Everyone in the world gets the same question, on the same day.
Every day there is one question. You answer it with one word — the first thing that comes to mind, not the cleverest thing you can think of. Then everyone waits.
When the day closes, all those words are read together, and the crowd becomes one thing: a picture, a poem, a shape, a sentence. Nobody knows in advance what it will be, including us. Then you can go and find where your own word landed in it.
Because you can give one in five seconds, and because a single word has nowhere to hide. Longer answers get performed — people write for an audience. One word stays closer to what you actually thought.
You also answer before you see what anyone else said. That is deliberate. The moment you can see the crowd, you stop answering the question and start answering the crowd.
No signup, no password, no login screen. Your streak and your history live in this browser, which has two consequences worth knowing:
Sharing a computer? There's a Not you? button on the waiting screen that starts a fresh run without touching the first one.
Honestly and completely:
An address here is somewhere to send a reminder, not a way to log in. There is no password attached to it and it cannot be used to sign in as you, because there is nothing to sign in to. One link in the first email confirms it's really your inbox, and you can ask us to delete it at any time. Device notifications switch off from your browser settings whenever you like.
Being straight about the limits of that: if you give us an address, then someone operating this site could look up that address and see the words that browser has given. We keep that screen locked and we don't go browsing it — but we would rather tell you it exists than claim a separation we don't actually have.
Never you. The system that writes each day's reveal is only ever shown totals — how many people said each word — never a list of individuals, and never anything tying a word to a person. That's true whether four people play or four million.
The same goes for any comparison between groups. We only ever describe a slice of the crowd when it's large enough that no individual can be picked out of it; smaller slices are dropped rather than shown.
The whole point is that the day's words become something. So by taking part you're agreeing that your word can appear in that day's reveal and in the archive — as part of a crowd, counted alongside everyone else's, never presented as yours by name.
If we ever make something you can buy — a print, a book of a year — it's built from those same collective results, on the same terms.
Not on the question. There is no box to explain your word, and there never will be — the whole point is that you don't have to. Your answer is one word, given blind, before you've seen a single other person's. That stays sacred.
But a hive that only ever talks at you isn't a hive. So once a day has closed and the crowd has become something, the hAIve says what it made of the day — and, soon, you'll be able to talk back about what everyone became together. After the reveal, never before it. The instinct stays pure; the conversation comes after.