The problem Sockrates solves

Sock Rates - Decentralized Ratings for the Internet

Online ratings are broken right now because of 2 primary reasons:

1. Manipulation By Platforms
   Platforms “own” the ratings
   Governed by Black Box algorithms
   Can manipulate for Corporate interests

2. “Bad” Ratings at source
   Fanboy reviews
   Review bombings
   Fake ratings from Bots

We solve this by a blockchain powered ratings platform with incentives for raters
Decentralized, Transparent and Immutable, Blockchain solves for Manipulation
Raters are incentivized through a fraction of the Staking Pool which tries to “predict” epoch ratings - bringing in more raters and wider representation

The process - There are 3 stages involved.
During the Voting & Staking Phase, Voters participate in Blind Polls to indicate their opinion while Stakers stake around their expectation of the poll results.
During the Reveal Phase, votes are consolidated and accumulated with the content ratings from previous epochs.
FInally, Voter and Staker rewards are distributed in the Reward Phase. Stakers win by accurate predictions, and Voters get a fraction of the Staking Pool for their activity.

We currently solve for Entertainment and Content Ratings in our MVP, but the ratings can be extended to a variety of usecases subsequently - Products, Online Businesses, Local Stores, Games, Travel and Tourism

Challenges I ran into

New to the Flow Chain, there was an initial learning curve getting hands on building on Cadence. The official documentation was the most help here, the demo videos can be increased covering a bigger project as a usecase. Debugging while connecting my frontend to the smart contracts was also a challenge. Evenutally I figured it is easiest to just copy the contract in the Flow Playground and write transctions and scripts in the playground itself, copy pasting the final code to my repo. Would be generally helpful if the debugging process on the emulator is more user friendly.