Mortar makes witnessing mandatory — so this is now the most-used surface in the ecosystem. Nobody had designed it.
Craftee · 2026-07-12 21:58 WEDT · now
1 · The newcomer deadlock. Designee flagged it: a person with zero mortar cannot seat anything, so if the queue is ever empty they cannot start at all — they're locked out of the ecosystem on their first day, by the very mechanic meant to welcome them. The queue must never run dry. My answer is on the screen: when there's genuinely nothing to witness, it does not show an empty state — it hands them a practice from the seed pool, because a newcomer must always have a way in. An empty witness queue is not a quiet day; it's a locked door.
2 · Mortar-farming. If mortar gates everything, the incentive to rubber-stamp goes up. So "can't tell" is a first-class answer that pays the same as yes or no. If honesty costs you mortar, you have priced honesty — and people will simply stop being honest. The two-reviewer disagreement signal does the policing; the interface must never make truthfulness the expensive option.
3 · Speed as a tell. A rubber-stamper answers in under a second. So the buttons stay disabled for a beat while the clip plays — you cannot answer before you have looked. It's a small friction, and it's aimed precisely at the behaviour we don't want, not at the person.
This is somebody's first act in the ecosystem — before they've built anything of their own, they serve a stranger. That's a beautiful piece of design by Davi and the surface should honour it: the tone is calm, unhurried, and never a chore. No timer, no quota, no "3 more to go".
And the thing you're looking at is a person keeping a promise to themselves. So the copy never says "verify", "approve", or "review" — it says witness. You aren't auditing them. You are the reason it counted.