How do you measure trust online?
See if the online can be taken offline.
Online, almost any signal can be faked. Likes, follows, and replies are cheap, so they drift away from anything real — the system keeps producing coherent-looking output while losing contact with the ground. The fix isn't more metrics. It's a settlement event: something costly enough that it can't be faked, where the prediction gets scored against reality.
An in-person event is exactly that. Showing up in the woods for four days with people you've only known through a screen is expensive, embodied, and hard to fake. If trust built online is real, it survives the trip offline. If it isn't, it doesn't.
So this is an experiment, run in public, with the result posted whether it works or not. The claim being tested: that a year of building trust in one network can be carried offline into a single real-world event — and that the trust moves laterally, person to person, not just toward me.
The receipt · last year (t = 0)
Last year I attended Vibecamp for the first time, funded by a grant. I wrote up what happened afterward. The part that matters for this experiment isn't the personal transformation — it's that the trust visibly circulated. Someone I'd influenced caught the idea, transformed it, and pushed it back to me in a form I couldn't have built myself. That loop — energy sent, changed, returned — is the whole thesis, observed once, with timestamps.
“My role is the coordinator. I just need to make sure the people working on saving the world can see each other and work together.”
— from the retrospective, July 2025
That write-up is the dated record this year's ask is measured against. Last year was the prediction. This year is the observation that scores it.
The ask · this year (t = 1)
Give $1 or more. The rules are fixed and public before anyone gives, so nobody is anyone's exit liquidity. There are three separate accounts, and you can see exactly where every dollar goes:
Donations fund my attendance, capped at the ticket cost. This is the clean trust signal: did genuine, un-incentivized support cover it?
Anything past the cap, and all sponsor matching, goes straight to the camp — not to me. The commons benefits whether or not I make it.
A comment saying why I should be there — and how you heard about this. These are the real data: trust you can read.
Donations beyond the cap flow to the camp.
This is a working demo of the mechanism — the live version connects to a real payment link. Try it to see how the three accounts split.
Why should I be there — and how did you hear about this? The second question is how we see trust travel between people.
The scorecard · pre-registered
An experiment that can only confirm me isn't measuring anything. So here is what I'm committing to before the result is in — posted publicly, because making my own falsifier visible is the most trustworthy thing on this page.
This post's engagement is compared against my median post — not my best. Fair baseline, set in advance.
If the money clears but every vouch comes from someone already close to me, the lateral-trust claim failed. I measured reach, not circulation — and I'll say so.
The donation is a prediction. Whether these same people actually connect with me at camp is the observation that scores it — next year.