Rooms and the headcount thresholds

The headcount is not the deliverable, and it is worth being exact about the difference because it is the number most often overstated in this category.

In a room of N, each participant may engage a given video once, so N − 1 is the arithmetic ceiling. What is actually granted is floor(0.75 × (N − 1)) — a quarter is held back so a room that opens at its minimum still has headroom, and so the grant does not collapse to zero when one participant drops out between opening and delivery.

In practice: a Watch or Saves room opening at 7 creators grants 4. Comments at 7 grants 4. Deep Dive at 7 grants 4.

This is the same factor the Instagram side has always used, and it is defined once for both platforms rather than restated per page.

All four TikTok rooms open at 7 creators. So does every Instagram exchange. There is one rule across both platforms and eight exchanges.

It did not start that way. TikTok was given its own ladder — 4 for watches and saves, 5 for comments, 6 for deep dives — on the theory that a new platform with no members needs a lower bar than an established one. Instagram had a ladder too, running from 6 up to 12.

Both were abandoned for the same reason, and it is worth stating plainly because it is an admission rather than a feature: the ladders were guesswork about platforms that did not exist yet. On Instagram, stories at twelve never opened once, while comments filled to fifteen and sat closed anyway. A room of 7 that opens beats a room of twelve that does not.

The trade is real. A lower threshold means a smaller grant — 7 creators grant 4 engagements each rather than the larger number a fuller room would deliver. That cost was accepted knowingly, in exchange for rooms that actually open.

Raising TikTok from its old ladder to 7 makes the wait longer, not shorter, and on a platform with no members that is the whole story: no TikTok room opens until 7 creators exist, and today zero do.

That is a worse number than the one it replaced, published anyway. One rule across both platforms is easier to reason about than two, and a threshold invented for a platform nobody had joined was never evidence of anything.

A headcount is the usual one — but a headcount of creators who are ready, and ready does not mean sitting on a waiting page. It means holding a seat in that room and having been active somewhere on PodSwap recently. You can be ready while doing something else entirely.

That distinction is the mechanism rather than a detail. Measured on whether people had a waiting-room page open, a room would report two creators ready while eighteen were queued, and the headcount unlock could never fire at all. Nobody keeps a page open for two hours waiting for strangers.

Presence decides when a room opens; engagement decides when it closes. A room closes when nothing is being exchanged any more, not when the headcount dips — people drifting away is normal, and a room that shut every time someone left would never stay open long enough to deliver anything.

The second is an announced time. A room can be scheduled to open at a stated moment regardless of who is waiting, which is how a relaunch works — nobody wants to be the person sitting in an empty room hoping three others turn up.

An announced opening carries a grace window of 6 hours and fires once. Past that window it does not fire at all, so a room announced for last Thursday cannot spring open weeks later when a switch is flipped back on, to an audience that has long since moved on.

No TikTok room has an announced time set. That is a statement about the database rather than a promise: the field exists, all four rooms are closed, and none of them has a date in it.

Everyone checked in at the moment it opens is granted their share at no cost in points. Nobody is charged for being early, and there is no advantage to arriving last.

Every room on the TikTok side is closed right now, and not because nobody has checked in. The whole TikTok surface sits behind a feature flag — features.tiktok, set by TIKTOK_ENABLED and false unless someone deliberately turns it on — and no TikTok account can be connected in the first place, because the service that reads public TikTok profiles has no data provider configured.

The flag answers 404 rather than 403 to anyone who is not an admin. Hidden means indistinguishable from absent: a 403 would confirm the route exists and invite the obvious question about what is behind it.