How it works

How a post gets in

1. Submitting

   A member posts a link, or a text. From then on, whether it is seen is not the author's to decide. Submitting is throttled by standing and stakes a little of it on the outcome.

2. The draw

   A panel is drawn at random from the members who can be reached at that moment: someone on Veridonia right then, or someone with a working way of being told. The author is never on it, nor anyone who already voted on this version; nothing else narrows the draw. How many are asked is read from the community: the bar is as many answers as it can be relied on to produce in the time a decision is meant to take, capped at five and never below one, and enough people are asked that the bar is very likely to be met in time, given how often its members have answered lately; the fewer people there are to ask, the more time they are given. A community too small for that is asked in full. In the smallest communities the bar is one. A drawn member who steps aside or cannot be reached is replaced while anyone is left to draw. When nobody at all can be reached, the post publishes at once, and its decision page records that nobody judged it. An editor may instead put their own post to every member who can be reached, in a single round decided by a simple majority of the votes cast.

3. Answering

   Each drawn member reads the post on the decision's own page and votes for it, votes against it, or steps aside (the record shows this as skipped). A vote against names what was wrong, from a short fixed set of reasons shared by every community, with a note if none fits. A vote in favour carries no reason, and stepping aside is not scored. A post that has been put forward before is marked as such, with why it came back.

4. Settling

   The panel decides by simple majority of the votes cast, every vote counting equally. A tie does not publish. Once the votes needed are in, the decision stays open until an hour after the round began, so slower answers still count. A decision usually settles within a few hours and never later than a day: at the deadline the round closes on the votes already cast, with a small minimum below which those few votes decide nothing. A round whose deadline passes with no votes at all does not publish. One where every drawn member stepped aside and nobody could replace them publishes, as a post with nobody to ask does, and moves nobody's standing.

5. A second round, where one exists

   In a community whose higher-standing members, roughly the top third, can be expected to produce more than one vote, the first panel is drawn from the rest and a post it approved goes to a second, narrower panel drawn from that top third, whose majority is decisive. The deadline is for the whole decision. As of September 2026 no decision has had a second round.

6. The record

   While a decision is open, its page is visible only to the author and the people asked to decide it, and nobody sees how the others voted. Once a round closes, its votes are attributed by name, with the reasons given against; the author sees them when the decision settles. Once settled, the page is readable by anyone, signed in or not. Every community and every person also has a public, time-ordered activity record, kept indefinitely.

7. Afterwards

   Standing moves for those who voted in a split round: up when the vote matched their round's majority, down when it did not. The author's stake settles the same way: a gain when published, a cost when the panel decided against; where nothing was judged, nobody's standing moves. Standing is conserved, so what the author gains or loses is balanced across a few members drawn at random. A post that was not published returns to its author, who may revise it and put it before the same panel again, staked again, or ask for a fresh panel, which the record counts. A published post cannot be edited.

The draw, simulated

A simulated run of the steps above. Panel sizes are read from each community, from how many members are reachable and how often they answer, so a small community draws a single, smaller panel. It starts when it scrolls into view.

A decision, as it is recorded

Standing, editors and moderation

Why it is built this way

A feed allocates scarce attention, and that choice should be legible, contestable and fast enough for daily use. Asking everyone to vote on everything is too slow; letting anyone opt in invites brigading and capture; handing decisions to a fixed class of moderators concentrates power. A small panel drawn at random, a reason required to vote against, judgement scored against the outcome and a record anyone can read are meant to give a representative answer under uncertainty, to make capture expensive rather than impossible, to settle within hours rather than days, and to claim a fair process rather than knowledge of what is true. The essays below take each of those choices in turn.

Accounts and being drawn

Reading needs no account. Posting, voting and commenting need one, and membership of the community. An anonymous account can do everything a signed-in one can, but is lost with the device unless an email or a social account is linked to it. Every new account is a member of the default communities, today Europe and Veridonia, from its first moment. Only members who can be reached are drawn: someone on Veridonia within the last few minutes, or someone with a working notification channel, in the app or in the browser.