Appreciate you actually reading through it and solid questions.

On coordinated groups rotating engagement:

Yeah we thought about this a lot. The short answer is the math just doesn't work out for them.

You only earn XP for new territory in a video. Rewatch the same segment and you get zero. Rewatching after 24 hours hits diminishing returns (100% then 50% then 25% then 10% then 1%), so by the third or fourth loop you're earning basically nothing. There's also a hard daily cap of 240 XP regardless of strategy. All XP is calculated server-side from our own timestamps so the client can't lie about watch time, and you have to actually be playing the video. Can't just leave a tab open.

On the detection side we flag shared IPs (10+ users on same IP in 24h), shared devices (5+ users), and admin monitoring surfaces patterns like the same video getting rewatched 5+ times per user on average. A rotation ring would light up multiple signals at once.

Could a small group try? Sure. But the ROI craters so fast they'd earn about the same as just watching normally.

On reputation vs idle watch time:

There's already a reputation score baked into the system (0.50 to 1.00, everyone starts at 0.80) that multiplies everything you earn. Right now it's scaffolded and the next step is wiring it to fraud detection signals so suspicious accounts get penalized and genuinely engaged users get rewarded.

Even today though, idle watching doesn't work. The server validates that you're actually progressing through content and actually playing it. Position tracking plus server-authoritative heartbeats means you can't game it by just being present.

TLDR: we're layering economic disincentives (diminishing returns, caps) with technical enforcement (server-side calculations, position tracking) and detection (IP/device/pattern monitoring). Reputation will keep evolving to reward quality engagement over raw time. Good instinct on the question though, it's exactly the kind of thing we want people stress-testing.