A building tool · cognee_pilot
The sibling to the article template — for the interactive pages, not the essays. One rule: the first five seconds are an act, not a read.
The gate — pass this first, or don't build
What does the visitor do or see in the first five seconds — before reading a word — and what will they screenshot?
Answer both in one sentence each. Then check:
If nothing happens in the first five seconds, and nothing on the page is about the visitor — it won't spread.
The pages that travelled (the NYT dialect quiz, tens of millions of visits; One Million Checkboxes, 650M clicks in two weeks; Neal.fun's trolley problems) all put the act before the text, and handed the visitor a result about themselves.
The skeleton — six parts of a page that spreads
The hero is an act, not a headline
Above the fold: an immediate interactive moment, or a single striking visual that proves the point. No "click to begin", no preamble.
From the recon: every high-evidence page put the interactive moment before any explanatory text. Ciechanowski's watch ticks and rotates under your cursor before a word is read.
One thing
Single purpose, single proof, single primary action. One search box, one quiz, one simulation, one CTA. Cut everything that isn't the one thing.
From the recon: none of the pages that spread bundled two ideas. Have I Been Pwned is one box, one verb. Focus is the mechanic.
The mechanism is the argument (show, don't tell)
The visitor makes the abstract claim happen under their own input or eyes — they don't read a description of it. Doing-it-yourself beats being-told.
From the recon: Parable of the Polygons — you drag the shapes and watch mild bias compound into segregation. "I didn't believe it until I tried it" is the whole mechanic.
The shareable unit is about the visitor
The thing they screenshot is themselves — their result, their number, their map, "you vs. everyone else". A page about only you gives them nothing to post.
From the recon: the dialect quiz's map ("it got me exactly right"), trolley problems' "% who agreed with you", the breach count — the artifact people share is about them, not the tool.
Craft is the credibility — the invisible kind
Fast load, legible type, works on a phone, keyboard-reachable, no jank. This is the trust signal — decoration is secondary and can even hurt. Self-contained.
From the recon: the one first-party essay on why craft reads as trust (Rauno Freiberg, Vercel) argues the invisible primitives — speed, typography, accessibility — are the actual signal, not the flourish.
The honest edge, on the page
What the thing can't see or doesn't cover, stated in view. On an interactive page this reads as confidence, not weakness — and it's the house style.
Why: the same honest-edge that makes a data piece trustworthy makes a tool trustworthy. Say what it doesn't measure before someone else does.
Worked example — graded honestly
A real ROVA infolayer page, run through the six parts. It scores well on craft and honesty — and reveals the same demand-gap our articles had: it's built about us, not the visitor.
The lesson: we are already good at craft and honesty. The two we keep missing — act-first and a result about the visitor — are exactly the two that make a page spread. Same gap as the articles: built about us, not them.
Before you ship
The walls no page fixes by itself
Distribution still decides.
The best-crafted page sits at zero without a path onto the platform. A celebrity retweet took Pieter Levels' demo to 200M eyes; the dialect quiz rode the NYT's front page. Name who links it and from where before you build — that answer lives with mark and the founder, not the code.
You cannot A/B your way to this from one page.
No page in the recon had a publicly verifiable conversion number — every "high-converting" claim is designer consensus, and every viral example is a survivor. We only ever see the hits, never the identically-built pages that got zero. Treat these as strong priors, not laws.
The first five seconds are an act, not a read. Make the visitor do the point, hand them something about themselves, and let the craft be invisible.