Personalheroes is a new social platform that rates the good things you do for others

Sometimes life on the internet can all get a bit much. But Personalheroes, a new social platform set to launch in September, aims to do something positive with the technology in our lives. Instead of the good looks, popularity or cat pictures that seem to drive success on other sites, Personalheroes rewards something we can all appreciate – kindness.

By analysing good deeds, which are submitted and tagged by others, the algorithm used by Personalheroes decides the social impact of the act of kindness, and in turn gives each user a score based on how kind the act is deemed to be. This is unaffected by how populated the user’s profile is – so, for example, your good deeds are worth just as much as Taylor Swift’s, regardless of how many people rate her. And – thankfully – there is absolutely no down-voting.

The formula used to decide the apps point based system has been created with mathematicians and game designers, and even religious experts. Users can be given a score of between 0 and 1000, which the creators aim to be able to use as a more insightful measure than the ratings sites like Etsy give.

Ultimately Personalheroes might not only score kindness, but encourage it: a pilot scheme has gone out with employees of Coca-Cola over the world, and the creators found that the programme created a positive feedback loop, with compliments tending to be reciprocated. And even if the motivation is a good rating, we could all benefit from more kindness in the world.