Regulation: Brain.ly

Posted by
From Brain.ly

The circuit of culture is how to study a topic and its influence appropriately and completely on our way of life. This way of exploring includes consumers who use the product, how it is used, its purpose, the identity of said consumers, the rules enforced over the product, how it is made, and how this all influences the product. The idea of regulation covers the official and unofficial rules and guidelines for a website and the analysis of how it is regulated. You need to consider who oversees creating, whether formal or informal, and enforcing the rules and whether it is effective or not. Most sites with subscriptions use the login and payments to officially regulate who has access to the website.

Brain.ly was built to be a homework-helping website. It offers access to textbook answers, “expert” answers, and step-by-step instructions. You can sign up for free with the registration of a login. Users describe whether they are a student or teacher, their email, and their age. The signup for free comes with ads and a limited number of answered questions per day. The payment options are $10 a month for access to verified answers without ads, textbook answers, and access to the math problem solver. The other option is $29 a month for the math and science problem solver, the ability to save answers to view later, and Brainly Plus which includes the Brainly tutor.

From Brain.ly

The free access allows you three answers a day after watching a minute ad from a sponsor and a 45-second ad from Brain.ly. These ads can deter users and regulates what products are shown on the page. The official website advisors are in charge of what ads are shown because companies pay for this service. The ad from the website is created by official creative directors and approved by administration; no one else has the power to change it. The price charged is also determined by the administration and cannot be changed by others without authority. The price is a way to regulate users based on their resources and how much the answers are worth to them. The lack of access makes the answers more valuable.

The website also shows answers from specific textbooks which are regulated in many ways. The website regulates who has access to the answers through the payment wall and is also in charge of what textbooks are displayed. They only have 120 college textbooks on their website, meaning that there is not access to all answers or possible classes. This is another way to regulate who uses the site because users will not pay for access that does not have the availability of their textbook. This can also benefit the website because companies can pay for the registration of their textbooks or pay for the answers to not be given.

From Brain.ly

All users can post questions assigned to a subject, but there is a lack of regulation here. There seems to be no way to filter the appropriateness of the question and whether the content is relevant. There is a point value assigned to each question for asking and answering it. Users who do not pay for a subscription only have 35 points. In the same way, anyone can answer the questions without checking if the answer is appropriate or correct. There is no true way of checking whether the answers you have access to are correct if it is not connected to the textbook or part of Brainly Plus. This highlights the advantage of paying for an account. Users get points for posting answers to the questions. This creates issues because some may post an incorrect answer just to accumulate points for their own questions. The lack of regulation on the questions asked corresponds to the lack of regulation of answers. This optimizes the use of the website and entices the users to pay for the subscription.

The only way to certify a correct answer is to pay Brain.ly to answer it for you. The only way to access this is a payment of $29 a month. Brain.ly must filter the qualifications of the tutors in order to claim they have the expertise to answer any question correctly. The user must trust the website to provide the resources for the right answers. This type of regulation relates to the lack of regulation for other answers. Brain.ly uses the option for certified answers by “pros” to have the user question the validity of the free answers given by anyone. This scheme is the way the website profits and the reasoning for why users pay extra for more excess.

The idea of this website may not seem ethical under the idea of cheating, but the website does have an honor code. It supports four main ideas: create your own work, give others credit, do not post any type of assessment, and get permission to share other classroom material. The idea of this system is valid, but there is no effective way in which the website can regulate that. The company is unable to make sure all users are following these guidelines. This lack of structure almost makes the website more user-friendly because users can find information with fewer restrictions, and this increases the number of users resulting in more money for the company.

The scheme of the website is to use a lack of restriction on what information is posted and a paywall to create a profit. The lack of regulation to prevent cheating makes the website more useful and more profitable. The points system used to regulate how much access a user has utilizes the lack of regulation on the answers posted. The users can cheat the system allowed by the lack of formal enforcers to post incorrect answers for them to get more out of the website without paying. The answers are formally regulated only through the Brain.ly tutors which increases the profitability of the website. The administration of Brain.ly have created the distribution of the lack of regulation in order to optimize their profitability and number of users.

Leave a Reply