How BuniFun works

Somebody asks a question — who had the better year, which album is the one, who takes the crown right now — and for a fixed window anyone can vote. When the window closes the result is settled once and never touched again. That frozen result is what every other number on the platform is built from.

The point is not the vote. The point is the argument around it: the chat while it is open, the reasons people give, the comments underneath when it is done, and the standings that build up over months.

Nothing on this platform is for sale that changes a number. Money can move where something is shown. It can never move what it says.

Sign in with Google or with an email code. An account is tied to the identity behind it, and that is a deliberate anti-manipulation control rather than a convenience: a board where one person can be a hundred voters describes nothing.

Username

Your handle, used in chat and on boards. You can change it.

Display name

What appears beside your avatar. Changeable, and it is what a screen reader announces.

Reputation

Earned by taking part. See Reputation.

Personality

A description of your voting pattern — The Contrarian, The Early Bird. Entertainment, and nothing else: it is not a judgement of whether you are right.

Your profile at /u/your-username is public: your display name, avatar, reputation and badges. Your individual votes are not on it, and there is no page anywhere that lists them.

Buni Verified says one thing: this person is who their name says. Anyone can have it — a rater or a creator — and it is the only thing on BuniFun you can pay for.

1. Your identity

You photograph a government ID and take a selfie in our identity partner's secure page (Smile ID). We never see or keep the images or your ID number — only whether it passed and the name printed on the document.

2. Your name

Your display name has to be the name on your ID — at least two of its words, and nothing that is not on it. A stage name or a name the document spells differently is looked at by a person before the badge shows.

3. The membership

Only after the check passes do you subscribe, through Paystack. You are never asked to pay for a badge that cannot be shown. Cancel any time; the badge stays until the end of the month you paid for.

It buys no weight. Your vote counts the same as everybody else's, and the badge never changes a result, a score, trending or your reputation. Money can move where you are shown; it can never move what a number says. See what money can and cannot do.

What it does get you: a member frame and your Verified Voice card on your profile, a place in the Verified Arena, advanced statistics on your Pulse, a profile theme, early access to new features, priority support, and protection for your name — a second account whose document shares it goes to a person rather than getting the badge automatically. Verified creators also get views and returning viewers, advanced analytics and audience insights in the studio, a Creator Card, a place in the featured creators rail (always labelled as featured, rotated daily) and protection against lookalike handles. Every creator tool that was free stays free.

Earned labels are never for sale. VERIFIED VOICE and VERIFIED VETERAN need the badge and the activity behind ARENA VOICE and ARENA VETERAN — see BuniScore.

It is drawn differently from the earned marks — the bunny in a ring, in cyan — so it is never mistaken for a creator's verification, which cannot be bought. Change your display name and the badge hides until the new name is matched to your ID; no second check is needed if the name is on the document.

Three identity checks are allowed in thirty days, because each costs a fee whether it passes or not. Staff can remove the badge for impersonation or abuse, with a reason you can read; the subscription stops with it. Start at /verified.

Live now

Sessions open for voting this minute. This is the front page.

Trending

The closest arguments with real turnout — see Trending.

Search

Subjects, sessions and creators by name.

Boards

Standing rankings — see Leaderboards.

Following

Follow a creator, a subject or a category and what they do reaches you rather than needing to be found.

Where notifications are switched on you can also be told when a session you care about opens. That is one permission prompt, and we only ask it once you have chosen to follow something — a prompt on arrival costs your permission permanently and buys nothing.

1. 1Open a session. You can read it signed out; voting needs an account.
2. 2Pick your answer. The control acknowledges in under a tenth of a second — the result you see is your vote landing, not a guess.
3. 3Optionally say why. It takes one tap and it is what makes the result readable afterwards.
4. 4Watch the tally move, argue in chat, and come back when it closes.

A vote cannot be changed or withdrawn. Not by you, not by a moderator, not by an administrator. There is no control anywhere that edits a vote, and nothing behind the scenes that could.

That is strict on purpose. A tally you can watch move is only meaningful if what you are watching is people making up their minds rather than reacting to the score. If votes could be switched, the last minute of every session would be the only minute that mattered.

If you try to vote twice you are told you already have, and shown the ballot you cast. Signing in mid-vote carries your choice through the sign-in and commits it on the other side, so you do not lose it.

Head to head

Two options, one winner. The default, and the one that produces the sharpest arguments.

Ranking

Up to six options, ordered by the room. You submit an order, not a single pick.

Rating out of ten

One subject, scored. These are shrunk towards the category average until enough people have voted — see the published numbers — so four tens do not outrank nine thousand nine-point-fours.

Category battle

Two subjects compared across several named dimensions at once — lyrics, delivery, consistency — rather than on one overall question.

A session also has a status. Scheduled means it has not opened yet; open means vote now; closed means settled. Two more exist and both are visible: cancelled, and invalidated — a result set aside because the voting was not honest. An invalidated session keeps its page and states the reason, because a result quietly disappearing is indistinguishable from one being hidden.

After voting you can attach one or more reasons from a fixed list appropriate to the category. They are counted, never quoted: the session page afterwards can say the room went this way mainly on consistency, which is a far better summary than the raw split.

A fixed list rather than free text, deliberately. Free text needs moderating, and a box that invites a paragraph gets a paragraph from the loudest people only.

When the window closes the result is worked out once and written down. Every later place it appears — a leaderboard, a share card, a season standing, this page — reads that same frozen record. Nothing is worked out a second time.

Each result records the version of the scoring method that produced it. That is what lets the formula improve without rewriting history: an old result always names the rules it was settled under.

A tie leaves no winner. “Too close to call” is an honest verdict, and a better one than picking between equal counts.

Chat

Live, during the session, in the room. Fast and disposable — it is the crowd noise, and it is where the argument actually happens.

Comments

Threaded, under a closed result, and they persist. This is where somebody explains why the room got it wrong.

Both are moderated — see Moderation. A host has controls of their own over the room they are running: slow mode, locking chat, removing a message, and timing somebody out of that session.

A room with six hundred messages is not one conversation. Somebody is arguing about the albums, somebody about the live shows, somebody about the numbers. The Topics tab shows those conversations one at a time — the same messages as the room, grouped by what they are about.

Where topics come from

BuniFun notices when three or more people keep using the same words, and groups them. The host can name topics before the session starts. And anybody who can chat can press + Start topic — two per person per room.

Where a message goes

Wherever you choose when you send it. Otherwise a reply joins the topic of what it answers, and a message whose words clearly match one topic is filed there. A message is in one topic at most, and most stay in the room alone.

Following

Follow a topic to keep up with that one argument: a +7 new in the room that jumps to the first message you have not read, a notification if it gets busy while you are away, and one if the same argument starts up in another session.

Catch me up

Arrive to a room that has moved on and BuniFun tells you how much you missed, what the room is arguing about, and what changed — which conversation took over, which take the room reacted to. Every line is a fact read off the room, not a summary, and the conversations are one tap away.

Topics never read a ballot. Which conversation you are in says nothing about how you voted, and nothing on BuniFun links the two.

When two people are clearly going back and forth, the room is shown This looks like a clash. Nothing happens unless somebody presses Challenge on the other person’s message and they accept. A clash is always two people, and a room runs one at a time.

Four rounds

Eight turns, alternating, and whoever challenged goes first — they made the claim. Each turn is up to 280 characters.

Two minutes a turn

Every turn is on a clock. A turn not taken in time is skipped: it scores nothing and the other person is up. It is not a forfeit — the clash carries on.

The room judges

Anybody watching can like or dislike any turn while the clash runs and for five minutes after the last one. The two people in it cannot vote in their own clash.

The verdict

Each side's likes minus dislikes, added up over its own turns. The higher score wins; level — including nobody voting — is a draw. Both people are told, and it goes on their profile as won, lost or drawn.

A clash never touches the session’s result. Who won the argument and which option won the vote are counted separately, and neither can move the other.

You can follow three kinds of thing: a person (the Follow button on anybody’s profile), a subject — the artist, team or thing being rated — and a category. Following is one tap, and tapping twice is not an error.

What following does

When a person you follow hosts, or a subject you follow is in a new session, you can be told — each of those is its own switch in your settings. People you follow also fill your Following feed of Bites, and they can message you directly rather than as a request.

What it does not do

A follow is not a reminder for one session. Tapping the bell on a session says "tell me about this one"; following a person says "tell me about them, from now on". The two are kept apart so wanting one result never subscribes you to somebody's whole output.

Your followers

You can see who follows you, and message them, on your followers page. Nobody else can: a follower count is public, the people in it are not.

You can also follow a single argument inside a busy room — see Topics and catching up.

A Bite

Media first: a video of up to 60 seconds, a picture, a meme or a voice note of up to 60 seconds, with a caption of up to 280 characters.

A Note

The casual version: text first, up to 500 characters, with an optional picture or voice note. "I have something to say about this."

There is no bare post. Every Bite and Note is about exactly one session or one subject, and it carries that anchor everywhere it appears — with an Enter Arena link back to the argument it belongs to.

You will find them on the session or subject they are about, on the Bites page — Following (people you follow and people who follow you) and Trending — and on the author’s profile. Anybody signed in can react and reply (replies are up to 280 characters).

Live for 24 hours

A Bite is in feeds, on profiles and on its session's "right now" rail for 24 hours from posting, and then it leaves them.

Kept in the Arena's history

If it earned it, it is kept: reactions + 2 × replies + 3 × accepted challenges reaching 10 or more, or a challenge on it that reached a verdict. A kept Bite stays permanently in its session's or subject's Arena history, and its author is told. The rule is a published threshold, not an algorithm.

Otherwise, gone

A Bite that was not kept has its words and media wiped 24 hours after it leaves the feeds. The grace period is for a challenge still being judged or a report still being worked.

A removed, hidden or deleted Bite is never kept. Bites and Notes are moderated like everything else people write — see Moderation.

1. 1Press ⚔️ on somebody’s Bite or Note and write your counter-take (up to 280 characters). The author is told.
2. 2They accept — optionally with a one-line defence — or let it go. Nothing happens without their acceptance, and a challenge that is turned down is never shown to anybody.
3. 3The room votes on which take landed for 24 hours. More votes wins; level is a draw. Both of you are told.

The two people in a challenge cannot vote in it. Results count towards the Challenges and Wins on a profile, together with clashes.

A challenge never touches a session’s result. Which take the room liked and how the room voted are counted separately.

A conversation starts from the Arena: Message on somebody’s profile, on a Bite, or on a line in a session’s chat. A thread remembers where it started, and you can share a Bite or a session into it as a card. Your conversations are at Messages, and the badge in the corner counts the unread ones.

Direct

If they follow you — they chose to hear from you — or they have already written in the thread, your message arrives in their inbox.

A request

Otherwise it is a request: one message, and nothing more until they accept. If they decline, it disappears from their side and you are not told.

Blocking

A block ends it in both directions: no new thread, no new message, and the conversation leaves the blocker's inbox.

Unsending

You can unsend a message you wrote; it is removed for both of you.

Messages are private. Threats and doxxing are refused in a DM exactly as they are in public, but nobody at BuniFun reads a conversation unless the person receiving a message reports it — the report is their permission to show it to a moderator.

Everything BuniFun tells you is kept in Notifications, whether or not it also reached your phone — so a notification you missed, or one your browser blocked, is still there to read.

What you hear about

A session you asked about opening or closing; a person or subject you follow; the result of an argument you were part of; a take of yours the room picked up; a clash or a challenge on your Bite, and how it ended; a Bite of yours being kept; a HopTalk room you are interested in starting; a reply to a help request; and anything moderation decided about your account.

Where it reaches you

In the app, always. As a push notification on devices where you allowed them. And by email for the sessions you asked about — when one opens, its last call and its result — with an unsubscribe link in every one.

Switching things off

Settings has a switch for each kind — session start, session closing, followed subjects, followed people and moderation — and an event can only send you a capped number however much you follow.

A notification carries a fact and a link, never somebody’s words. What was said is fetched when you open the link, where every moderation decision still applies — so a removed message cannot live on in a hundred inboxes.

A subject’s position aggregates the settled results of every session it appeared in over a rolling window, with older sessions weighing progressively less. Recency matters in pop culture, but a hard cutoff would make a subject vanish overnight, so it decays smoothly instead.

Currently: a 90-day window with a 45-day half-life, and nothing appears on a public board until it has at least 3 settled sessions and 200 votes behind it.

That floor is the important part. Below it the number is not meaningful, and publishing it anyway invites ridicule it would deserve.

Boards exist per category and globally, and there is a separate board for people rather than subjects. A movement indicator beside a rank shows how far it has travelled since the last snapshot.

velocity × closeness × conversation × recency

A 95/5 session is settled and boring. A 51/49 session is the product working, and that is the editorial choice this formula encodes.

A session must have at least 50 voters across at least 10 networks to trend at all. Fifty votes from one network is one person with a script, not a hit.

Boosted sessions are excluded from trending entirely, and appear only in slots labelled as promoted.

Reputation is the number beside your name. You earn it by voting, by saying why, by turning up early to a session, by chatting usefully, and — if you host — by running sessions people actually attend.

Agreeing with the crowd earns nothing. Rewarding consensus would manufacture it, and destroy the signal the whole product runs on.

Most signals are capped per day, so somebody with unlimited time cannot out-earn somebody with an evening. Moderation costs you points. Nothing you can buy adds one. The full table, with the current values and caps, is in the published numbers.

The rater board ranks people by it. It is all-time and it is live — unlike a season, it has no window.

BuniScore adds up what you do: sessions you vote in, votes cast early, votes with a reason, arguments other people react to, reactions from other people, clashes you finish and win, sessions you host, how many of the last twelve weeks you turned up, and how many categories you range across. Moderation action against you in the last ninety days takes points off.

Picking the popular side earns nothing, and neither does a call that matched. BuniScore never looks at which option you chose or how a session came out — that is enforced by a test on the query itself, not promised.

Every line is capped before it is weighted, so no single habit carries the number. You can see every line of your own — count, cap, weight, points — on your Pulse. It is rebuilt every hour.

The BuniFun Rankings are eight boards built on it: Voices (BuniScore), Debaters (reactions from other people plus clashes won), Most active (the last 30 days), Veterans (all time), Most consistent (weeks with a vote), Rising (accounts under 90 days old), Creators (people who turned up to their rooms) and Calls. Profiles carry the same record: score, place, sessions, calls, clashes and top category. Two labels are earned there — ARENA VOICE and ARENA VETERAN — and can never be bought.

Before a result exists you can call how the room will go. When the session closes, your call is marked as having matched the room — the frozen community result — or not. It is never marked “right”: for an opinion there is no right answer, only what the room decided. A tie matches nobody's call, because there was no clear outcome to match.

Calls close a fifth of the way into a session (and open while it is still scheduled). The live tally is public, so a call made later would be a copy of it. Which way other people are calling is never shown while the room decides — only how many have.

Your record — calls, matched, and a rate once twenty have resolved — is public on your profile. The call board needs twenty resolved calls to enter and ranks by what the record proves rather than by the raw rate: 90 from 100 outranks 20 from 21. Calls are separate from your vote and from BuniScore.

The Verified Arena shows six of the boards — Voices, Debaters, Most active, Creators, Rising and Calls — with everyone but Buni Verified members left out.

A member's number in the arena is exactly their number on the open board. The badge decides who is listed there, never what anybody scores. Money can move where something is shown; it can never move what a number says.

Buni Pulse shows the last 24 hours beside the 24 before: sessions you joined, replies and reactions to what you said, new followers, clashes, conversations you follow that moved, and calls you made. It also itemises your BuniScore. Both are free. Members also get advanced statistics there — twelve weeks of activity, where they stand on every board, and the shape of how they take part — as a view of their own activity, never as weight.

A season is a named period — a month, a tournament, a festival. It has no earning rules of its own: it counts the same reputation you were already earning, over its own dates.

While a season is open its board is live. When it closes the standings are frozen into a permanent record and the top finishers get a badge that names the season. That record is append-only, so a season you placed in stays placed.

Nothing depends on a season existing. If none is running, the home page simply does not show one and everything else — voting, results, leaderboards, reputation — carries on exactly as it does otherwise. Seasons are a lens on the ledger, not the ledger.

Badges are awarded for participation milestones, for placing in a season, and for a handful of specific achievements. They appear on your profile, in four families: Taking part (how much you vote), How you rate (the shape of your voting), In the room (chat and hosting) and Seasons.

Every threshold is reachable by taking part rather than by agreeing, winning or paying. There is no badge for being on the popular side of a vote and there will not be one — it would reward reading the room instead of saying what you think. The one badge that touches the crowd at all, “Reads the room”, is framed as matching the crowd rather than as being right: for a subjective question there is no right answer to match.

Anyone looking at a profile sees the whole catalogue, not only what that person holds — the ones still to go are drawn dimmed, with how many people hold each. Rarity is most of why a badge is worth having, and a badge you cannot see until you already have it is one nobody works towards.

On your own profile each badge you have not got yet carries a progress meter — “17 of 25 sessions”, in whatever the rule counts. Nobody else can see your meters, on your profile or anywhere else: what a badge takes is public, but how far along you are is a running count of what you have been doing, and some of those counts are published nowhere else.

Meters update live; awards land on a periodic pass, so a meter can read full for a few minutes before the badge appears. Where a rule has two parts — a share of your votes, gated by a minimum number of them — the meter shows whichever one you have not cleared yet.

Awards are append-only: a badge you earned is not taken back if the criteria later change, because the thing it records — that you did this, then — is still true. So a rule that is tightened later leaves people holding badges that would not be given today, deliberately.

There are six: The Contrarian, The Chaos Agent, The Specialist, The Early Bird, The Defender and The Consensus Seeker. Each is a rule over how you have voted — how often you land away from the room, how often the sessions you join finish close, how concentrated your votes are in one category, how early you vote, how much you talk in the rooms you turn up to.

None of them is better than the others. An archetype describes a voting pattern. It is not a measure of intelligence, taste, morality or correctness, and “The Contrarian” is a compliment. Where two rules fire at once, the rarer one is the one shown, so the label leans towards the more interesting thing to be told.

Nothing is worked out below 50 votes. A pattern from a handful of votes is noise, and a label drawn from it would be a guess wearing a costume.

The archetype on your profile is public — it is one word about how you vote. The six meters behind it are yours alone, for the same reason badge meters are.

Method version bayesian-v1. Every settled result records the version that produced it, so improving a formula never rewrites history.

Reputation, per signal

A creator’s standing

Version creator-rep-v1. The caps matter as much as the weights: without them one creator with a runaway session outranks everybody forever and the board stops describing anything.

What verification takes

Fixed before the badge existed: criteria written after somebody wants one are criteria written to fit them. A badge is refused when one of these is unmet, whoever is asking.

• Sessions you have finished10
• People who have voted in them1,000
• Moderation actions in the last 90 days0
• Identity checked by staffa person looks

Payment is not on the list, and there is no way to buy one. Funding a review may be necessary and it is never sufficient: a badge that is purely purchasable stops meaning anything.

Rater personalities

• The Contrarian — Sided with the minority in more than 45% of closed sessions
• The Chaos Agent — More than 50% of sessions joined finished within 5 percentage points
• The Specialist — More than 70% of votes concentrated in one category
• The Early Bird — More than 60% of votes cast in the first 20% of the window
• The Defender — Chat messages per session in the top decile
• The Consensus Seeker — Sided with the majority in more than 80%

A personality describes a voting pattern and nothing else: not intelligence, not taste, not whether somebody is right.

What is actually running

• frozen results — runningrunning
• leaderboards — runningrunning
• personality — runningrunning
• reputation — runningrunning
• session scoring — runningrunning
• trending — runningrunning

Published rules that are not switched on are listed as such. A page describing something as though it were live, when nothing does it, would be the exact failure publishing is meant to prevent.

You keep everything: your votes, your reputation, your badges, your profile, your place on the rater board. Hosting is something your account can now do, not somewhere else you log in.

1. 1Open your settings and choose Become a creator.
2. 2Pick a handle. The handle is permanent. It appears in every share of every session you ever host, and a product where it changes is one where a link stops resolving to who it named. The same sentence is on the form itself, at the only moment it matters.
3. 3Add a headline and, optionally, the category you mostly work in.
4. 4You now have a public page at /creator/your-handle and a private studio.

Self-signup is behind a switch. If it is closed you will be told so rather than shown a form that fails — and staff can still make somebody a creator directly, because the switch gates self-serve, not whether creators exist.

1. 1Go to send in a session. Anyone can do this — you do not have to be a creator.
2. 2Choose a format, write the question, and give it options. A template can fill the form in one click, and everything stays editable afterwards.
3. 3Set how long it runs.
4. 4Send it in.

A submitted session is not live. It goes into a review queue, its page is a 404 to everybody including you, and a human decides.

That is the one thing this flow must never blur. Somebody who thinks they published a session that is actually pending will conclude the product is broken and say so somewhere we cannot answer.

Being a creator changes the path, not the standard. A creator’s submission is scheduled immediately and read shortly afterwards; a stranger’s waits for a reader first. Both get read. If yours is set aside you are told why.

You can watch everything you have sent in at your submissions.

Go live

Open the hot window — the period where you are actively running the room.

Slow mode

A minimum gap between messages, for when chat outruns reading.

Lock chat

Stop new messages without ending the session.

Remove a message

Takes it down and leaves a tombstone, so the thread still makes sense.

Timeout

Silences somebody in this session for a period. It is scoped to your room and it appears on their own record, so they can read it.

Co-hosts and moderators

Grant either to somebody so you are not doing it alone.

End early

Close the session ahead of its window. It settles immediately.

A host can shape the room. A host cannot see who voted for what, change a tally, or alter a result. There is no control for it, and nothing behind the scenes that could do it either.

Before voting opens you can put your name on an outcome — Creator versus Audience. The call is locked before the first vote is cast and cannot be changed afterwards, which is the entire point: a prediction you can revise once the numbers move is not a prediction.

When the session settles, your call is shown against what the room actually decided. Getting it wrong in public is the product working. A creator with a visible record of calls is one whose opinion means something.

Where two creators call opposite sides, the session becomes a battle, and the report afterwards shows both calls, the result, and which audience turned up for whom.

The studio is where a creator finds what their sessions did: sessions finished, unique participants, the typical room size, followers, and the creator score those add up to.

Every number in the studio is a total. Individual votes are not visible to anyone, including you — they are not recorded in a form that could be shown.

That is said out loud rather than left to be inferred, because the difference between “we do not show this” and “this is not computed” is the whole basis of the claim, and a creator who assumes the first will keep looking for the setting.

The studio breaks down how often the room agreed with your calls, which of your questions split it most evenly, and — per session — the reasons people gave.

Everything here is an aggregate with a minimum cohort size, and the floors are shown to you rather than applied invisibly. Below the floor you are told the group is too small rather than shown a number that would identify somebody. A breakdown fine enough to name one person is not analytics.

Once a session settles, its content kit gives you ready-to-post copy per channel, built from the result, your call and the public chat. No model generates it and no new data is collected — it is a rendering of what already happened.

A moment that did not occur is named as absent rather than quietly omitted, so you are never handed a post claiming something that did not happen.

Every session also has a share card that renders from its frozen result.

The verified mark on a creator page means BuniFun checked that this person is who they say they are, and that they have actually done the work. The criteria were set in advance: criteria written after somebody wants one are criteria written to fit them.

Your progress against each one is in your studio, showing how far along you are rather than a pass or fail — “10 of 10” tells you that you are at the line, and a tick does not. The current numbers are in the published numbers.

One criterion is not something you can earn by hosting: a person has to look. It is named rather than left implicit, so the checklist can say we do this, not you instead of showing a bar that never fills. When everything earnable is done, your studio says so — the difference between “keep going” and “waiting on us”.

Payment is not on the list and there is no way to buy this badge. Funding a review may be necessary; it is never sufficient. A badge that is purely purchasable stops meaning anything.

Buni Verified is a different mark for a different claim — an identity check on a paid membership — and it is drawn differently so the two are never mistaken for each other. Holding it does nothing to this one.

A badge is refused when a published criterion is unmet — whoever is asking. It comes back off if the identity cannot be confirmed, and that requires a reason you can read and appeal.

An event is several sessions strung together — an awards night, a match, a launch. Each question opens on its own schedule, and the event page carries a running order, a live timeline, and a recap once it has finished.

A host can advance an event by hand, and some questions are parked to be opened when the moment arrives rather than at a fixed time. You can ask to be reminded when one starts — there is a strict cap on how many notifications a single event may send you, so following an evening cannot flood your phone.

A show is a recurring event — every Friday, every match day. It books its own episodes ahead of time and has a page listing what has aired and what is coming.

A show composes things that already exist rather than inventing new ones: it owns no tally, no verdict and no earning rule of its own. When a programme ends it keeps its episodes and their recaps, and cannot be revived — a name returning with a run of episodes nobody expected to resume is worse than starting a new one.

A moment is a very short session opened on the spot — a goal, a line, a reveal. It counts towards a subject’s standing at a reduced weight, because ninety seconds of reaction is not the same evidence as a full window.

Moments are excluded from trending, and that is a stated rule rather than a surprise: a ninety-second window cannot clear the voter and network gates honestly, and a gate a whole feature systematically fails is a gate that gets “temporarily” loosened for it.

A HopTalk room is a live audio debate. Most are attached to a session, and then the room argues that session’s question: its options are the sides, the audience’s position is their ballot, and when the room ends its verdict is the session’s result. A room can also stand on its own, for a show or a conversation that is not about a vote.

Rooms on air are on the HopTalk page and the home page, marked LIVE; rooms booked for later say Starting soon, and pressing Interested on one means you are told when it begins. HopTalk works in the browser and in the BuniFun app.

Listening

Free, and you do not need an account to listen. Signing in lets you react, chat, pick a side and raise your hand.

Staying in while you browse

Going to another page does not take you out of the room. It shrinks to a player along the bottom, still playing, with your microphone or your hand on it; tap it to go back in. Only Leave takes you out — one room at a time.

Open Floor

Anybody can ask to speak; the host brings people up.

The Debate

Two benches, one for each side, with a timer on every turn.

Creator Show

A host and the guests they invite.

Town Hall

A host and a panel, with the audience's questions queued.

Clash on Stage

Two people, one argument, timed turns — see Clash on Stage.

Next to the audio is the room’s chat. A room on a session uses that session’s own chat — topics, reactions and clashes included — and a standalone room has its own. The host can pin the topic being argued right now, above both.

1. 1Press Raise hand, with a question if you like. Hands are a queue in the order they went up.
2. 2The host or a co-host brings you up. You choose whether to step up — nobody is put on stage without saying yes.
3. 3Unmute and speak. Step down whenever you like, and you are back in the audience.

Eight voices

A stage holds at most eight speakers at once, host included.

Timers

In formats with a turn timer, the microphone closes when your time is up. The host can give you more.

Mutes are real

When a host mutes you, or moves you back to the audience, BuniFun's server stops passing on your audio. It is not a request to your app — a muted microphone is silent for everybody, whatever the device does.

What the host can do

Bring people up and send them back, mute, extend a turn, seat a speaker on a side, make somebody co-host, remove somebody from the room, pause the chat and end the room.

Nobody can pay to be heard. The queue is first come, ordered by the host, and nothing a person has bought is read when it is decided who speaks.

A room attached to a session shows the session’s options as sides, with the live tally beside them. Picking a side is voting in the session — the same vote, through the same door, and like every vote it cannot be changed afterwards. If you have already voted, the room knows your side and does not ask again.

A speaker can declare their side on stage. The declaration is checked against their own ballot, so nobody can claim a side they did not vote for, and it is never shown on a profile.

The room shows the tally, never who voted which way. Your ballot is exactly as private in a HopTalk room as anywhere else on BuniFun.

1. 1A speaker challenges another with their take. The other has three minutes to accept — again, nothing happens without acceptance.
2. 2The host starts the clash when the room is ready.
3. 3Each side gets an opening statement, then a rebuttal. During every turn only the person whose turn it is can be heard: the server opens exactly one microphone.

The audience reacts as it goes, and in a room on a session can vote on the session’s question. A clash on stage records that it happened and what the room reacted to. It does not declare one person right, and it does not touch the session’s result.

When a room ends, everybody in it lands on its Verdict. In a room on a session it leads with the session’s vote — the answer to the question that was argued, not a judgement of who argued best. Underneath: how many listened and spoke, the hands raised, the topics the host pinned, and any clash that was held.

The Verdict is frozen when the room ends and has its own link and share card, so it can be posted afterwards the way a result can.

Start a room from New room: what it is about, the format, optionally the session it argues, and whether to take raised hands. You can go live now or book a time; a booked room can be opened up to a quarter of an hour early, and is cancelled if its host has not arrived within an hour. A room whose host and co-hosts have all left ends itself after a few minutes.

Recording

Off unless the host turns it on. Everybody in the room sees that it is recording, and every speaker is asked when they step up — somebody who says no is not recorded. Recordings can be reported and removed like anything else.

Co-hosts

A host can make one co-host for free, to help run the stage.

Creator Pro

A subscription for people who run a show: recurring shows booked for you, audience analytics, more co-hosts and room themes. The Pro page shows the current price, or says it is not on sale yet.

Sponsored rooms

A room a brand has paid for always says so, on the room and wherever it is listed.

Creator Pro buys production tools. It never buys a place in the queue, a louder voice, or weight in a vote — see what money can and cannot do.

Every message is checked against a curated blocklist as it is sent, and again afterwards by a slower pass that catches terms added since and repetition across sessions. The blocklist includes curated Pidgin, Yoruba, Igbo and Hausa terms — a filter that only understands English is a filter that does not work in our market.

Report

Anyone can report a message, a comment, a session, an account, a Bite or Note, a HopTalk room or recording, or a direct message sent to them. Reports go to a queue sorted by priority.

Removal

Takes content down and leaves a tombstone, so a thread still reads.

Shadow removal

Hides a message from everybody but its author, for the borderline cases.

Timeout

Silences somebody for a period, scoped to one session or platform-wide.

Suspension or ban

Stops an account acting. See below.

A host moderates their own room; staff moderate the platform. Every staff action is recorded, and the ones with a consequence for you are recorded a second time in a place you can read.

No sanction removes a vote. A suspended or banned account keeps everything it has cast, because results other people have already seen and shared must not change underneath them.

Every sanction requires a written reason, and that reason is not a default. Whoever handles your appeal reads exactly that sentence, and a pre-filled “violation of terms” would make every record say the same nothing.

You can read the decisions made about you on your own record. A reversal is a new entry on top rather than an edit of the old one, so the history stays honest in both directions.

A creator whose hosting is revoked keeps everything else — votes, reputation, badges, and the sessions they ran, whose results are unchanged. Their page stays up carrying the reason, because nobody can appeal a decision they were never shown.

Public

Your username, display name, avatar, reputation, badges, and — if you host — your creator page and the sessions you ran.

Private

Your email. It appears to staff only on a single account they have opened deliberately, never in a list.

Never shown to anyone

Which way you voted in any particular session — including the side you picked in a HopTalk room.

Between the two of you

Your direct messages. Nobody at BuniFun reads one unless the person it was sent to reports it.

Recorded only with consent

Your voice in a HopTalk room. A room records only if its host turned recording on, and only the speakers who agreed.

A creator’s analytics are aggregates with published minimum cohort sizes. The fan board on a creator page names people, and every person it names already carries the same number on the public rater board — it is that ledger filtered to one audience, not a new exposure.

Account deletion is not offered yet, and that is deliberate rather than an oversight: it has to reconcile with append-only votes and frozen results first, and a button that half-deletes is worse than none.

Money can move where something is shown. It can never move what a number says.

A boosted session appears in slots labelled as promoted, and is excluded from trending entirely. Nothing purchasable adds a reputation point, moves a leaderboard position, changes a result, or grants the earned creator badge.

In HopTalk, Creator Pro pays for production tools — recurring shows, analytics, co-hosts, themes — and a sponsored room is always labelled. Neither buys a place in the queue to speak, a louder voice or weight in a vote.

The other thing you can pay for is Buni Verified: an identity check and a badge that says it was done. It is display, and it is structural that it stays display — no query that computes a vote, a result, a standing, trending or reputation can read it, and a test fails the build if one ever does.

This is the claim the whole product rests on. If people believe a leaderboard can be bought, the leaderboard stops being worth reading — and so does everything built on it.

Help

Help is where you tell us something is broken, ask a question, make a suggestion or complain. A person on our side reads it and replies, and you are notified when they do. Only staff ever see a help request, so you can quote exactly what somebody said to you.

Reporting

Something somebody else wrote or did goes through Report instead, on the thing itself — see Moderation.

The community

Community has the current links to BuniFun’s groups and channels elsewhere, kept up to date by staff — including when a group is full and a new one opens.

Can I change my vote?

No. A vote cannot be changed or withdrawn by anyone — not you, not a moderator, not an administrator. There is no control anywhere that edits one. A tally is only meaningful if what you are watching is people making up their minds rather than reacting to the score.

Can anyone see how I voted?

No. Individual votes are never shown to anybody, including the creator who hosted the session and including staff. Creator analytics are aggregates with published minimum cohort sizes, so a breakdown fine enough to identify one person is refused rather than displayed.

Why is my subject not on the leaderboard?

A subject needs a minimum number of settled sessions and a minimum number of votes before it appears on a public board. Below that floor the number is not meaningful. The current thresholds are published on this page, read live from the software that applies them.

How do I earn reputation?

By voting, attaching a reason to a vote, turning up early in a session's window, chatting usefully, and hosting sessions people attend. Most signals are capped per day. Agreeing with the crowd earns nothing — rewarding consensus would manufacture it.

Can I buy reputation, a leaderboard position or a verification badge?

No. Nothing purchasable adds a reputation point, moves a position, changes a result or grants verification. Money can affect where something is shown — a boosted session appears in slots labelled as promoted, and is excluded from trending entirely — and nothing else.

What does the verified mark mean?

That BuniFun checked the creator's identity, and that they met a published bar: a minimum number of finished sessions, a minimum number of distinct people who voted in them, and no upheld moderation actions in the last ninety days. The criteria were fixed before the badge existed, and a badge is refused when a criterion is unmet.

I sent in a session. Why can I not see it?

A submitted session is not live. It goes to a review queue and its page returns 404 to everybody, including its author, until a human approves it. You can see everything you have sent in, and its status, on your submissions page.

What happens to my votes if my account is suspended?

Nothing. No sanction removes a vote. A suspended or banned account keeps everything it has cast, because results other people have already seen and shared must not change underneath them.

Do I need an account to read a session?

No. Sessions, results, leaderboards, subject pages and creator pages are all readable signed out. An account is needed to vote, to chat, and to host.

What happens when no season is running?

Nothing breaks. The home page does not show a season strip, the seasons list is empty, and voting, results, leaderboards and reputation all carry on exactly as they do otherwise. A season is a window over the reputation ledger, not the ledger itself.

Why did a result end with no winner?

A tie leaves no winner deliberately. 'Too close to call' is an honest verdict and a better one than picking between equal counts.

What is an invalidated session?

One whose result was set aside because the voting was not honest — coordinated voting, or traffic from a single network. The session keeps its page and states the reason publicly, because a result quietly disappearing is indistinguishable from one being hidden.

Is picking a side in a HopTalk room the same as voting?

Yes. In a room attached to a session, your side is your vote in that session — cast through the same path and final in the same way. The room shows the tally, never who picked which side.

Can I pay to speak sooner in a HopTalk room?

No. The queue to speak is first come, ordered by the host, and nothing anybody has bought is read when it is decided who speaks. Creator Pro pays for production tools, never for a place on stage or weight in a vote.

Why did my Bite disappear?

Bites and Notes are live for a day and then leave feeds and profiles. The ones that earned it — enough reactions, replies and accepted challenges, or a challenge that reached a verdict — are kept permanently in their session's or subject's Arena history. The rest are wiped a day later.

Why did my message arrive as a request?

A direct message goes straight to somebody's inbox only if they follow you or have already written to you. Otherwise it is a request: one message, nothing more until they accept. A declined request is hidden from them and you are not told.