Resonance introduces you to a few people at a time, and the way you get more is by doing the things that make friendships in the first place. Here is every rule, in plain words. We publish them because they are fair enough to publish.
Your list of matches is small on purpose. A hundred matches is a list to get through; three is an afternoon. Starting small is what makes each person on it worth your attention — and it is why getting more matters enough to explain.
There is one test behind everything below: does the thing being rewarded actually move you closer to a friendship? Answering someone properly. Reading what they wrote back. Meeting them for coffee. Each of those is worth doing whether or not anything comes of it, and the extra match is that fact made visible — not a lever you pull.
So nothing here rewards logging in, showing up every day, or saying more than you mean. No streaks. No progress bar filling up. Those aren't missing features; they're the ones we decided against, and they aren't coming.
Publishing your profile earns you two matches. Two is a slightly unsatisfying number and we know it — it is meant to leave you wanting one more.
Filling in every section of your profile earns a third, once ever. Not a longer profile, and not a better one — just the whole of it, so that the people you meet arrive at a page that actually says who you are. It is judged on the sections being filled in earnest rather than on how much you wrote, and publishing never waits on it: you can publish with gaps and come back.
Recording a video answer for your profile and letting it go live earns one more on top of that, once ever. Taking that video down later doesn't take the match back, and recording a second one doesn't earn a second match. It's a note in a ledger about something you did, not a property of the video.
The rest is earned one friendship at a time. Every rung below is per person and each one pays once, ever, with that person — so a rung you climbed with Sam is still there to climb with Alex.
Most of the rungs run through Fast Friends, the exchange the two of you can start from each other's cards: three questions dealt to you both, you each answer any two of them in your own time, and nothing is revealed to either of you until you have both finished. Then it all opens at once.
Finish two short games with the same person and you each get a match. Once with that person, ever — a third game and a fortieth pay nothing more, and it makes no difference at all how either of you did.
Games are open with anyone you're connected to, but this rung only pays with someone we introduced you to.
A round counts for you when the two of you both finished it and you have read what they wrote. Once that's true twice, you have earned two more matches.
A real conversation earns this same step: ten messages each way, however long they take — whichever of the two you get to first is the one that pays, and it is one or the other, never both.
You can write to anyone you're connected to, but this counts with someone we introduced you to.
Your side never waits on theirs. If you answered and read and they haven't opened yours yet, yours arrives anyway — and theirs waits for them, for as long as it takes. Nobody is penalized for somebody else's quiet week.
One match for the pair of them, not one each. It arrives when your fourth round counts.
On top of whatever that round already earned, not instead of it. And if the two of you started out on video, it lands alongside the first rung rather than waiting — early courage counts.
Audio-only counts the same as video, everywhere. And a round only runs in a format you have both said you're comfortable with, so if one of you would rather type, the round is text and the ladder still climbs exactly as fast. You are never told who set that — being not-ready-for-camera is nobody's business and no kind of lesser partner. Video never earns less than text; it just earns this one extra rung.
This rung isn't built yet. It's listed anyway, because a published ladder with a rung quietly left off it would have a false top.
The biggest rung on the ladder, and the whole reason for the rest of it. It pays when you have both said, separately, that it happened.
The top of the ladder is ten, per person. A rung that would carry you past ten doesn't fire at all — we would rather leave a rung unearned than pay half of one. Eight of the ten are reachable today; the missing two are the live-video rung, waiting on the feature. (It was nine until the games rung was added, and the top moved by exactly the size of the new rung, so nothing already on the ladder is worth less than it was.)
A while after a meeting could plausibly have happened, we ask each of you the same question, once: did you two end up meeting? You each answer on your own, and neither of you is ever told what the other said. That's deliberate. An answer given to be polite would be worth nothing, and this is the single most useful thing anyone tells us about whether any of this works.
If you're about to meet someone from here for the first time, we wrote a short page of advice: meeting someone in person. It takes a minute and it's mostly the things a friend would say.
There's a separate, quieter moment. Once you and a match have finished two rounds of Fast Friends, or once you've said you met up, we ask you one question: do you want to move them into your Connections, or would you rather leave them with your matches? Either answer is fine, and you can change your mind later — if you leave them where they are, a small line stays on their card offering the move whenever you want it. Moving someone earns nothing at all. It's a private note to yourself about where the two of you stand: it happens on your page only, it is never shown to them, and nothing in the system treats either of you differently for it.
You did the brave part, and the system asked you to. So the cost of the silence isn't yours to carry: after about a week with no answer, we replace that match with a new one.
Three things about that, said plainly. It is a replacement, not a bonus — you end up where you would have been, not ahead. The person who didn't answer stays among your matches; nothing is hidden, withdrawn or expired, because deciding they're a lost cause on your behalf isn't ours to do. And you get one replacement at a time, so a quiet fortnight doesn't mint a pile of matches you never asked for.
We also never look at why it was quiet. Someone who thought about it and decided not to, and someone who meant to and never got to it, look exactly the same from where we stand — same clock, same outcome, nothing anywhere to tell them apart. That is not an oversight to be tidied up later. Being able to leave something unanswered without it becoming an announcement is what makes the answers you do get worth having.
And nobody is told about any of it. There's no note saying nobody answered you, because that would hand you a disappointment you may not have noticed and describe someone else in the process.
When someone you invited takes the survey and joins, you get one match. That happens for your first three. After that, inviting is still one of the best things you can do here — a friend arriving makes the whole network warmer, and their friends become somebody else's matches — but it stops earning matches, and nothing anywhere will tell you off for it.
It never chains, either. You earn from the people you invite and nobody earns from the people they go on to invite. There's no tree, no downline, no reason to bring people you don't actually want here.
Sometimes you're owed a match and the pool can't fill it — a thin city, a quiet week, or you're simply earning faster than people are arriving. When that happens we carry the debt and say so: you have a match coming, and nobody here right now is a match we'd honestly make — as more people join, it will appear.
What we will not do is pad your matches. One invented match would make every real one on that page worth less, so we would rather tell you the truth and owe you. Nothing expires while you wait.
After your second round with someone, and again after your fourth, we ask you two short questions about how it's going with them: whether the two of you seem compatible, and whether you feel like you're learning something meaningful about who they are. Both of you get asked, separately. We ask the same two after you and somebody have played four games together, and we keep track of which of those moments each answer came from — an answer given after four games is a different moment from an answer given after four rounds, and telling them apart is most of what makes this worth asking.
They're research questions — the reason this whole thing exists is to find out what actually makes two people click, and this is where the science stops and asks what you make of it. Answering the pair of them is what lets the two of you carry on with each other — another round, or a message. Your Two of You report isn't behind them: it's yours from the moment the two of you said hello and have both said yes to it, and it's yours to read whether you answer these or not.
Why twice? Because one answer about a person is a mood, and two answers a few rounds apart are a direction. That repeat is the measurement this research has never had, and you're the only person who can give it.
Your answers go to the research and nowhere else. They are never shown to the person you're answering about, never hinted at, and never echoed back in anything either of you sees. Nothing you answer changes what you're shown or what you're owed, either — a one opens the same doors as a five.
Everything inside a Fast Friends exchange belongs to the two of you, permanently. Answers, clips, the conversation running alongside them: pair-private, and that isn't a setting that could be changed later. Exchange videos live in their own storage, separate from anything public. They are never screened, never surfaced anywhere, never attached to your profile, never shown to another member, never used to train anything, and not mined for matching. After a few months a room becomes the scrapbook of how a friendship started, which is exactly what it's for, so nothing in it expires on a timer.
There is one door out, and only you can open it for your own takes: after you record a video answer, you're offered — once, beside that take — the chance to publish it as your profile video. A recording made for a real person is often the best one you'll ever make. It's your take, your choice, asked once and never again, and your partner's clips are untouched by it.
Anything you made is yours to take down. There's no button for that inside a room yet, so for now email support@resonance.info and tell us what to remove; it comes down from both sides, not just yours. Deleting your account removes all of it — the terms for that are in the Privacy Policy.
You can play short games with your matches — a way of warming up with someone you have only just been introduced to, without having to be clever or brave first. They are deliberately easy: there is no timer, nothing to be on time for, and being wrong is half the point.
Playing games with someone earns you one more match. Finish two games with the same person and a match arrives — once with that person, ever. It is the smallest rung on the ladder above, and it is deliberately the smallest, because finishing two short games together is a smaller thing than answering each other honestly twice. Play a third, a fourth, a fortieth: nothing more is paid. There is no per-game payment, no reward for playing a lot of them, and nothing at all for playing the same game again. Two people who play forty games earn exactly what two people who play two earn. Beyond that one match, meeting more people works through Fast Friends and through meeting up, exactly as the rest of this page describes.
It also only counts with someone we introduced you to. Games are open with anyone you're connected to, and always will be — but a match is us introducing you to somebody new, and earning one by playing games with a friend you brought here yourself would make the whole thing circular.
After four games together, we ask you both two questions. The same two we ask after your second and fourth rounds of Fast Friends — whether the two of you seem compatible, and whether you feel like you're learning something meaningful about who they are. Answering is what opens the next game with that person; it holds nothing else. You can still read everything you have already played, talk to them, and ask them why they answered something the way they did. Each of you answers your own, and neither of you ever waits on the other.
What happens inside a game stays there. Scores are shown to the two of you while you play and are never used for anything else — never in matching, never on a profile, never in anything either of you is shown afterwards. What you earn is a match, and it is earned for finishing games together, never for winning them: how you did has nothing to do with it.
No streaks. No rewards for message volume. No progress meters, and no number anywhere telling you how many matches you've earned or how close you are to another. The one place a count of messages appears at all is the rung above — a real back-and-forth with one person, ten each way — and it pays once, in place of a first round of Fast Friends rather than on top of one. The rules are on this page; the scoreboard doesn't exist, because a scoreboard turns people into points and this whole product is an argument against doing that.
Something here not matching what you're seeing? Tell us — support@resonance.info. This page is supposed to describe the product exactly as it behaves, and if it doesn't, one of the two is wrong and we want to know which.