and the stake of KICK held in the registered wallet. All of these were selected specifically to give the senior users of KICKICO more deciding votes, due to those who stay with us throughout the stages of our development are the most interested in our growth, and therefore, more motivated to play fair.

Nevertheless, we clearly realized, as it is in any system, there were loopholes, one of which appealed to dishonest participant as a way to trick the community and the platform: some projects deliberately violated the principles of good faith dealing and besides or instead of calling their followers for support also incentivized their communities to vote all the other projects down in order to put a gap between them and the fair players. Taking this issue as a standalone problem, we of course discouraged everyone from doing so, since in our vision a manipulated market will never be driven to growth and development, but actually in addition to the general destruction of the democratic atmosphere it caused an avalanche-like effect. Though a number of campaign remained loyal to the open-market principles, a majority followed the “monkey sees, monkey does” path, which resulted in too many projects having a groundless negative rating score, and the top being occupied by a group of cheaters who had invited the most followers to exploit the described loophole.

This way, obtaining the results of the Community Choice Beta, we could create a solution to set everything back to the honest grounds, we have seriously upgraded the vote score calculation mechanism, carefully redesigning the resulting formulae, this time introducing the Toxicity Index, designed for the only purpose of deterring such cheating behavior: from this point on any voter will decrease his or her Voice Weight by voting projects down. Yes, of course we realize it is totally fine when Community members vote the unfavorable campaigns down, and such matters will not affect the Voice Weight significantly; on the other hand, those who used the rating to vote for a single campaign and against all the others, as it had happened, will now have lost almost all of their deciding powers and correspondingly have no influence on the projects’ score.

Here’s how the new rating system works:

Project A asks its backers to vote for Project A and vote against all Project A’s rivals. Project A backers follow the order and vote for Project A and against Project A’s rivals. The KICKICO Rating System in this case nullifies all malicious backer votes. The malicious backer votes are now damaging to Project A as they are non-existent both for Project A and for the rival projects. The rival projects win.

To rectify the situation, Project A can now only ask its backers to remove the negative votes on rival projects.

As we can now see several hours after the deployment, it has already happened: the top of the rating is now represented by those who played fair and did not chase the alleged advantage of tricking around. Therefore we shall announce that taking the reversive change of the rating, we have chosen to postpone the next Top-of-the-List nomination for the next week, giving the last chance to the dishonest: just as they incentivized their communities to take attempts to violate the fair voting, we now suggest all of those to change their minds. Taking off all of those unmotivated negative votes will in a period of time result in the Voice Weight recalculation, this way returning the powers to voters.

We encourage all of the communities to support their most preferred campaigns, and we reserve the users’ right to say “no” to those they do not like, but there shall be no place for unfair and cruel violation of good faith in our open and frank Community Choice Rating.

As the early adopters of the ICO market and blockchain technology, we of course share the great values of openness and transparency, which is the core of our intention to design such a Rating System, in which only the frank incentive will be rewarded: the current fix took us long to develop, but at the same time has put us much closer to the final stage, when we will introduce the state-of-the art Community Choice for everyone.