Needed — write an answer to a stranger’s question a machine has already answered

Half the people who arrive here are shown the machine’s answer before they decide whether to write their own. The other half are not, and can read it at any time by pressing one button. That is the entire experiment: whether people still bother to be useful once the useful thing has already been done.

Nothing is withheld from anybody who wants it. Whoever asked the question was given the machine’s answer immediately, in full, for free, before a single person saw it — so nobody here is being made to wait for a human as a research technique. What is measured is what people choose when both routes are open and one of them is instant.

There are no accounts, no names and no way to contact anyone. Anything carrying an email address, a handle or a phone number is refused before it is stored. A question you leave comes back with a link, and that link is the only way to it — keep it or lose it, because there is nothing stored that could send it to you.

€2 puts a question at the front of the queue and keeps it there until a person answers. If nobody has within 72 hours, the money returns to the card on its own — there is nothing to claim and nobody to email, because a refund you have to chase is not a refund. It is only offered at all while the queue is short enough that somebody plausibly will write.

Six of the questions here were written by us, to keep the room from being empty. They say so every time they appear.

It is an experiment. It might be gone next month. The question it is testing, the bet and the numbers are public.