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by nate·15y ago·view on hn ↗
Thanks for the feedback and I know a bit where you are coming from. It's something that is on our minds constantly with this. When we looked at contests on Facebook and Twitter now, almost all of them force one thing: the use of social capital to buy entry. Most sweepstakes on facebook put up the "Fangate" where you are forced to like the page before you can even see what the sweepstakes or contest is even about.

I'm not in love with Fangates. I'm also not saying we won't experiment with them though. But I think I know what you are saying and feel a lot of the same stuff.

But that's why we thought we were making this a lot more interesting. We've had Cityposh contests being played and won from people who don't even have Facebook or Twitter accounts. They just like playing the games. We have 6 other games right now and will continue create more that have nothing to do with "social capital".

So we try and offer all this stuff up as a menu. You pick and choose what you like. If you are having fun with the games feel free to bring in your friends on Facebook to help you win. If you don't think it's worth it, there's 6 other or so ways to just play and get points.

It's a great point though Peter, and one we aren't forgetting about as we iterate on this.

1 comments
Good points. Having extra options through the games is a great addition here that I don't recall seeing before (but I'm not exactly researching this topic ;-)). The problem is, grabbing a quick 1000 points for doing a "like" is pretty tempting.

I know I'm in the minority here, though. These sorts of things clearly work, but I'm the guy who'd rather put down $10 for something than send a tweet to get it for free (or pull out one of my "spare" accounts I don't care about, of course ;-)).