Cleaning up the Streets of Mission Cheating on Empire Avenue
Empire Avenue lets people run missions for people to take social actions online like: liking a Facebook page, RTing a tweet on Twitter, buying shares of them, or subscribing to a channel. To learn more about Empire Avenue read my post: Empire Avenue – Streets Paved with influence. I love Empire Ave but there is a glaring problem they need to fix when it comes to their missions. Users run missions and offer eaves (Empire Avenue currency) to to people who will do simple tasks for them. Well, mission cheating is a big problem for those who run missions on Empire Avenue. The streets are not well lit and thieves lurk in the shadows. People come and click the link to claim the eaves and then don’t do the mission. People are getting nervous taking their hard earned eaves down the ave and Empire Avenue needs to do something to restore law on the ave. I have read multiple articles from people who have had their eaves stolen by mission cheaters. Most rant and rave about the thieves and make idle threats of exposing the cheaters if they ever find them. I have a simple solution.
There are always going to be people who game a system, as a younger man I was into computers and hacking. I can tell you if there was a weakness a hacker will find it and exploit it. So how do you stop people from abusing your system. Well, it reminds me of the movie Catch Me if You Can with Leonardo DeCaprio. In the end the FBI hire the con artist to catch other con artists. Now in the case of Empire Avenue they haven’t solved this issue so it is time to go vigilante, or at least tell them how to fix it. It all comes down to smart systems and better structures. The glaring weakness with being able to click a button to get the reward with no way of holding them accountable is obvious. The issue I am guessing is that they can’t get access to the information on the sites like Facebook or other platforms to know if they actually liked the page or left a comment. Instead of trying the difficult task all they need to do is look at the simple structure of how things work. So here is the solution. (And by the way maybe Empire Avenue can pay me like a few million eaves for solving their problem.)
Look at the Craigslist model they let people manage the people on the platform by turning them in. Put the power back into the people. All they have to do is create a list of every user who took the mission and clicked the button. Since they are depositing the eaves in their account they know who the 20 people are that took the eaves already. What they should do is simply let the user who ran the mission access a list of the users who took the eaves. Not only would this be useful so they could thank them and invest in them, but also they could see if those people actually did what they mission said. This would take Empire Avenue out of it and let the people police themselves. The person who ran the mission could reclaim the eaves and block and flag someone who took the eaves but didn’t do the mission. They would have to do this before archiving the mission. So now if a person runs a mission to leave a comment on their post they can simply look at the 20 people who took the eaves and then cross reference the comments and take back the eaves from the people who didn’t do it.
Now in order to stop reverse abuse which I don’t think would happen often, you can allow the person who had the eaves removed be able to make a claim for those eaves if they feel they did the mission. If a person has x amount of flags Empire avenue can ban them temporarily or permanently from completing missions in addition the person should be able to block them from their future missions with one click. Over time the cheaters would just not survive. Just by being able to see who did your mission would solve most of the issues and that is an easy fix. This is like putting street lights so thieves can hide in the shadows of Empire Avenue. Right now the thieves can hide in the shadows because the person running the mission has no way of knowing who took the eaves. So please step up Empire Avenue and and clean up the streets on Empire Ave of the thieves lurking in the shadows and robbing your users. Install proper lighting on the ave and watch the streets become safer.
By the way if you haven’t checked out Empire Avenue click here to join and buy 200 shares of me (ROSSQUINTANA), I reciprocate all buys and social interaction because that is simply the type of person I am :]
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