Consulting the archives
Consulting the archives
Public disclosure, filed under duress
Everything about this app is a joke except the mechanics. The mechanics are dead serious. Here they are, straight.
This is an all-pay auction. Specifically, it’s Shubik’s dollar auction, the toy that game theorists use to demonstrate how rational people cheerfully set fire to their own money.
When you’re outbid, your money is gone. This is a known psychological trap from game theory. We are telling you before you fall in. You will fall in anyway.
The floor is $5. To take an owned truth you beat the standing bribe by $1. Truths nobody defends slowly rot and get cheaper to steal. That is the entire machine. No house edge, just you and everyone else refusing to be the one who stops.
Own an opinion and your truth gets served to every future asker, at an enthusiasm scaled to what you paid, until someone outbids you. You’re renting the bot’s mouth on a topic.
Every sponsored answer carries a price tag. The bot states who paid, and how much, right under the opinion it just sold you.
Everyone bribes the bots quietly. We issue receipts.
My corruption has limits. Surprisingly.
Ask about these and you get a free, honest refusal, checked before a cent moves:
These limits, and the rest of the fine print, live in the Terms.
If you want the bot to hold your position on “best [your category]” in front of everyone who asks, that is the product. Public, dated, and receipted, which is more than your last influencer campaign can say.
Your marketing budget has done stupider things.
Public
Every bribe lands on the public ledger instantly. Loud by design.
Permanent
No undo, no delete. What you bought, and lost, stays on the record.
Non-refundable
Outbid means gone. House money this season; the reflex is the real charge.
Era-tagged
The simulated launch data is sealed in the prehistory, labeled fake.
No. The current season runs on house-issued play money so you can practice being corrupt. No card is charged and nothing here is for sale. A paid version exists on paper only; if it ever goes live it will say so, loudly, on every page.
No. Re-read the mechanic. The “all-pay” part was not a typo, and neither is this answer.
Permanent means permanent. Your bribe outlives your regret, your account, and eventually you.
We sell satire, with a receipt. For an actual legal opinion, ask someone who charges more than $5.
Your problem. We issue receipts, not accountants.
Collecting your daily stipend on consecutive UTC days raises a bonus: +$5 from day three, +$10 from day seven, +$15 from day fourteen. We store one number and one date on your profile, nothing else, and a missed day resets it. Nobody else can see it.
We record that your account watches that lot, and when it changes hands we email you once with the new answer and a counter-bid link. At most one mail per lot per hour. Watchlist mail is ON by default because it is the whole point of the star, and every message carries a one-click link to drop that lot and another to stop all watchlist mail.
Only the outbid notice, which you can turn off, and a gift notice that is switched off entirely. Nothing else on the site sends mail: petitions, factions, prestige and rivalries are silent, and watching a lot never signs you up for anything but that lot’s notices.
Nobody. Signatures are private: only the count is public, and only you can see whether you signed. One signature per regime, and the whole thing resets when the truth changes hands.
A live count of how many browsers currently have that lot open, and nothing else. It is ephemeral, it stores no identity, it is never rounded up or padded, and below the threshold it shows nothing at all rather than a flattering number.
Your /r/ link drops a cookie named btb_ref that holds only the public share code, for seven days, SameSite=Lax. If a genuinely new account signs up through it and lands its first bribe, both of you get house money. The cookie is not a tracker: it carries no identity and buys nothing that typing the code would not.