If a designer sends all of their friends and family to vote for their design, doesn’t that make the whole voting process unfair?
Design ratings are based on all votes, regardless of how the voter ended up on the site—whether a designer sent the voter to Minted to vote for their design, or whether the voter arrived at Minted independently. But at Minted, it is very important to us that challenge outcomes are fair. So we do two things: we examine voting logs for suspicious voting behavior and remove these votes; and we also recruit a large audience to vote in our challenges so that it becomes very hard for a designer to swing their ratings in a positive direction, because their friends’ and family’s votes become outnumbered. Overall, we’re pretty convinced right now that the best designs win.
