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 4 creators grants 2. Comments at 5 grants 3. Deep Dive at 6 grants 3.

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

Watch opens at 4 creators. Saves at 4. Comments at 5. Deep Dive at 6.

Instagram's are higher: comments at 6, shares and saves at 8, follows at 10, stories at 12.

The reason for the difference is stated in the product's own migration: TikTok starts with zero participants, and a room that never fills is worse than no room at all. A threshold set where Instagram's is would leave every TikTok room permanently closed.

Ordering follows what each action costs the person doing it and what it is worth to the person receiving it. A watch is one video. A comment means reading the video properly and writing something true about it, and five real comments are worth considerably more than five views.

Deep Dive opens highest because it asks the most: three videos watched end to end, aimed at your profile rather than at a single post.

A headcount is the usual one: enough creators check in at the same time and the room unlocks by itself.

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.