If only the winner pays, it's just a silly game. But when the losers also pay, it becomes a genuinely abusive exploit of human irrationality which most people are not aware of. Please take it down.
Except none of those are good analogies to what's going on here, where people aren't actually bidding on something of monetary value. I find it hard to buy your argument that this is in any way unethical.
And those businesses are accordingly regulated by society. But good luck trying to foster that winner-takes-all free-market world of yours. I'm sure it'll be a real blast.
Similar to the "I am rich." app released on the app store so long ago. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Rich was art. I'm not sure if I think your site is imitation or art as well.
All these negative comments are a good thing. You've made something that polarizes people. I'd take that any day over something that makes people say "meh".
If I understand it, it's a pretty horrible idea. For a lot of reasons. But, the most obvious, is how easy it'll be for you to game it. When someone makes a bid, you can simply outbid them but not actually pay any money.
I see your concern, but we haven't done this yet - we have no reason to. There is no actual reward for being the "richest", we could care less as to who claims the title.
If we ever auto-outbid people, they would find out right away, and wouldn't return to the site.
Anonymous submissions are allowed... so it could be you hit the nail on the head and they are doing this right now (and simply publicly denying for obvious reasons).
Exactly. I mean I'm not bidding on it. But I wasn't one of the people who helped milliondollarhomepage.com reach its goal and then some either :) I'm just calling it like it is, a really good idea worth trying :)
This can be a good way to increase your Twitter account visibility and hope to gain some followers through this site.
Right now, the bids are low but if this idea sustainable or not needs to be seen. You can hope to make it big if businesses find it a good way to advertise and promote products and product launches.
Some time ago I registered 100EuroTweets which I guess was kind of a similar idea: you would be able to send messages to that account by paying 100€. Presumably people would follow the account to see who would be crazy enough to pay, and in turn the tweets would actually get some exposure for their money.
I never got round to implementing it, because I wanted it to be fully automated (checking a bank account), which is slightly complicated in Germany.
Anyway, it was just a silly idea in the spirit of the Million Dollar Page, for fun - just like yours, I guess. I actually like your variant better, I wouldn't be surprised if it turns out to be quite successful.
On Firefox 7.0.1 on Windows 7, the bid overlay automatically comes up and blocks the leaderboard with no way of dimissing it. Works on Chrome 15.0.874.120, though ;)
If people have been paying in 1 cent increments, that site already made 80$ - not too shabby for a Hackathon project :-) (126*127/2 was my calculation).
I don't mean to be critical, but your idea doesn't have any real point. It isn't selling a service or a product, which is a requirement of a startup company, especially in technology sectors. So I'm not saying it has no point, but what do you intend to do with the website? Where is it going?
