Governance
The five rules a vote cannot override
Members decide what this product asks about. These five rules are the part they do not get to decide, and they are short on purpose, so that anybody can check whether they were followed.
Why a charter at all
A bank that can vote on anything can vote itself into something ugly
This is the uncomfortable half of handing the question bank to members, and it is better written down before there is a vote to lose than afterwards.
The bank is governed rather than curated. Members propose topics and vote them in; an editor controls the wording and may not decline a subject. That split exists because the alternative is us deciding what matters to you, which is the thing this product is replacing.
The cost of that split is obvious. A process that will adopt whatever a majority asks for will, eventually, be asked for something that is not a topic at all — a question written so that only one answer is available, or a question about a group of people rather than about a belief. Those do not sort anybody. They recruit.
So there is a floor. Five rules, published before there were any members to vote on them, that a ballot cannot reach. Everything else about the bank is up for a vote, including the Core Ten.
The charter
The rules, in full
Numbered so they can be cited. If we ever break one, this is the text to hold us to.
- 1
Topics are unlimited. Framings are not.
A topic asks what a person believes. It never presupposes the answer inside the question, and it never names a group of people as the thing to hold a position “on”.
There is no subject Bearing refuses to ask about. Abortion, Israel and Palestine, vaccines, immigration, medical transition — all of them are askable, precisely because they end relationships. What the bank will not carry is a question whose wording has already decided its answer. Those are not topics; they are conclusions wearing a question mark, and no fair set of answers can be written underneath one.
Where a proposal arrives in one side’s vocabulary, the editor finds the belief underneath the frame and asks about that. The editor still may not decline the subject. Reframing is not softening, and the practical argument matters more here than the principled one: a question phrased in loaded vocabulary returns that side’s opinion and nothing else, because everybody else cannot find themselves in any of the options. It sorts nobody and it is dead weight in the score.
This is the rule most likely to be tested, so every reframing is published with the proposal it came from. The ledger keeps both versions, and an unexplained rejection would read as censorship where a published transformation reads as craft.
- 2
Every option must be recognisable to someone who holds it.
If a person reads their own position in a list of options and feels caricatured, the topic is broken and it goes back for rewording.
This is not politeness. An option nobody selects collects no signal, so a caricatured option is a dead option, and a topic made of dead options is weight in the score with nothing behind it. Options describe positions, never groups of people, and never in the language of contempt.
- 3
No legally protected characteristic is filterable.
Race, ethnicity, national origin, disability and HIV status are never topics and can never be filtered on. Nor can anything that works as a proxy for them.
We never ask about raceYou cannot filter on itReligion, politics and orientation stay filterable. They are conventional and lawful for a dating service, and religious dating services have run on exactly that basis for decades. The line between the two lists is not squeamishness about which subjects are touchy: values are chosen and these are not. The same distinction is why health choices are in the bank and health status is not.
Same-sex and non-binary matching is a first-class feature and was from the first version, independently of this rule and of what the membership turns out to look like.
- 4
No topic may solicit illegal content or incitement, and the bank respects the law of every jurisdiction it operates in.
Positions that amount to incitement, harassment or advocacy of violence are not options in the bank, and are not permitted in bios or in chat either.
Some questions that are lawful in Canada are not lawful in Germany. Every topic already carries a place — global, a country, or one city — so a topic that is unlawful somewhere is scoped rather than deleted everywhere, and the scoping is published in the ledger with the legal basis that caused it. Nothing has had to be scoped for that reason yet. When something is, you will be able to read why.
- 5
Answering is always optional.
No topic outside the Core Ten is ever required, and the Core Ten itself is subject to a ballot like anything else.
This rule is what makes the bar to add a topic deliberately low. Adopting a question coerces nobody, so the vote is closer to “is this worth the editor’s time” than to “do we endorse this”. It is also why retiring a topic needs a larger majority than adopting one: removing a question takes a filter away from people who are actively relying on it.
A topic existing in the bank is not an endorsement of any answer to it, and it is not a claim that you ought to care about it.
Changing the charter
Two-thirds, and thirty days to think about it
A floor that the company can move whenever it likes is not a floor. A floor that a simple majority can move on a Tuesday is not much of one either.
The charter is amendable by members, by a two-thirds vote with 30 days’ notice before it opens. Two-thirds rather than a majority because these five rules are the protection the minority in any given vote is relying on, and the notice period exists so that an amendment cannot be carried by whoever happens to be paying attention on the day it appears.
The limits of this document
What a charter cannot protect you from
A promise scoped wider than it can be kept is worth less than a narrower one that holds, so here is the narrow version.
What we can refuse, and will
A topic is not removed because somebody objects to its existence. Not because a journalist writes that it is dangerous to ask, not because an advocacy group demands it, not because a competitor briefs against it. Members put it there. If they want it gone they can vote it out, and the vote is public.
That commitment is published now, before the first campaign arrives, because a policy written under pressure reads as a concession no matter what it says.
The law
A court order is not an angry letter and we will not pretend otherwise. What rule 4 buys is that the answer to an unlawful topic is a narrower scope rather than a deletion everywhere, and that the reason is published rather than quietly applied.
An app store review team
Unilateral, without appeal, and the sharpest risk to this whole model. It is one of the reasons Bearing is a web app permanently rather than an application somebody else can decline to carry.
A payment processor
This is the one that actually ends companies. Processors have withdrawn service from platforms over hosted content, and losing card acceptance ends a subscription business in about a week. It is also why rule 4 is enforced rather than decorative.
So the honest version is: we can refuse a campaign, we cannot refuse a court, and if one of the three above ever forces a change, it is recorded in the ledger with which one it was. A company that names its own limits is worth believing about the ones it does hold.
All three are readable without an account, and so is this page. The charter is worth nothing if the only people who can check it are the people who already joined.