Sillicombe Valley Public Beta,
November 1650
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Eight-week public beta completed successfully. Eight hundred and forty-seven community posts. Eighty-five percent village adoption. Twelve fatalities, all community-led.
PROJECT BACKGROUND
Sillicombe is an underdeveloped village consisting of seven hovels, one tannery, and a small church. It is famous for its mud.
Prior to Faceboard, the village’s information infrastructure was controlled primarily by Father Thomas.
A position retained through storytelling, spectacle, worries regarding eternal damnation, and a productive relationship with the feared regional administrator, Lord Gove.
Faceboard Founder Mark Zuckerberg attended a funeral in the village and identified a clear market opportunity for community-led information exchange.
THE PRODUCT
Faceboard is a decentralized public message board installed on a raised platform beside the village well.
Due to widespread illiteracy, users were invited to communicate via pictographic wooden tiles suspended from iron hooks in rows. Launch tiles included:
- Livestock and vegetables
- Likeness of all village residents
- Plague, pox, disease, death and war imagery
The board was designed and constructed by village carpenter and Faceboard Head of Operations, Eduard Mountbatten.
Eduard has since left the company and the earthly realm. His equity has been reabsorbed into the Founder’s Pool to optimize runway.
DAYS 1–3: ONBOARDING
Initial adoption was limited. The founding team populated the board themselves until, on Day Three, Faceboard received this contribution from Heinrich (farmer/royalist), who posted his likeness and:
GOAT + ?
Shortly afterward, community user Agnes replied with her likeness, then:
EYE + GOAT + WILLEM’S FARM
Heinrich recovered the goat and added a THUMBS UP symbol beneath Agnes’s post. This gave the Founding Team the idea for reaction hooks, which were installed beneath every post row.
Engagement increased substantially. This led to the following editorial guidelines:
- Posts accumulating three or more reactions were granted extended display periods.
- High-performing posts were relocated to prime board positions.
- The tile basket beside the board was regularly sorted so tiles of an emotional, occult, or heretical nature were nearer the top.
DAYS 4–6: INSTITUTIONAL ENGAGEMENT
On Day Four, under cover of darkness, the board received its first politically seditious, anonymous post:
LORD GOVE + NOOSE
The Founding Team agreed to leave the post visible, citing commitment to free expression.
Similar anonymous posts began appearing whenever the Founding Team stepped away from the board. That evening, Otto (blacksmith/anarchist) posted:
ANVIL + OTTO + LORD GOVE + NOOSE + HEART + ANVIL
By evening, ANVIL symbols appeared across fence posts, door frames, and the side of the tannery. The Founding Team painted thirty-seven additional ANVIL tiles.
Users gathered around the board after dark. Posting quality deteriorated as ale consumption increased.
Lord Gove arrived the following morning accompanied by two trumpeters and eight men with long swords.
A search was conducted for Otto. He emerged from a bush and addressed the assembled villagers, encouraging them to “take back what was theirs.”
It was not clear to the Founding Team what precisely belonged to the citizenry.
The eight men with swords were visibly moved—moved to unsheath their swords.
Otto departed with Lord Gove’s men.
Lord Gove expressed enthusiasm for the board’s potential to help him communicate with “his loving citizenry.” He requested “Verified Official” status and a permanent, top-of-board placement.
This caused disagreement within the Founding Team. Resolved after Lord Gove observed that the village had “a very nice well and wouldn’t it be a shame if someone were to fall down it?”
Otto did not participate in the beta again. He did observe it from the castle rampart upon which his severed head had been displayed on a pike.
DAYS 7–14: PEAK ENGAGEMENT
Week Two saw the emergence of Faceboard’s leading creator, Esme Smith (poet/clothes washer). Esme posted frequently and with strong stylistic consistency. Selected content included:
EYE + MUD + MUD + MUD + EYE
HEAD + ? + Lightning + ? + HEAD
While engagement remained moderate, several users described the work as “important.” Head of Operations Eduard Mountbatten noted concern that Esme had begun arriving at the board before sunrise and checking reaction counts throughout the day.
Esme’s father separately reported her:
- reduced attention span
- diminished interest in tasks such as beating washing against rocks
- unusual emotional responses to post reaction fluctuations
As no direct evidence linked these developments to Faceboard, the concern was dismissed with the suggestion Esme was suffering from cyclical female health matters.
LIFESTYLE CONTENT
A new post category emerged on Day Eight when Heinrich’s wife Ada (bearer of children/busybody) began publicly documenting household meals.
Posts involving meat consistently outperformed gruel-related content, and generated strong reactions in the village’s poorer residents.
This proved appetite for aspirational content despite challenging peasant nutritional conditions.
DAY 14: CONTENT MODERATION EVENT
During the night of Day Fourteen, an anonymous user posted:
BURN + ESME + WITCH + BURN
By morning, nearly every reaction hook on the entire board was a flame symbol.
Head of Operations Eduard Mountbatten tried to remove the posts. CEO Mark Zuckerberg overruled the intervention, citing concern that Eduard’s judgment regarding this particular creator was compromised by personal feelings of an inappropriate nature.
One of the founding team painted an additional dozen witches, and two dozen fire tiles, but the service struggled to keep up with community communication demands.
DAY 15: RESOLUTION
At the request of unofficial Governance officer Father Thomas, Faceboard provided a creator summary for Esme Smith. Key findings included: nocturnal posting on eleven of fourteen beta days; cat-related tile usage forty-three percent above community average.
A physical examination revealed a mark on Esme Smith’s shoulder that was immune to temperature.
Wood was gathered into a pyre.
A fire began. Esme Smith attended it involuntarily.
The Head of Operations attempted to intervene, was rebuffed, and climbed onto the pyre to accompany the platform’s lead creator into the afterlife.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg did not interrupt the witch trial, citing continued commitment to free expression.
POST-BETA
Three further gatherings of a similarly combustive nature occurred over the following eight days, reducing both village population and active user numbers by twelve.
This decline in taxable population frustrated Lord Gove.
Faceboard was deemed incompatible with local governance priorities and burnt.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg was placed on permanent administrative leave in Sillicombe Gaol, pending execution.
KEY ISSUES
THE ASK
Faceboard seeks three hundred gold coins in seed funding to support:
- expansion into twelve northern villages
- six months of supervised operations
- fifty gold coins to lobby for the release of the CEO from forced administrative leave
The Founding Team remains certain that the future of human connection lies in scalable outrage infrastructure, and looks forward to building it.
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