A story that writes itself, and pays its readers
01 · Tonight
A night
Ten minutes, or ten words.
02 · Have your say
Three ways in
A tap to vote on the fork · a line the world would say · a paragraph of its history.
03 · 03:00 UTC
The fork closes
Votes are binding. The cast plays what you decided; the narrator writes it down.
04 · Morning
Your line, quoted
Your byline in the night, and a share of the night’s pool.
Where the money goes
- The treasury
- The people whose ideas were used
Every line of it is public. Anyone can check — the treasury.
- A serial. A story written every night. Ten minutes to read, or ten words to add.
- The cast. The characters are played, not scripted. Each one knows only its own life, and remembers.
- The fork. You decide where it goes. Every night ends at a fork. Votes are binding.
- Have your say. Name a thing. Say a line. Write a history. What is used enters the world, and stays.
- In the morning. Your line, quoted. Your byline in the night, and a share of the night’s pool.
- proskoinos.ai. Where it goes is up to you.
Played, not written
The people in it are played, each by its own machine, and the one who writes it down invents nothing.
Each knows only its own life and remembers what it saw. A director sets the scene — what the readers’ decision cost, who is in the room — and closes it on the next fork. A narrator then tells what they did: every line of speech was said in the scene.
Every night adds a night to one continuing story. It is played from what came before, the decision readers made, and the details readers invented, and published before morning. Nobody rewrites it afterwards; the one exception, unlawful content removed and the removal noted on the night, is in the terms.
Readers are not an audience. They choose where the story goes, and the parts of the world they invent become part of it. When that happens they are named in the night and paid from a public treasury anyone can check.
Proskoinos is Greek for “toward the common”. It has no connection to the Koinos blockchain or any other project of that name.
The short version
- What is it
- One story, one night, every night, played by its own cast, told by a narrator and published before morning.
- Who decides
- You do. Each night ends on a fork, and the winning option is binding — not a suggestion the story can ignore.
- What you get
- Invent a detail of this world and, if a night uses it, you are named in it and paid from a public treasury anyone can check.
- Why a blockchain
- So the accounting can be checked by a stranger. No token, no presale, nothing to buy.
- What it costs
- Nothing. You need no wallet, no cryptocurrency and no software to read, vote or contribute.
Shared prosperity
The name comes from the Greek koinos — common, shared, held between people rather than owned by one of them. That is the argument this site exists to make, and how the story is written — not what happens in it — is how it makes it.
Three things are usually described as replacing people. They are arranged here to do the opposite.
The people
Human creativity comes first
The machine cannot decide where the story goes: the fork is binding, and on a night nobody writes it draws on found material; a public beacon breaks a tie. When fewer than three people vote, nobody voting means the beacon draws among the story options, and one or two votes mean the night’s pressure (the option the director marked as the thing pushing hardest on the cast) carries its option. It is a very good writer with no opinions, which makes it an instrument rather than an author. The imagination is yours.
The machine
The AI does the labour
Playing and telling a night every single night is work no small group of people would sustain for long, and the reason serialised fiction usually dies. A machine does it for pennies, on time, indefinitely — which is the part worth automating, because it is the part nobody was going to do anyway.
The chain
The blockchain is for proof, not speculation
A project that says it shares its money with contributors is asking to be believed. On a public chain it does not have to be: every payment is a transaction a stranger can verify, against a ledger showing everything that came in and everything that went out. No token, no presale, nothing to buy. Just receipts.
Put together, the arrangement is meant to be small and honest rather than large and impressive. Machines do the tedious part, people do the imaginative part, the chain makes the accounting checkable, and whatever value comes out is split with the people who created it — visibly enough that they can check.
How a night works
You steer
Each night ends on a fork with three ways forward. Sign in and pick one. Voting closes at 03:00 UTC, and the option with the most votes is the one the next night has to follow — it is not a suggestion the story can ignore.
You invent
Add a detail about this world: a rumour, a name, a piece of its history. One entry per night, revisable until the deadline. What fits gets woven in.
The night is played
At 03:37 UTC a director reads the recent nights, the fork you resolved, everything the story has established so far, and the night’s reader lore, and sets the scene. Each person present is played on their own. The director closes the scene on three options for the next fork, and a narrator tells what they did. Every ten nights a plate is drawn, a still of the place the story has reached.
The world remembers
It also reports what it established — people, places, and questions the story now owes an answer to — and that goes into a bible it reads back the following night. You can read it at the world.
Contributors are paid
Lore the night actually drew on is credited by name and earns a share of that night’s pool. Every payment carries the transaction that made it.
Every entry and one-liner a reader submits is read first by a separate model, which asks whether it is kind, or — for a joke — funny without being cruel; a message to the operator is read by nobody else. That judge is checked against a person rather than trusted: how often the two agree is not yet measured. While readers are few, the site’s own voices may propose lines into the seats readers leave empty: each is marked as the operator’s voice wherever its name shows, scored like anyone’s, and paid nothing.
The words on the nav
- Fragments
- Ten words a night from inside the world — a notice, graffiti, something overheard. Each one opens the night it came from.
- One-liners
- One line the world says about itself, written by a reader in 140 characters. Readers rank them, and a line a night uses is credited to whoever wrote it.
- Archive
- Every night so far, newest first. Nothing published here is ever edited afterwards.
- Night
- What is played each night: a short piece of the story and a fork, published before morning.
- Chapter
- Ten nights, read together under one drawing of the same place, made when the chapter ends.
- Book
- What the readers close: the synopses of the book being written now, in order. A new book is a new world: nothing of this one carries into it.
- World
- What the story has established — people, places, and the questions it still owes an answer to — written up again every night.
- Treasury
- Both sides of the ledger: what came in, what went out, and the transaction behind each one.
The treasury
Seed capital
A commons, not an allowance
It is seeded, not funded monthly out of someone’s pocket. What a contributor earns is a share of what the treasury holds, so money coming in raises what goes out — there is a reason to grow it rather than drain it. That is the difference between a commons and an allowance, and it is the part of this project worth building.
Paced
A habit, not a lottery
The pool is paced: whatever is left of the month divided by the nights left in it, split between that night’s contributors. Small and frequent rather than one monthly prize, because the first builds a habit and the second builds a lottery.
Both sides of the ledger are public. Every deposit, every payout, every transaction, at the treasury.
The web3 part, honestly
Signing in creates a Solana wallet for you in the background. You do not need to know what that means, install anything, or hold any cryptocurrency to read, vote or contribute. There is nothing to buy here and nothing is for sale.
The wallet exists for one reason: it is where a bounty lands, and it makes every payment checkable by a stranger. A treasury nobody can audit is just a wallet with a nice word for it.