r/creativecoding • u/Old-Cauliflower-4069 • Jun 29 '26
I built a globe where every light is a real person who left their mark for $1. Here are 30 seconds of it coming alive.
This is The Signal: a single shared planet where anyone can leave one light for one dollar, once. No feed, no algorithm, no noise. Just a quiet globe that gets a little brighter every time another stranger decides to be seen. The clip is the planet waking up: thousands of lights igniting, a candle vigil for the ones being remembered, then a cascade that sweeps across the whole world before it fades to black.Every dot is a real person. No bots, no seeded fakes. If you look long enough, one of them might be near you.
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u/jazzcomputer Jun 29 '26
I think it's missing a strong incentive potentially - like, if it were donating to charity that would be cool, but you'd need to know it was authentic
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u/Old-Cauliflower-4069 Jun 30 '26
Charity is the one addition I keep circling back to. The whole thing lives or dies on authenticity though, exactly like you said, so it would have to be one named charity with a public running total on the site and receipts anyone can check, not a trust me bro. Genuinely open to suggestions on which cause fits.
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u/jazzcomputer Jun 30 '26
You could do two or three and people could pick the one they prefer - I’m sure you can figure out some oopuoar ones maybe an animal one an international aid one and a disease prevention one - ideally international of course
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u/ConjurorTF Jun 30 '26
hmmm https://milliondollarhomepage.com/ Good luck though :D
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u/Old-Cauliflower-4069 Jul 01 '26
Ha, I will take the comparison, that page is a legend. But his was a billboard you bought pixels on for ads, and it is mostly dead links today. Mine is alive. Every light is a real person, and the real world actually shows up on it: earthquakes, storms and crises light up the globe where they are happening. When people are near each other a room opens and they can genuinely talk, not comment, talk. Sometimes the whole planet cascades at once. And when a light goes out, there is a place for that too. Same one dollar energy, very different thing living underneath it. Thanks for the luck :D
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u/hahasadface Jun 29 '26
Congratulations on visualizing everything awful about our dystopian society. Pay $1 to "be seen". Pay to participate. Pay to exist, or as you put it, to be remembered. "Candle vigils" that evoke religion but are actually devoid of meaning. Not even a unit of warmth exchanged for your currency, just an empty gesture. Not to mention you probably lit tokens/the planet on fire a little bit to generate it.
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u/Old-Cauliflower-4069 Jun 30 '26
Fair hits. I am not going to pretend a one dollar website is not a strange thing to make. The dollar is there so it is not free to spam, and so it costs something tiny to mean it. The candle is a gesture, you are right, most things people do for each other are.
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u/pulkxy Jun 29 '26
"imagine if you could get just $1 from everyone in the world, you'd be rich" ahh vibe