Why there is no account

Everything stored when you answer is the card it belongs to and your three numbers, plus any doubts you picked:

votes (
  card_id,
  person_id,
  today, bar, odds,
  tags
)

person_id is the column that got weaker, and it is new. Until September 2026 a vote had no author and could not be given one; the guarantee was an absence rather than a promise. It now points at the address your invite went to, so the card can ask a follow-up of the people whose answers raised it. That is the trade, stated at the top of this page and again here.

Still no name, no IP, and still no timestamp and no primary key. Those stay missing on purpose. A creation time would order the votes, and the order people answered in a nine-person team is often enough to identify them — so identity is the only refusal that was lifted, and the order was not.

A row like (3, 7, 5, scope unclear) is one person’s entire opinion, reassembled. So the card never reads rows — it reads three separately sorted lists, one per question.

Every number you gave is in there. Which of them were given by the same person is not, and cannot be recovered, because the ordering that linked them was thrown away on the way out.

This is the sentence that now carries the most weight. Your person_id sits on the row and still cannot help anyone, because the view never reads rows — each list is sorted away from the other two before it leaves the database. Knowing who cast a vote does not reassemble what they said.

A card shows nothing until five people have answered. That rule is not an if statement in a page that someone could forget to write — it is enforced by the database view every surface has to read through.

No screen in this product is capable of showing an early result, including by mistake, including to whoever made the card. The reason for the floor is the same as for the missing timestamp: a number that moved with each vote could be watched, and the difference read backwards to whoever just answered.

A creator can paste addresses in when they make a card, so Daylight sends the link instead of them. Those addresses sit in their own table, are never joined to a vote, and are deleted when the card sends its last mail. A card made without them stores nothing of the kind.

It also has to keep the voting link itself, in plain text, for as long as the card still has something to say — up to about ninety days on a card with a metric. Every other card stores only a hash of that link, which is why a card made without addresses cannot be opened by anyone who gets at the database. A card made with them can.

It does not weaken the anonymity of a vote. Knowing every address on a card still tells you nothing about who said what, because a vote has no name, no order and no time to match an address against. What it does mean is that Daylight now holds one thing it did not before, so it is written down here rather than left for you to discover.

No department, no team, no role. It has been asked for, and the answer is no: on a team of nine, a department is an identifier. Once the breakdown shows one person in Design, their answer has their name on it in everything but letters.

No submission order, no device fingerprint, no analytics on the card surfaces. There is a list of who was invited — the creator typed it — and since September 2026 your answer is joined to your place on it. What is not there is the order, and the order is what would turn one person’s answers into a pattern.

The public pages — this one, the front door, the demo and the pre-mortem article — are counted, by a cookieless visit counter that never sees a card. A page with a token in its address is not, and cannot be: the list of measured pages is fixed in the code and a test fails the build if anything token-bearing is ever added to it. That is the same reason the floor is a database view rather than a rule — a promise you can forget to keep is not a promise.

Every person invited to a card gets their own link, and the answer they give is stored against it. So the product can tell your vote from your colleague’s. It could not before, and this is the change that page-one of this site used to describe differently.

What this bought: a card that says three people flagged the data model used to stop there, because there was nobody to ask. It can now go back to those three and ask what they meant, without asking the other six and without telling anyone who it asked.

What it cost: the old promise was that a column which does not exist cannot be queried — by us, by a feature that seems reasonable in six months, or by whoever ends up holding this database. That promise is gone. In its place is a narrower one: no view exposes the column, no page can read it, and no screen in this product is capable of showing it to a person you work with. That is a commitment rather than an impossibility, and this page is not going to pretend otherwise.

Votes cast before September 2026 have no person attached and never will. They were given under the other promise.

When a card fills up, it looks for the thing the numbers cannot explain: an answer sitting a long way from the rest of the room, or a doubt several people named and nobody described. If it finds one it asks a single question of the people whose own answers raised it — not of everyone.

You get a day. You can write something or skip, and skipping records nothing at all — there is no row, no count, and no endpoint for it. When the day is up everyone on the card reads the answers together, with no names, in an order that comes from the text rather than from who replied first.

That is why nothing tells you how many people were asked or how many answered. On a small team, “six of nine replied” hands the room a set to reason about — so a person who stayed quiet and a person who never opened the mail are the same thing here, and the card could not tell them apart either.

The honest edge of this: a doubt you write is shown in your exact words, and a specific enough sentence can point at its author as clearly as a signature. That was true of the doubts on a card and it is true here.

The numbers on your card are counted alongside other cards — how many people answered, how wide the spread was, and later whether the project landed. That is how a sentence like “projects with more than six people start less confident than smaller ones” could ever be said, and it is the only way this product can ever show that a room’s day-one read was worth having.

Nothing below the card travels, because there is nothing to travel with. A vote has no name, no order and no row identity, so there is no individual answer to follow from one card to the next — the same three columns that make your own card anonymous make you invisible across all of them. Your subject line and any link you added stay on your card and are never counted or published.

The five-answer floor protects people inside a card. It does nothing between cards, so there is a second one: a statistic drawn from three cards is a statistic about three teams, and whoever made one of them could subtract themselves and read the rest. So no cross-card number gets published below twenty cards.

That last one is a policy, not a mechanism, and it is the only promise on this page that is. Nothing aggregates yet, so there is no view to put it in — when the first cross-card number is built, the floor goes into the query the same way the five-answer floor went into the view, and this paragraph gets rewritten to say so. Until then you have our word, which is worth exactly what the rest of this page says it is worth.