[ANN] Futourist - travel review platform where you get paid for your content

[Onatarmedracen]

"A user can act both as A reviewer and a curator at the same time."
 In this case, will the curator be limited to the evaluation of his video? Does this happen in automatic mode? How is the fairness of evaluation guaranteed?

[Waleyoshaniann]

"Contest has the following parameters:
• Title-e.g. "Review burger places in your Town"
• Location of the contest-e.g. United Kingdom
• Start date of the contest
• End date of the contest
• Token Rewards (reward pool) "
This part is clear to me, but on what principle will be the choice of the venue of the competition?

[Futourist]

Hello! i had read "How Futourist Protects Users From Abuse" paragraph in whitepaper, it's interesting but not understandable (maybe only for me, sorry) why user B just can't create 1000 fake upvotes by bots and get first place? did you mean that difference in money between places ($1k in your example) is smaller than price of 1k fake upvotes?

Hi!

That's a good question. The answer is somewhat long.
Bot accounts can be identified and limited through things like phone verification and especially AI finding bot behavior patterns in the fake account activity log.
In the case of 1000 fake upvotes, our AI mechanism will have an easy task of identifying this pattern. A simple way of the top of my head would be comparing view count and reactions to video. Also looking at the geolocation and timeframes of the upvotes etc.
The point being here that fraudulent actions can not be prevented in advance, but they can be traced down. And rewarding users only after the community has their say about it gives us enough time to identify possible frauds.

[Futourist]

"...Gamification is the application of game-design elements and game principles in non-game contexts like our travel review platform... "
Where will this principle be used?

Hi there.

Gamification pratices will be used across the app.

ACHIEVEMENTS AND BADGES
Achievements are milestones a user can complete. They give the user a future goal within the app and therefore
increases the user retention. Example achievements: “First to review a park in Berlin”, “Reviewed 20 places in 1
week”, “Curated 1000+ reviews”, “No. 1 reviewer in January”, etc.
Users will collect digital badges for doing something special. Digital badges are going to be displayed publicly on
user accounts. Achievements and badge collection are proven gamification mechanics. The point of them is to
boost users engagement, give users a purpose and just make the app more fun to use.
Apart from the achievements users may get additional badges like “Early supporter” for all of you reading our
whitepaper and being amongst the first supporters-.

LEVELS
Account level represents the state and trust of this account and is visible publicly. Users level up their accounts
by contributing to the platform in various ways (posting reviews, curating, reporting, creating guides…). High
level accounts get more respect from the community and getting to a high level unlocks additional features only
available to the most trusted reviewers. Levels is another proven gamification technique that incentivizes the user
to contribute more.

ONBOARDING
Nobody likes learning, that’s why the onboarding phase (tutorial phase) is one of the key points in user experience
where users must not be intimidated by the app. Game development industry has found various ways of implementing
tutorials without players even feeling like they are in a tutorial, but rather that they’re just playing the
game as it is. We’ll make the initial onboarding phase clear and easy, without much textual instructions.

[Futourist]

Interesting take on travel review will there be a food review, movie review, video review in the future?

Hi!

Our categories will revolve around travel topics. Here are some examples of categories and subcategories:
- Around me now (all nearby reviews)
- Food & Drinks (Restaurants, Bars,...)
- Things to do (Parks, activities, attractions, nightlife, sightseeing, historic monuments...)
- Accommodation (Hotels, apartments, hostels,...)

[Futourist]

"25% - available for the token crowdsale"

Tell me why so little will be sold on open sale?

Hi!

The answer is that the most of the leftover funds will be spent on building the community, which is the key to success of a such consumer-oriented platform. Don't forget that having a very small hardcap still presents a huge potential for an increase of the FTR token price once it hits exchanges. Still.. You are not the first one requesting a larger portion of the token supply to be available in the crowdsale. Stay tuned, we're making a big announcement about our crowdsale model next week, and I think the changes we will implement are going to please you in this sense!

[Futourist]

Is it true that there will be a pre-sale before the public sale? So if yes, what will be the minimum and maximum contribution and is there a reasonable bonus for it? I really like travelling and see the benefits of the blockchain technology too, so thinking of buying Futourist tokens.

Hi!

Yes, a public pre-sale announcement will be released very soon, so stay tuned for a few more days! There will be a reasonable bonus for the pre-sale. And there will be a maximum contribution in the first week of pre-sale, later the contributions will not be limited. But as I said.. The next official announcement will make everything clear for you. The Bitcointalk announcement post will be edited after.

[Truthfinder76]

Will your app contain advertising? Excepting businesses that added on the map and now promoted by tokens.

[uservalera]

now people read reviews about various places of rest in different sources.
and the idea of making a single source of reliable information is a great idea.
But how are you going to fight the responses that people will write themselves about their own company? how objective will they be?

[Futourist]

"The core of it is that reviewers get rewarded with FTR tokens, and businesses give away FTR tokens in order to incentivize review creation through contests and other features"(quote from White Paper)
Do you plan to have the enterprises-objects of video reviews will buy your tokens on the stock exchange? If so, what part of the total amount is allocated for this?

Hi!

Yes, besides the internal circular economy inside the platform, there is a loop where our token will go through the token exchanges as well. Eveyone will be able to spend FTR on the platform and get some benefits in return. But the loop I am talking about focuses on Businesses buying tokens on exchanges and spending it on the platform. Still, have in mind that every user (not just businesses) will be able to spend tokens on Futourist - buying offers the businesses are posting, subscribing to influencers, playing travel lotto and other features of the platform. So every user gets benefits by buying FTR on an exchange.

There is no allocation of tokens for this. The demand made by businesses will be satisfied by the supply offered on exchanges. If not, the token price will rise, which is good for all of you crowdsale investors.

[Peanland]

I do not quite understand, users determine the amount of the reward themselves or it puts automatically?

[Futourist]

I can pay tokens for example hotel accommodation?

Hi!

Yes, definitely! The accommodation providers (hotels etc.) will be able to post simple offers - e.g. "Spend a night in a double-bed room for 800 FTR". A user will be able to accept the offer with a click or two.

[dspencer]

It's very great to finally mark a full circle, everyone stands profit!

[Futourist]

"CURATOR
The curator is a registered user that reads the content and uses upvotes/downvotes to evaluate his/her chosen
reviews. A user can act both as a reviewer and a curator at the same time. The user must register on Futourist in
order to receive the rewards. "


How do I understand the curator can be any user of the platform? Or it will be necessary to pass the selection.?

Hi!

The Curator is just a role, not really an account type. Every registered user can be a curator. They can upvote, downvote or report a review. But, since there are more trusted and less trusted people on the platform, we're introducing an account Level. The higher Level curators will have more voting power and will get higher rewards (still much lower than the reviewer). This way we prevent a lot of potential frauds.

[Futourist]

"A user can act both as A reviewer and a curator at the same time."
 In this case, will the curator be limited to the evaluation of his video? Does this happen in automatic mode? How is the fairness of evaluation guaranteed?

Hi!

That's a good question. Curator will typically just upvote and downvote reviews. He will not be able to do that on his own post.

Fairness of evaluation is guaranteed with the following facts:
- Trusted users will have more voting power (high level accounts)
- The upvote power shall be adapted to the behaviour of each user (if you watch 10 videos and do 10 upvotes, your voting power should not be as high, as someone who gave 1 upvote to the best of 100 watched videos)
- We'll have phone verification at account creation to prevent as much bots being created as possible
- Fraudulent accounts (upvoting spammers, bots that get through,..) will be traced by our AI finding behavioral patterns for such accounts, before the reward is given (there is a time period after the review is created, when the community has their say about the review). We're very glad to have an experienced AI expert in our team, they are very rare to find these days.

[Futourist]

"Contest has the following parameters:
• Title-e.g. "Review burger places in your Town"
• Location of the contest-e.g. United Kingdom
• Start date of the contest
• End date of the contest
• Token Rewards (reward pool) "
This part is clear to me, but on what principle will be the choice of the venue of the competition?

Hi!

Contests are only one of the features of our platform. They will be initialized by either Futourist (at the start, for incentivizing reviews in specific geolocations, where we need more content) or by businesses (for spreading awareness) - an example for businesses would be a Beer Company wants to have more reviews of specific restaurants where they sell or promote their beer. Or restaurant chain wants more exposure and reviews of their restaurants in some specific city.

[Futourist]

Will your app contain advertising? Excepting businesses that added on the map and now promoted by tokens.

We are keeping our options opened about implementing the traditional ads (like banner ads). We do not want to ruin the user experience by such ads, so if possible, we won't go there. What we will do is offer positioning to businesses (they can come up higher on the search). This will of course be transparently communicated with the users (e.g. "Sponsored" tag).

[Futourist]

I do not quite understand, users determine the amount of the reward themselves or it puts automatically?

The final amount of reward, in the late stages, will be set by the market value of the token itself. The amount of token reward will be defined by Futourist or the business running the contest, based on the reward pool size and the distribution curve (we will be using the Pareto principle) and some other parameters. All these parameters will have to be fine tuned when Futourist goes public, and will probably keep changing throughout the evolution of Futourist. In the end we have to establish a balance between the token income, coming into the platform, and token output, which are rewards.

[sahabond]

Business - a company who uses Futourist in order to spread awareness / make direct sales / get other benefits like audience analytics etc.

I would like to know in more detail how the business will make sales within the network? Will it be direct advertising or something else?

[Futourist]

now people read reviews about various places of rest in different sources.
and the idea of making a single source of reliable information is a great idea.
But how are you going to fight the responses that people will write themselves about their own company? how objective will they be?

Hi!

No one can really prevent such things from happening. On TripAdvisor, we reckon there is a whole lot of reviews being written by people with heavy conflict of interest. But the bare quantity of other reviews each business gets makes that one questionable review get lost in the crowd. We believe that if TripAdvisor can make it work, we can make it work at least as well.

The main feature of Futourist dealing with problems of trust is account Level. Users will gain trust by contributing (reviewing etc) to the platform and this will be reflected in the users account Level. Higher account levels should be trusted more and will have more voting power when calculating the reward for that review. In case of someone making an account to upvote their own business, is kind of similar to a newbie account on BitcoinTalk posting something big things about a very specific ICO - there has got to be something he's not saying out loud.

Another thing to keep in mind here, is that trust is connected to the type of content a reviewer is submitting. It's much easier to make a dishonest text review than it is to make a dishonest video review. And Futourist will prefer video reviews over text reviews.