Why I built this

The game is real. It is also the front door.

I am not going to be coy about this. The wall is a vanity game. You buy a number, you put your face on it, people click, you climb. It is meant to be fun, slightly ridiculous, and worth five dollars on its own.

But ask what a game like that actually builds, if it works.

Not a leaderboard. A million people who came in through the same door, standing next to each other, who could all be pointed at the same thing on the same day.

That is the part I cannot stop thinking about.

What I am actually building

The plan is to aim that cohort at a small number of causes each year. Not a banner. Not a round-up box at checkout. One cause at a time, and a coordinated push from a group large enough that a modest gesture from a fraction of it changes what a small organisation can do in a year.

The arithmetic is the whole argument. Most people will not give. That is fine, it is expected, and I have built for it. But a small proportion of a very large number is still a very large number. For an organisation that counts its donations in dozens, that money arriving all at once is not a good month. It is a different year.

It can also go wrong at the other end, and I would rather say so here than discover it later. A small charity receiving many thousands of small donations in a week is not simply lucky. It is an organisation suddenly doing a job it is not staffed for. Choosing causes that can absorb the win is part of the work, not an afterthought.

Nobody is helped by being flattened.

Why the reach matters more than the money

A million people is the headline. It is not the number that counts.

Every person on the wall has a circle. You already know what yours looks like. You know who would open a link because it was yours, and who would scroll past the same link from a stranger. That is the thing no advertising budget buys, and every one of you is carrying it.

A cohort that shares is worth far more than a cohort that merely exists. The whole design of this site is built around that: your own page, your own link, your own number to point people at.

So when a cause comes round, I will ask two things, and the second one is free. Give if you can. Tell people either way.

What your five dollars does

Straight answer: it pays for this. The servers, the storage for a million photographs, the payment processing, the moderation, and the hours it takes to build. Your purchase is not a donation and I am not going to describe it as one.

What it buys is the thing that makes the giving possible, which is the cohort itself. Whether a share of what the site earns also goes to the causes is still open, and it is listed below with the other open questions rather than hinted at here.

What I promise

Giving is always yours to refuse.

Buying a spot never requires a donation. Saying no changes nothing about your spot, your number, or your standing on the wall.

Giving never buys position.

Position is earned by clicks and nothing else. That is as true of donations as it is of upgrades. No amount of generosity moves anybody up, and there will never be a leaderboard that mixes the two.

I never hold your money.

When the giving side is built, donations will go directly to the cause's own account. The money will not pass through me. That is deliberate: a platform holding other people's charitable donations carries a regulatory weight I have no reason to take on, and you should not have to trust me with it in order to take part.

I will know that you gave. I will never know how much.

By design, and it is why there will never be tiers, ranks or badges based on amounts. Nobody's generosity becomes a number other people can measure themselves against. Five dollars and five hundred look the same from here.

How you will hear about it

When there is a cause to talk about, it will show up in your notifications on the site. That is part of what holding a spot means, and it cannot be switched off. Which is precisely why it is written here, before you buy, instead of explained afterwards.

Email is different. Every optional email carries an unsubscribe link, and turning it off costs you nothing. Not your spot, not your number, not your standing. I would rather you muted me than lost the one email that has to arrive, which is the link that signs you in.

Where this is up to

Honestly: at the beginning. The wall is built. The giving side is not. There is no cause running today, no donation button, and no money has been raised, because none has been asked for.

What exists is the intent, the design, and this page saying so out loud before anybody hands over five dollars on the strength of it.

Everybody who claims a number is asked to confirm they have read this. Not as a formality. It is there so that nobody can reasonably say, later on, that the giving was sprung on them.

One in a million

The phrase is usually a compliment, and it usually means alone. The rare one. The exception. Nobody in the history of the phrase has ever been told they were one in a million and then handed the other 999,999.

That is the trick this whole thing turns on. You are one in a million here because there are a million of you, and the number on your square is worth almost nothing by itself and quite a lot standing next to the rest.

You get seen. Then you help somebody else be seen.

Five dollars buys you a small square on a wall, and a share in the only reason the wall is there.