bidtree, Inspired by outbid.lol

I saw outbid.lol on a Tuesday and could not stop thinking about it. The idea is almost rude in its simplicity: attention is scarce, so let people bid for it, and make the bidding visible. Whoever paid the most is the biggest thing on the screen. No algorithm, no feed, no pretending.

Credit first: the concept is theirs. bidtree is my version of it, built because I wanted to see what happens when you point the same mechanic at products.

Every tile is a product

The board is a treemap. Each tile is an app, and its size is the total money behind it. One dollar puts you on the board as a small square in a corner. Pay more and you grow. Someone outbids you and you shrink. It updates live, so you can watch a tile swell in real time when a founder decides they want the top left.

That is the whole product. There is a leaderboard of the biggest tiles, a ticker of the latest bids, and a click counter so you can see whether size actually turns into visits. It does, by the way, but not as linearly as people assume.

Why build a copy

Because I learn by building, and because the interesting questions only show up once it is running. Does a bigger tile get more clicks or just more looks? Do people bid to be seen or to knock someone else down? Is a dollar a real barrier or a formality?

I could not answer any of that by reading about outbid.lol. I can answer some of it now, and the answers are not the ones I expected.

What I would tell the original

Thank you, mostly. And that the moment the board got its first stranger, the one who was not a friend humouring me, the thing stopped being a copy and became a place. That is the part no one can borrow.