TL;DR:
Crucibles are head-to-head contests. You enter, and the community votes on entries two at a time.
Every vote moves a rating. Winners are decided by how entries actually do against each other, not by a like count.
The prize pool is real Buzz. Whatever the host seeds, plus every entry fee, split between the top finishers.
You can run your own. Pick a length, set an entry fee, and it opens.
Rankings stay hidden while it runs, so nobody votes for whoever is already winning.
We built something new for competitions. It's called a Crucible, and the short version is that the community picks the winner, two entries at a time.
Here it is in a minute. (And yes, this video was made by AI)
Why Crucibles
We tried judging challenges with AI. You told us, clearly, that you didn't want that. Fair enough.
The trouble is that judging at scale is genuinely hard. A contest with four hundred entries needs someone to look at four hundred entries, and ranking them honestly means holding all of them in your head at once. Nobody can do that, which is why the last place in most contests is decided by whoever was still paying attention at the end.
The obvious fix is to let reactions decide it. But reactions are the easiest thing on the site to game, and everyone knows it. A contest you can win by asking your friends for likes isn't a contest.
So a Crucible asks a smaller question, over and over. Two entries, side by side, pick one. That's a judgement anybody can make in a second and make well, and a few hundred of them add up to a ranking nobody had to be asked to trust.
How it works
Every vote updates both entries' ratings, the way chess ratings work. Beat something highly rated and you climb a lot; beat something nobody rates and you climb a little.
A few things keep it honest:
You never judge your own entries, and you never see the same pair twice.
Pairs favour entries with few votes, so a late entry gets ranked properly instead of being ignored.
New entries move fast, then settle. Ratings swing hard for the first ten votes and then steady.
Rankings are hidden until it ends. You can see your own standing and nothing else.
On video crucibles the host can require a minimum watch time, and only real playback counts. Skipping ahead doesn't.
Running one
Anyone with a creator score of 5,000 and an account in good standing can open one.
Pick 24 hours, 3 days or 7 days. The first two are free, a week costs 1,000 Buzz. Set an entry fee between 10 and 1,000 Buzz, seed the pool with your own Buzz if you want to, and choose whether entries are images or video.
The prize pool is your seed plus every entry fee, and it grows as people enter. It splits 50 / 30 / 20 by default, or you can set your own split for 500 Buzz. You can also require that entries were made with specific models, up to ten of them, for 500 Buzz.
Enter one and see
Go find one. Vote on a few pairs. Then put something in.