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 shelf is small on purpose. A hundred introductions 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 introduction is that fact made visible — not a lever you pull.
So nothing here rewards logging in, sending a lot of messages, or showing up every day. No streaks. No message counts. 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 puts two people on your shelf. Two is a slightly unsatisfying number and we know it — the shelf 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.
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 introductions.
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 nine, per person. A rung that would carry you past nine doesn't fire at all — we would rather leave a rung unearned than pay half of one. Seven of the nine are reachable today; the missing two are the live-video rung, waiting on the feature.
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 where you can say that someone has become one of your people, and they move in with the friends you already had. That one earns nothing at all. It's a private note to yourself about where the two of you stand, it is never shown to them, and nothing in the system treats 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 introduction 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 on your shelf; 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 introductions 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 introduction. 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 introductions — 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 an introduction 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: there's a match waiting for you, and we're holding it until someone right arrives.
What we will not do is pad the shelf. One invented introduction 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.
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, and it's also what opens your Two of You report, the written portrait of how your two ways of seeing fit together.
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.
No streaks. No rewards for message volume. No progress meters, and no number anywhere telling you how many introductions you've earned or how close you are to another. 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.