Conjure Prototype ReadMe

Rewards System Overview

Conjure

6 min readApr 25, 2019

This article is a companion to the Conjure Web Desktop Prototype.

Many of the concepts and topics within the prototype warrant a closer look and further discussion.

The prototype has one particular component that’s subtle and may be overlooked: how content is sorted and rewarded.

Quick Briefing

To reiterate, the purpose of the prototype is to provide a look, feel, and general idea of what to expect on the Conjure platform.

For the purposes of the Conjure prototype, we used over 100 movies to serve as test content for the Rewards System. We chose movies because there’s a high level of familiarity with the genre system — and the movies themselves.

We used 5 genres: action, animation, comedy, drama, and horror.

We used IMDb datasets to gather information about these movies, which we used to calculate the statistics below.

These are some of the “best” movies of the last decade, according to multiple lists we reviewed during the data collection process. We added some we thought were missing too, by the way.

Conjure Rewards

To incentivize quality content creation throughout the Conjure platform, we have designed a rewards system.

Every 48 hours (exact time interval subject to testing), Conjure Tokens from the Conjure Reserves will be distributed to creators of content based on how well their content performance within the community (“realm”) it was uploaded to.

*Note that the Rewards System described herein is not the main source of revenue for creators or CJR holders. Rewards are meant as a creative stimulus to the platform, and serves true utility in the process of ranking and sorting content.

Rewards Distribution Through Realms

The image to the left shows the trickle-down flow of rewards.

100% — All of Conjure

(100,000 CJR)

10% — Movies

(10,000 CJR)

We began with the above values simply as a reasonable starting point to work from; the real experiment begins between the genres within the movie realm, distributing rewards amongst the children realms.

Allocating to the Child Realms

Let’s allocate this 10,000 CJR rewards pot amongst the children realms of the parent (movies).

To do this, we look at views, votes, and comments — all measures of activity and engagement. Each realm receives a pool of rewards relative to how active it is.

Numbers review before moving on to the formulas:

Weights:

75% — Views
15% — Votes
10% — Comments

Here’s an example:

And if we do the same to the 4 other realms:

Because of rounding, numbers are approximate but accurate.

Next, these rewards are handed out to worthy content…

Content

The next formula determines the amount of CJR an item of content should receive within a community.

“How much CJR does the #1 action movie get?”

Using the formula above, each item is assigned an rQ (relative quality) value; this number denotes how strongly an item of content is received by its realm, relative to all other content within that same realm.

The rQ score is multiplied by the realm’s Rewards pot, which results in how much CJR the creator receives for the given time period.

Aggregation

Because our calculations have accounted for relativity, these CJR values would simply be compared “up the ladder” of realms to curate parent feed.

However, should adjustments be necessary, the relative strength of child realms to a parent realm could be used to provide a greater level of balance between parent and its child realms.

Time

Time is one variable we did not account for in this scenario. Time will affect content negatively. The longer an item of content has been uploaded, the more difficult it will be to collect CJR.

This metric will also be relative to each community. For example, time may affect movies less than gaming, since the upload frequency of movies are much less than gaming videos.

Upload Location

This is not evident in the above demonstration, because all movies have been uploaded to a genre. But some realms aren’t as straightforward as movies.

For instance, some podcasters may choose to upload content directly to the “podcast” realm instead of choosing a genre.

That’s fine — content directly uploaded to a parent will be gathered and treated as a child during the allocation process. Rewards will continue to trickle down throughout Conjure, while being diverted where the activity is along the way.

Multi-realm Classification

We did not touch on this concept in the prototype, so let’s do it here.

Consider the following:

A user enters the site, and wishes to browse sports documentaries.

His or her path would be:

Conjure
Movies
Sports + Documentaries

To enable this ability, creators can choose multiple realms to upload their content to — so long as those realms exist on the same axis (sports + docs).

From a development standpoint, approaching this requires some finesse.

Catch-22

Enabling multi-realm uploads would enable creators to classify their content appropriately, however, the potential for abuse comes into play.

If a creator can upload content to multiple realms without incurring any sort of penalty, why wouldn’t he? Mass uploading to realms would only help him reach more viewers.

This would undermine the content discovery system, and ultimately be counterproductive — niche realms would be flooded with irrelevant content.

Conjuring a Solution

Conjure’s taxonomic structure is extremely flexible and circumvents this dilemma. Because each parent to child realm pairing is unique, there’s massive flexibility to work with.

We can set parameters in one area without affecting another.

Realm Floors

For the movie realms, let’s say creators get a maximum of 2 selections. Selecting 2 realms would set a floor, disabling the ability to classify into lower realms.

Meanwhile, in the news realm, creators are given a maximum of 3 selections. This judgment is based on the need to accommodate the sheer variety of news subjects that exist.