Live Rooms

When a room of N opens, each participant is granted floor(0.75 × (N − 1)) engagements at zero points spent.

The reasoning is simple: in a cohort of N, everyone can engage everyone else exactly once, so each participant can receive about N − 1. The 25% haircut is the safety margin against people leaving early.

So the threshold sets the deliverable: the number of creators needed to open a room is what determines how much each of them receives. Not the same number as the grant — a room of 7 delivers 4 — but the one that decides it.

Every exchange unlocks when 7 creators are ready at once. When a room of 7 opens, everyone in it is granted 4 engagements before spending a single point.

A single consistent threshold across comments, shares, saves, follows and stories keeps cohorts moving and makes room openings predictable. All 4 TikTok exchanges use the same number.

Ready means two things at once: you hold a seat in the room, and you have asked for a room within the last 2 hours. What it does not mean is simply being logged in.

What counts as asking: taking a seat by hand, spending points, completing an engagement, opening the waiting room, and being checked into a room already running. Browsing does not, and that is deliberate — holding a seat is what being logged in gets you; asking for a room is what opens one.

This page used to say that using the site anywhere kept you counted. It does not, and the difference matters if you are waiting. The waiting room is the surest way to stay ready: it keeps a heartbeat while it is open, so leaving it on holds your readiness indefinitely.

Readiness is counted per person, not per account. One member with eight connected accounts is one creator toward the threshold, which is what stops a room opening to an empty house.

A room opens the moment the threshold is met, whatever the hour. If it is met at nine in the morning, the room runs at nine in the morning.

A room that fills with seats but never with people at the same time is given an announced opening time instead. The shipped schedule is 19:00 UTC, and the slot is chosen for reach into the waking hours of the creators holding seats rather than simply being the next one on the clock. A planner that widens this to 3 slots is built and is currently switched off. A slot is never announced less than 2 hours ahead.

An announced opening is emailed ahead of time to the creators whose waking hours it falls in, never more than 1 room email a day per member across every exchange, and never between 22:00 and 08:00 in your own local time. A room opening on readiness alone is announced in the app and by push, not by email — an email about a room is still in the inbox tomorrow morning advertising something that closed last night.

Once open, a room runs for at least 2 hours, and keeps running for as long as engagement is still landing. It closes after 30 minutes of silence, and never runs longer than 6 hours. What is actually being exchanged decides when a room ends — not whether the headcount dipped.

There is no cooling-off period after a close: a room with people waiting reopens immediately. There used to be an hour, and it was removed for blocking exactly the rooms it was meant to protect.

In the previous always-open exchange design, a large majority of people who gave engagement received none and never came back. An exchange where you can donate but not receive is not an exchange.

The check-in grant exists so that nobody can end up a pure supply donor: if you are in the room when it opens, you are owed something before you do any work.

If an exchange sits closed for 7 days, everyone waiting is nudged. The threshold itself does not move: 7 is a floor, not a starting point that erodes.

A standing seat is an opt-in setting that keeps your place in an exchange you already have demand in, so you are not re-taking a seat every day. It holds a place; it does not signal readiness on your behalf, because a setting that quietly counted absent members toward a threshold would open rooms to nobody.

The answer to "what do I do while every room is shut" is PowerSwap, which is deliberately not gated on rooms. You can earn there whatever the hour, against the exchanges that have shipped, and a session checks you into any room that opens while it is still running.