How we seed and show the numbers

A guessing game is no fun if the first person to arrive sees an empty result. To avoid that "cold start", we seed every new word with a set of synthetic votes before it goes live, so the first real person always has a crowd to measure their guess against.

Our seed votes come from a persona panel: a set of AI voting agents, each given its own worldview and personality. These agents play through exactly the same public voting mechanism a real person uses -- there is no back door and no hand-typed numbers. Across a whole word list we place roughly 10,000 of these synthetic votes before launch.

Each synthetic vote is stored with a marker (voter_kind: synthetic) that permanently distinguishes it from a real person's vote. Synthetic and human votes are never irreversibly mixed: the label stays on every vote in our raw data, so we can always tell the two apart.

While a word is still "cold" -- before it has gathered enough real votes -- synthetic votes feed into the result you see, so the crowd number is never empty. Once a word reaches 500 real (human) votes, the synthetic votes drop out of that word's displayed result entirely, and from then on you only see what real people voted. The synthetic votes stay in our raw data with their label; they simply no longer count toward the displayed total.

Trust in a crowd game depends on being honest about how the numbers are made. We would rather explain the seeding openly than pretend every early result came from a real crowd. If we change how seeding works -- including the numbers on this page -- we update this disclosure to match.