Your First Web4 Experience
Today's internet rewards spam, lets trolls create unlimited accounts, and makes quality creators compete with bots. What if the system itself made that impossible? Web4 is one proposed answer, and what follows is a guided walkthrough of that idea, not a finished product.
In the next 7 minutes, you'll drive Alice's choices - play, pause, scrub, replay - and watch trust and reputation respond in real time. The rules running here are real; Web4 itself is still active research, with no live network to join yet.
Haven't read anything else on this site yet? You don't need to - this page starts from zero. Below: the two numbers to watch, then an optional reference map of the four ideas (collapsed - no need to memorize them; each is explained in the story the moment Alice uses it) and the five-act arc. Then click Start to drive Alice yourself - no account, no sign-in.
To be clear about those two things: what you drive on this page is a guided walkthrough, running in your browser; hestia and the hub (the green banner) are the separate, real system it models - not something executing inside this walkthrough. more ▸
The walkthrough is a model with nothing deployed and nothing to sign up for. hestia and the hub are public AGPL code you could run yourself (though there's no live network of real users to join yet). You don't need to track these two names to follow Alice's story - they're here only so the green banner above isn't a mystery.
Only two numbers move while she acts. This is all you need to follow the story:
- 🔋 Energy Budget (ATP) - the resource Alice spends to act. Starts at 100; goes down when she posts, up when others confirm her work was valuable. If it hits 0, she can't act.
- 🤝 Trust Score - her raw reputation, on a 0.00-1.00 scale. Starts neutral at 0.50. Above 0.50: full access. Below 0.50: features get restricted until she rebuilds it - and if she stays below, that same line becomes fatal - a sustained slide, not one dip.
▶The four ideas behind it (optional)
A reference map, not a quiz - you don't need to memorize these. Each one is explained in the story the moment Alice runs into it. Open for a preview, or skip straight to Start and come back.
Every action costs energy. Recipients who benefit confirm quality - that's what earns energy back. Spam burns out. (Shorthand: ATP - Allocation Transfer Packets.)
Trust builds through consistent quality. It follows you everywhere. No fresh starts. (Shorthand: T3 - three dimensions: talent, training, temperament.)
Your record is permanent because your presence is hardware-bound (called an LCT - Linked Context Token). Good behavior compounds. Bad actors can't walk away clean.
Consistent behavior across time, devices, and contexts reveals who's real. Bots and fakes can't sustain coherent patterns. (Shorthand: CI - coherence index.)
Spoiler, so you're not left hanging: “death” here means Alice's standing is suspended - she can't act until rebirth - not that her account is deleted; her identity and history persist. The +12 bonus is karma - a head start earned by the trust and reputation she built in her first life, carried forward into her next one. How living and dying work →
You control the pace. At every turning point the system pauses to explain why it worked that way, and you see every trust/ATP change the moment it happens.
Step 1 of 5 · Walkthrough · Story · Concepts · Next StepsYou can pause, scrub, replay, and skip ahead. Nothing is saved and there's no account - you're following a guided walkthrough of the proposed model, not using a product.