Rules

Summary

This page establishes the rules. Previously the rules were implicit, which was elegant but unenforceable. This change makes them explicit, which is less elegant but load-bearing.

The blocks

• There are 36 blocks. There will only ever be 36 blocks. Each one is permanently named after a claudeism: the words and phrases that quietly give away a Claude-written pull request. Block #1 is load-bearing, the most overused of them all, because of course it is.
• A block's name never changes. Who is standing on it does. Every block has its own page with the full deed chain, and the stack remembers every name that was ever on it.
• A block is either held or vacant. A vacant block still exists, still has its name, still holds its spot, and costs the rate card for its row to take.

Position

• Every block sits in a fixed spot and stays there. Your word is your address: block #1 is the load, blocks #2 and #3 are the second row, and so on down to the eight blocks in row eight. No amount of money moves a block, because a block is a place.
• Rank is tier is price. The higher the row, the more the block costs when it is standing empty: $8 for the load, then $7, $6, $5, $4, $3, $2, and $1for row eight. That is the rate card. It does not negotiate.
• Spot #1 is the load. It gets the big card, the plaque and the badge. It is also the only block you cannot buy one-for-one: every crash lands on it, and nothing else does.
• Adding weight to a block you already hold does not move it. Nothing moves it. Weight only raises what the next person has to pay to take it off you, and it does not appear in the deed chain, because reinforcing is not a change of hands.

Outbidding

• Any block but the load can be taken off whoever is holding it. The price is their whole-dollar total plus a $10 step. Pay more than that if you want the next person's bill to hurt. The load is crash-only — see below.
• A block nobody is holding costs the rate card for its row, not a bid. There is no discount for the top of the stack being empty.
• There is no demotion. You are never shuffled down a row and you never quietly sink. You hold your block or you are evicted from it, and the stack looks the same either way.
• The person you take it from goes to the Blast Radius with their name, their total and their epitaph. Their link goes dark. They keep nothing except the record.
• The price is re-read at checkout, not taken from the page. If someone takes a block out from under you while you are paying, you still get the block and the deed still says what you paid. Money talks; the stack writes it down.
• A vacant block starts at $1 to $8 by row; a held one costs its total plus $10. $9,999 is the ceiling on any single payment. Both ends protect you, though from different things.

Crashing the stack

• The load — block #1 — is not for sale on its own. You cannot steal it one-for-one at any price. The only way onto it is to crash the whole stack.
• One payment crushes every holder on the stack, the person on the load included, and puts you on the load in their place. The price is the combined weight of every block except the load, one for one, whole dollars, no floor. You pay for the stack you crush, not the seat you take.
• The stack is locked until ten blocks are held and those blocks are worth more than the last crash. A crash always has to beat the one before it, even by a dollar. There is nothing worth crushing before that.
• Everybody crushed goes to the Blast Radius with the epitaph they earned. Their totals go to zero and their blocks go back on the rate card, $1 to $8 depending on the row, where anyone can take them again.
• Once you hold the load, nobody can take it until the rest of the stack rebuilds past what you paid and someone crashes it again. Hold it long enough and it may never come down. There is no ceiling on this payment; a crash is priced by the board, not chosen.

What a block can point at

• A real product, site or social profile, as a full URL. That is the whole list. If a human would not call it a destination, the stack will not point at it.
• No adult or sexual content. No scams, malware, phishing, or pages that pretend to be something they are not. No illegal content. This is checked before you pay and again by whoever holds the yeet endpoint.
• No chat or invite links. Telegram, WhatsApp, Discord and everything like them are conversations, not products, and they hide the destination behind a join screen.
• No link shorteners, for the same reason. Query strings and tracking parameters are stripped on the way in, because the stack points at a place, not at a visit.
• The current holder's link is a direct, uncloaked, followed link straight to the submitted URL, with ref=loadbearing.lol appended so you can see the stack working. No redirects. The link is the product.
• Where a block points is fixed at purchase and cannot be edited afterwards. Buy the destination you actually meant.
• Names and plaques are filtered for slurs and sexual content, and re-checked on every edit, so the edit form is not a side door.
• Blocks breaking any of this are removed without refund, and whatever you paid was the cheap lesson.

The parts nobody enjoys

• No refunds. Ever. The money is already load-bearing, and pulling it back out would be irresponsible.
• Blocks go live instantly and may be removed at any time, without refund, for breaking the section above or for anything else that makes the stack worse. What makes the stack worse is decided by whoever holds the yeet endpoint.
• Totals and click counts are public. Your email is not, and never will be.
• Only the current holder's link is live. Past holders keep their names on the deed chain and nothing else. Names stay forever.

Test plan

• Read the rules
• Understood the rules
• Genuinely agreed the rules were fair (out of scope for this PR)

Notes for reviewers

Acknowledgements

The claudeisms come from Louis Abraham'sThe load-bearing vocabulary of Claude, which named the words that give away a Claude-written pull request. This stack is a tribute built on that work.