The whole thing, in seven pieces
How Democrez works.
Democrez shows one situation a day where every option costs somebody something, records what you would do, asks you to predict what everyone else chose, and then shows the verified figure. Seven separate rules make that final figure worth reading. Each has its own page below.
The short version first.
Nearly every product that shows you a crowd figure shows it too early. You see that a large share of people chose something, and only afterwards are you asked what you think. By that point your answer is contaminated — you are reacting to a number rather than reading people, and nobody can tell the difference, including you.
Democrez inverts the order and then enforces it. You commit to a prediction about other people before you are permitted to see what other people did. The distance between those two figures is the only output, and it is called the Gap.
That inversion is easy to describe and surprisingly hard to protect. It only produces something meaningful if the situations are genuinely ambiguous, if the crowd figure is real, if it is withheld until enough people have answered, and if nothing follows it that would make people answer strategically. Those conditions are the seven pages below.
Each rule exists because people are involved. A measurement of human judgment can be broken by the measuring, and most of these pages are about preventing exactly that.
Seven pages
Each one answers
a question you should ask.
Read them in any order. If you only read two, read gray against gray and no fake reality — those two carry the most weight.
Gray vs gray
Why no situation has a right answer
If one option is obviously correct, you are measuring reading comprehension, not judgment.
Prediction vs opinion
Why a poll can never tell you this
A poll never asks you to commit to a guess, so it cannot report how well you read people.
The Reality Bank
Where answers go, and why they never leave
Append-only. Nothing is edited, nothing is deleted, and a changed card becomes a new version.
Min-N
When an aggregate is allowed to appear
Below the threshold you see nothing at all — not an estimate, not a partial count.
No fake reality
Why we never generate a crowd
No AI writes responses, fills gaps or smooths curves. Where humans have not answered, nothing appears.
The Human Seal
A person signs off before anything reaches you
Cards are drafted with AI assistance and approved by a person. Nothing publishes itself.
Mirror, not judge
Why nothing follows the number
No score, no advice, no interpretation of what your answer says about you.
In the app
What the rules look like
when you are actually using it.
These are not abstractions sitting behind the product. Each one is a screen you meet, or a screen you deliberately do not meet.
What this section is not
These pages describe how the instrument works and why it is built the way it is. They do not teach you to read people better, and they will not tell you what your answers mean about you. That is not modesty — it is the same rule as everywhere else on the platform, and it has its own page.
Questions
Straight answers.
Where should I start?
With gray against gray, which explains why a Democrez situation never has a correct answer, and then no fake reality, which explains why the figure on the other side of your prediction is real. Those two carry the most weight; the rest describe the machinery that keeps them true.
Do I need to read any of this to use the app?
No. A round takes about a minute and explains itself. These pages exist for the reasonable question that follows — why should the number on the second screen be believed — and that question deserves a real answer rather than a reassurance.
Is this the methodology, or the marketing?
It is how the system actually behaves. Where something is not yet built, or is still a decision rather than a rule, the relevant page says so. Nothing here describes a safeguard that exists only on this website.
Do these rules apply to institution sessions too?
Yes, with one difference: situations written for a particular institution feed that institution's own report and never enter the public record. The two pipelines are kept apart, and a card cannot move between them.
What is the difference between these pages and the glossary?
A glossary entry defines a term in a sentence or two. A Learn page explains why the thing exists, what it prevents, and what it costs. If you want the short form, the glossary is the faster route.
Will these rules change?
They are written as constraints rather than preferences, precisely so they cannot be traded away for growth later. If one ever does change, the change will be visible here rather than quietly applied, because the record of readings taken under the old rule does not disappear.
Reading about it is not the same as doing it.
One situation a day. Your prediction, locked. Then the verified number.