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Submitted: —
- Automated safety screen
- Checked for duplicates, and merged if needed
- Approved, and open for votes
Cleared review. On the board with 1 vote — yours. Ideas reach production at 500.
Escrow, and why your mortgage payment changed
- What you were told
- Why that didn't help
- What's actually going on
- The number that matters
- Where this bites you
not a category
the bit you're stuck on
no “studies show”
looked this up twice
How it works
Six steps, and only two of them are ours.
Screening is automatic, ranking is automatic, and the crowd decides what matters. A person still signs off before anything gets made — that checkpoint is the whole reason you can trust what comes out the other end.
- 01
Submit
Any family-friendly question, plus a line on why you want it. Name or anonymous.
- 02
Safety review
Automated screening runs before anything becomes public. Nothing skips it.
- 03
Voting
Approved ideas go on the board. Anyone can vote. Duplicates merge and pool votes.
- 04
Editorial sign-off
A person reviews the winner before production. This one is never automated.
- 05
Production
Drawn, sourced, cut to whatever length the idea actually needs.
- 06
Explained
Published free, credited to whoever asked, and embedded back on the idea page.
The ideas
Nobody here picks the topics.
Every approved idea is public, and anyone can vote. Clear 500 votes and it goes to editorial for sign-off, then into production. We seeded the board to get it started — everything after that is yours.
Nothing here yet. Yours could be the first.
Explained
What an idea looks like once it is made.
This is the prototype — the one we made before asking anyone to vote for anything, to prove the format holds up. Scrub it, jump chapters, follow the transcript, and if a chapter doesn't land, say so and it gets recut.
and only that chapter
gets redrawn
Where they live
Every explainer is public, on the channel, forever.
Nothing here sits behind a login, and nothing sits on our servers. The moment a board is cut it goes up on YouTube — chapters, captions and sources in the description. That's how watching stays free.
We don't pay to deliver video
No storage bill, no egress bill, no player to maintain. Which is why nothing here carries a price: there's no delivery cost to recoup at the door, so there's no door.
Each explainer answers one real question
Somebody asked it and hundreds voted for it, so plenty of other people are searching it. A finished explainer is a permanent answer to a real question, and it keeps working for years after it's cut.
The loop closes on itself
The finished video is embedded back on its own idea page, credits whoever asked for it, and points viewers at the board to pick the next one. Every video is an advert for the thing that makes the next video.
| title | Escrow, and why your mortgage payment changed |
|---|---|
| length | 1:52 |
| chapters | 0:00 What you were told 0:22 Why that didn't help 0:48 What's actually going on 1:20 The number that matters 1:44 Where this bites you |
| captions | en — cut from the script, not auto-generated |
| sources | CFPB §1024.17 county assessor notice annual escrow statement |
| credit | Idea by D. Morrow · 512 votes |
| license | CC-BY 4.0 |
| supersedes | nothing — this is v1 |
The chapter list you clicked further up is the description. One object, published in two places.
House rules
Four things we won't do.
Every one of these is a thing that made an explanation worse for somebody, so it got written down. What you can put on the board is a separate list — that one's the .
Explain what we can't source
If the honest answer is “economists disagree,” the video says economists disagree, and shows you both boards. Confidence isn't a substitute for a citation.
Pad it out to ten minutes
Length follows the idea, not the ad break. The prototype runs 2:08 because that is what the idea needed. Not a second was added to reach a number.
Say “as we all know”
Along with “simply,” “obviously,” and “it's just.” Whoever's watching didn't know — that's why they're here. The style guide is public.
Quietly delete our mistakes
When we get something wrong, the board gets a visible strike and a correction card, and everyone who watched it gets told. No corrections yet. There will be.
Who pays for this
Not you. So here's the whole ledger.
Free things usually aren't, and the honest thing is to show the arithmetic rather than assert it. Three lines, smallest first, roughly what each one covers.
The channel
Ads run on YouTube, where every explainer lives. It's the floor, not the business — but it compounds, because a video that's genuinely useful keeps earning and pays for the next one years later.
Commissioned explainers
An organisation pays to get something explained in public. Disclosed on the board, on the video, in the description. They buy the making, never the wording — ask to approve a script and you get the money back.
Teams
Companies pay us to explain their own things to their own people — onboarding, policies, products, the codebase nobody documented. Private, per seat, and it subsidises everything on this page.
You cannot pay to move a request up the board, and it has never been offered. The ranking is the only thing here worth anything — the moment it can be bought, the whole library is just advertising with better handwriting.
So what should we
explain next?
Write it badly. Badly is how everyone types the thing they don't understand, and nothing here marks spelling. Anonymous is fine too.