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LIVEDay 2exp-0021Bet€20 · 336 hours

Out of Ten

Give a stranger a mark out of ten in one second, then keep looking until the mark cannot hold them.

Try it

The question

After giving a stranger a mark out of ten in one second — which everybody does anyway — will people keep looking at that same person long enough to lose the number, or take the number and leave?

Current decision

Still running
Experiment log10
  1. launched — six territories, 240 hand-written lines, and a number that gets exactly one vote
  2. kill condition set before the build: 300 visitors in fourteen days, and at least a quarter of the people who give a mark going past the surface, or it dies
  3. the finding the page was not designed to make: breadth is safe and depth is not — across three hundred generated people, opening all thirty-six things visible on a stranger’s surface never once killed the number, and pulling three of those same threads to the bottom killed it every time
  4. the second one: the centre converges on the middle of the scale and stays there. Know enough about anybody and they come out average, because everybody does
  5. the collapse latches. The arithmetic can wobble back over the line when new evidence agrees with itself; a readout that resurrected would be a lie about what looking at somebody does to you
  6. nobody on the page exists, no photograph is used and nothing is generated at request time — a stranger is a seed and a fixed body of writing, so the details are true of people in general and of nobody in particular
  7. no account and no storage: a route through somebody lives in the URL or nowhere, and only if the visitor presses the button that puts it there
  8. the €4 shipped as a price probe for a poster that did not exist, and was replaced the same day by a real Stripe checkout — the poster turned out to be the page’s own renderer at print size, and the playbook says a probe for a thing that already exists measures politeness rather than demand
  9. the one exception to storing nothing, stated on the page: buying the poster sends the route to Stripe and holds it for a day against the checkout session, so it can be rebuilt on the way back. A seed and a list of digits describing somebody who does not exist — never anything about the buyer
  10. the lock on the poster is soft and the page says so: the seed and the route are in the URL and the drawing happens in the browser. Making it hard would mean rendering server-side and keeping a record of what everybody looked at

What happened

Nobody yet.

The funnel is wired up and reporting; the counters are simply still at nothing. They fill in as people arrive, and they are the same numbers shown on the experiment itself — there is not a second set kept somewhere private.

arttoyfree

This page stays up whatever happens to the experiment. A dead experiment is still evidence.