Buying engagement on Contra challenge submissions needs to be stopped. To the Contra founder, the challenges team and support: engagement is being bought and demanded on challenge submissions, and it needs action.

Vishal Singh [@vishal_singh_glpzotia] (Vishal Web Studio) has a submission in the Base44 challenge, judged by @Ofir Maimon . I reached out about a role he had posted and sent my application. He replied that he was shortlisting candidates and would check my application. In the same breath he sent a link to his own Contra submission and said: “Until then like share comment upgoat reshare.”

When I told him I was out of upgoats for the day, he came back with: “Like comment upgoat this. And I will give you 10 USD.”

Both screenshots are attached, unedited.

This matters for three reasons. Challenge rankings are meant to reflect what the community values, and paid or coerced engagement corrupts them. A prize pool is at stake, so this directly harms people who entered honestly. And job seekers are being made to feel that an application only gets read if they first boost someone’s entry. That is exploitation of people who need work, and it should have no place on Contra.

I am asking Contra to:

Investigate this submission and account for engagement manipulation, and disqualify the entry if the review confirms it.

Write an explicit rule into every challenge’s terms: paying for engagement, or making engagement a condition of a job or application, is a bannable offence.

Suspend or block accounts that do this, and make it easy to report it from inside a submission.

If you have been asked to boost a submission in exchange for money, or for a chance at a job, please report it and say so below. A pattern is easier to act on than one set of screenshots. @Isabel Feuerstein @Ben Huffman