Standing you can't buy.

Karma is a stake, not a score

Most reputation systems compute a number about you. Karma isn't computed — it's held. It sits in the ledger as yours, it moves only under rules, and it is conserved: every unit was created by one specific rule and destroyed by another. There is no formula weighing your behaviour, no model deciding what you're worth.

That distinction matters more than it sounds. A score can be recalculated; a stake has to be spent. When karma leaves you it goes somewhere or it's burned, and either way the ledger shows it.

The protocol's job is to keep karma conserved, honestly recorded, and legible — not un-gameable. It never tries to detect fake accounts or judge suspicious patterns. It records who did what, and leaves interpretation to clients and indexers. A protocol that punishes suspicious behaviour inevitably punishes people who merely look suspicious, and starts an arms race it can't win.

Getting in costs someone else something

New karma enters the network through exactly one door: invitations.

Someone already here locks a bond of their own karma. The person they invite receives a grant immediately — enough to post a few times and start receiving likes. The bond returns to the inviter gradually, as the invitee earns real likes from real people. If the invitee never engages, the bond is forfeited.

So an invitation isn't a permission slip. You're underwriting someone. Your collateral comes back if they turn out to be a person; you lose it if you vouched for a ghost.

Why this stops fake accounts without checking anyone

Notis never verifies identity — no phone numbers, no documents, nothing. It doesn't need to, because inviting yourself is unprofitable in both directions it can be run.

Say you invite an account you control. You lock a bond of 12 and it receives a grant of 10. You now have two options, and here's what each costs:

Both roads lose. That isn't a coincidence — it's two constraints, and they're the ones that have to survive any retuning:

The bond must be at least the grant. Otherwise "take the grant and abandon the bond" is simply profitable.

Fully vesting the bond must burn more karma than the grant was worth. Likes burn a fraction of what they cost (below), so manufacturing enough endorsement to free your own bond destroys more than you gained.

That asymmetry is the whole defence. The same action costs both of them the same karma — but for one of them the cost was already going to be paid by a community doing what it does, and for the other it's a bill.

Two things fall out of this for free. Bonds are locked collateral, so anyone has at most balance ÷ bond invitations outstanding — the population can't explode, not even from the founding set. And the founding set doesn't stay founding: their head start decays like everyone else's if they stop showing up.

A like has to hurt

A like costs the liker 1 karma, and it does not come back.

This is the part people find surprising, so it's worth being blunt about why. A free like is cheap talk. It costs nothing, so it says nothing, and it can be produced without limit. A like that hurt to give is information — you spent something you cannot buy more of, on someone else.

It also means liking yourself bleeds. There's no arrangement of accounts that makes it pay, because every like burns real karma on the way through.

What the author gets

Not one karma per like. Likes accumulate, and for every 5 received the author is paid 4. The fifth is burned.

Most of a like's value reaches the person who earned it; a slice is destroyed. That burn is one of the two forces holding the karma supply steady against the karma that invitations create — decay is the other.

The remainder waits for you, it isn't lost

Likes don't arrive in neat multiples of five. Whatever is left over stays on your account and counts toward your next payout. It's one running tally across everything you've ever written, not a separate one per post.

That sounds like an implementation detail and isn't. Counting per post would mean every post that never quite reaches a multiple leaves its leftovers stranded forever — a slow, invisible destruction of karma that scales with how much people write rather than with how much they're liked. One tally per person means the most that's ever outstanding is four karma, and it's waiting rather than gone.

Standing decays if you stop showing up

An inactive account loses a small, flat amount of karma per window. An active one loses nothing at all.

Two reasons this exists. It stops entrenchment — you can't earn standing once and coast on it for years; you keep it by continuing to be someone people endorse. And it keeps the books honest: if dormant hoards never shrank, the amount of karma that's actually in play would drift further and further from the amount that exists, and every measure built on the supply would quietly become a lie.

Note what it doesn't do: tax everyone. Punishing active participants to control the supply is a tax on exactly the people you want. The hard part of the design isn't the decay — it's making activity expensive to fake.

The obvious dodge, and the answer

If posting resets your clock, the exploit writes itself: post garbage every window and never decay. So posting isn't free. A post locks a bond, and the bond only comes back as the post earns likes.

Now wash-posting locks up karma you'll never recover. Forfeiting a 3-karma post bond to avoid 2 karma of decay is a bad trade, and it stays a bad trade at every setting where the bond exceeds the decay — another of those relationships that has to hold across the tuning range.

Trying to rescue the bond by liking your own post is worse: you'd spend 15 karma of likes to recover 3.

Meanwhile the honest version costs nothing. A post that earns 15 likes returns its 3-karma bond and pays its author 12. Posting well is profitable; posting to game the clock is not. Same action, same price, opposite outcomes.

You might ask why receiving a like doesn't reset the clock instead — it seems simpler. Because a second account could then reset your clock for a single karma. Only a bond puts a floor under what a reset costs.

Removing things: two different acts

People want two different things and older designs kept confusing them. One is I regret writing this. The other is I want this whole thread gone. They deserve very different prices.

Withdrawing your own words

Withdrawing removes your post's content while every reply beneath it survives. What's left is a marker: the conversation still hangs together, your words are gone. It costs nothing — you're destroying nothing of anyone else's, and you already paid to post.

It's worth being precise about what "withdrawn" means, because it's easy to overpromise. Posts are identified by a fingerprint of their content, so once the content is dropped, what remains reveals nothing, and honest nodes delete it. But anyone who already saved a copy can still republish it — that's true of anything ever sent over a public network, here and everywhere else. What the protocol guarantees is that it stops spreading and that your decision is permanent and attributable. It cannot un-publish.

That's why the interface says withdrawn and never deleted.

Pruning a whole subtree

Pruning removes a post and everything under it, including other people's replies. It costs three things:

The first two are one principle: you may destroy your own stake, never someone else's. Your bond is forfeited for changing your mind. Everyone else gets theirs back.

The third one is less obvious and matters most. Without it, cost runs backwards to harm. A well-received post has had most of its bond already returned by likes — so the post whose destruction wipes out five hundred replies would be the cheapest one to destroy. Charging per descendant fixes the direction: your bond prices your change of mind, and the per-post charge prices the damage to everyone else. Two different things, and one curve shouldn't be doing both jobs.

Getting a bond back doesn't give a replier their words back. Under a post you didn't write, that's the deal — but it should be a decision rather than an accident, which is why withdrawal exists. If all you regret is your own writing, you never need to reach for this.

The numbers, such as they are

Illustrative values, internally consistent so the examples above work. All subject to change.

The same move, every time

Read the mechanisms together and they're one idea wearing different clothes: make the identical action cheap for honest people and expensive for everyone else.

A like costs the same whether it's sincere or manufactured — but the sincere one was going to be spent anyway. A bond costs the same whether you vouched for a person or a puppet — but the person vests it back. A post bond costs the same for something worth reading and something posted to game a clock — but only one of them earns it back.

Nowhere does the protocol decide who is genuine. It never has to. It just makes being fake cost full price, and being real cost almost nothing, for exactly the same move.