The Tally Rating
A friend to help manage reputations.
Everyone knows that cats are good judges of character. Bring a new person in to your home and a cat will know right away if they are a keeper. Kontrak is built around trust and Tally is here to help you manage your reputation.
We’d like to introduce our friend and our helper, Tallycat. Tally is here to help you work through social contracts with your friends and family. Tally’s job is to look out for who ask been fulfilling their obligations and who hasn’t and to give them a rating so you can make quick decisions about who you transact with. Tally has a couple friends who will pop up from time to time too, so keep an eye out for them.
About trust, and why it matters
Trust is the glue the holds us together. Trust can be very hard to win, but is extremely easy to lose. People generally lend things to each other based on how much they trust each other and the more you trust another person, the more likely you are to lend to them.
Trust can also be abused pretty easily too. Whether that is through forgetfulness or something worse. Tally takes the emotion out of lending, the fact that we trust other people to do the right thing can often be the seed that can lead to relationship breakdown and in worst cases even violence, so at Kontrak Social we have Tallycat to take the emotion out of decision making with a clear visual system to allow informed decisions upfront.
How the trust system works
For our initial build we’ve kept things super simple. If you’re a borrower and successfully complete a Kontrak within terms, your Tally Rating will automatically go up a level. If you don’t complete a Kontrak within terms, it will go down a level. Simple.
Your control of this system is very limited. A lender can set a Kontrak up so that it isn’t rated – for example a parent might not want to effect their kid’s rating if they fail to meet terms, but still wish to lend to the child, so we have enabled this feature from a lenders persepective only.
The other feature is a trusted contact. Now we don’t want cousin Vinnie hitting everyone in the family and friends group up for cash every week so we have disabled borrow requests from lending contracts as standard. If you wish to have a person request money from you, you must choose to have them as a trusted contact in your app and turn this on in the contacts page. This will not only allow children and trusted contracts to request funds, but it will reduce the number of scams people fall for from text messages as if you know the request came through the app as a trusted contact then you know its legit and its supported by the selfie attached to the Kontrak. Yes we hate scammers too and are trying our best to eliminate potential fraud.
When you set up a Kontrak with someone there are two indicators of their current level, the trust bar:
Your Tally rating will start as neutral.
Increase your rating when you complete a Kontrak within the set terms.
Lower your rating when you don’t complete a Kontrak within the set terms.
Gaming
To help stop people from gaming the system and instantly getting the highest rating, we’ve set the system up so you can only get a positive rating bump from another user once every three months. You can get receive more than one negative bump from another user if you fail to meet terms though, so try to keep your end of the deal ok?
