flmflm’s goal is to reward merit, not just popularity. Flmflm takes various complementary measures to ensure challenge winners are picked based on authentic votes.

• Voting users must verify their identity with a mobile device to prevent bot accounts spamming votes
• Voting users may be asked periodically to complete exercises to verify they are not a robot
• Votes are only counted if a voter watches a significant portion of the submission video. Quickly skipping a video does not count as a down vote.
• Voters must use the flmflm app with a minimal frequency. You cannot simply create an account to vote on a single challenge, you have to demonstrate a recent history of considering various challenges and competitors (see attenuated votes below).

Attenuated votes

flmflm adjusts the weight of a vote to mitigate the chances of manipulation by groups organized outside of flmflm. The size of this adjustment is called the votes “attenuation factor” and has a value between 0 and 1 inclusive. Legitimate users’ votes will have an attenuation factor of 1 except during the first few weeks of use, or following a long pause in use. Non-legitimate users will have an attenuation factor below 1.

The attenuation factor implies that an authentic user must consistently participate as a voter in flmflm over a recent, but significantly long period of time. Attenuation is related to the concept of “proof of work”, the idea that a malicious actor is disuaded from cheating because it is expensive in money and time or both to “prove they did the work” to verify their vote.

In summary, a flmflm vote does not count unless a user can show that they have an authentic unique mobile device (expense in money of maintaining a multi factor authentication) and that they use it regularly over an extended period of time (expense in time). They must also complete CAPTCHA challenges to prove they are not a bot.