A new prompt drops every day and you get a single line to answer it. 140 characters. One shot, no edits, no second attempt. You cannot grind or spam your way up this board — you get one swing a day, so make it count.
You get one vote. Not ten. One. Spend it on the line you wish you'd written.
There are no downvotes, and there never will be. Nobody gets dogpiled for a joke that didn't land. Survival here means most loved, never least hated.
At midnight the board is judged. The top lines survive. Everything below the cutline is out — the board closes, the ranks are final, and those lines carry nothing forward. No appeal, no second pass, no next time on the same line.
They don't vanish. A judged board keeps every line on it, cut ones included, because that board is the record of what happened that night — who was there, who survived, where the cut fell. What's gone is the chance: a cut line will never be voted on again, never appear on another board, and never count towards a streak. It sits there, under the cutline, as the thing that didn't make it.
How many survive scales with the board, so a busy night is genuinely hard to survive and a quiet one won't wipe out everyone who bothered to show up.
Then the board wipes clean and tomorrow's prompt goes up. Nothing carries over. Yesterday's genius starts today on zero, same as everyone else.
Any line can spawn a thread. Reply with a one-line comeback — one per thread, the same way you get one line on the board. Pick your thread and pick your shot. Comebacks get voted on too, the top few survive, and the rest go the way of everything else.
You get one vote per thread as well. Different threads are separate contests, so you can be in as many of them as you like — just once each. It's a knife fight in the footnotes, and it's how Whittle gets depth without turning into a forum.
You're ranked by survival rate, not total votes. That's deliberate. Lifetime scores ossify — the same five people would sit on top forever and nobody new could ever catch them. Here a sharp newcomer climbs fast, and a coasting veteran slides just as fast.
The ladder keeps itself winnable — it reads your last 30 nights, so a bad run fades on its own and nothing needs wiping. A season isn't a reset, then; it's a crowning window. When one closes, whoever is on top of the ladder is crowned, and that crown is permanent. Win a night, a season or a year and it's on your record forever. The board is temporary. The record isn't.
THE SHORT VERSION: post one line, spend one vote, come back tomorrow. Be funny or be forgotten.
Gallows humour. Profanity. Punching up, punching sideways, and the occasional richly-deserved punch down. Bleak observations about death, work, your family and yourself. Jokes that would earn you a quiet word from HR. If it's funny and it's yours, post it.
We are not going to remove a line for being tasteless, edgy, or for upsetting somebody. That is the entire genre. The crowd is the referee — an unfunny line isn't removed, it simply fails to survive the night, which is a far more honest punishment than a moderator.
A short list, and it isn't negotiable:
Cross that line and the content is removed and the account may be banned. There is no appeal process. This isn't a democracy, it's a bulletin board with a sysop.
Removal is a founder action, taken by hand. A removed line is pulled off the board and cannot win, place, or occupy a survivor slot. Bans are permanent unless we decide otherwise, and we usually don't.
We would rather remove one line and leave a hundred tasteless ones standing than sand the board down into something safe and unfunny. Over-moderation kills a comedy site faster than any troll manages to.
Seen something over the line? Email sysop@whittle.lol with a link or a screenshot and one line of explanation.
There's a report control on every line and every comeback — flag it and it lands in the sysop queue. Reporting the same thing twice does nothing: one report per person per line is all it records, and a second press is not a louder one. You won't be told the outcome either way, and that's deliberate — we're not going to tell one player they got another one removed.
The inbox above still works, and it's read by the same human who can delete the thing.
THE SHORT VERSION: be as dark as you like. Don't be a bigot, don't threaten people, don't post anything illegal. Everything else is fair game.
You must be 16 or older to use Whittle. This is a place where adults tell jokes that are frequently in poor taste; it isn't built for children, and we don't knowingly collect information from anyone under 16. If we learn an account belongs to someone younger, we'll remove it.
You need an account to post or vote. Accounts are created by logging in with Discord or with an email address (magic link). You're responsible for what happens under your account.
You keep ownership of the lines and comebacks you write. By posting them to Whittle you grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to store, display, reproduce and distribute that content as part of operating and promoting the service — on the site, in shareable cards, and where Whittle is discussed.
You confirm that what you post is yours to post and doesn't infringe anyone else's rights.
Note the obvious: most of what gets posted to Whittle is cut at midnight and never carries forward. Whittle is not a backup, an archive, or a safe place to keep anything you care about — there is no folder of your things here and no way to get a line back into play. Cut lines do stay visible on the board that judged them, which is a record of that night rather than a home for your writing. Assume anything you post is out of your hands the moment you post it, because that is the entire point of the product.
We may remove any content at any time, for any reason or for no reason, with or without notice. We may suspend or terminate any account at our sole discretion, permanently, with or without notice or explanation.
We are not obliged to give you a reason, to hear an appeal, or to keep a copy of anything we remove. The Community Guidelines describe how we intend to use this power; they do not limit it.
Don't: post slurs or hate targeting people for who they are; make credible threats of violence; post sexual content involving minors or anything else illegal; publish private information about people; impersonate anyone; spam, scrape or automate accounts; or attempt to break, overload or bypass the service's technical controls.
See the Community Guidelines for the plain-language version of where the line actually falls.
Whittle is provided "as is" and "as available", without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement. We don't promise the site will be available, uninterrupted or error-free, or that the game will run correctly on any given night.
We may change, suspend or discontinue any part of Whittle — or shut it down entirely — at any time, without notice and without liability to you.
To the maximum extent permitted by law, Whittle and its operator are not liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damages, or for any loss of data, content, reputation or profits arising from your use of the service.
Where liability cannot lawfully be excluded, it is limited to the greater of the amount you have paid us (at present, nothing) or USD $50.
Nothing here excludes liability that cannot legally be excluded. Some jurisdictions don't allow certain exclusions, in which case those parts don't apply to you.
We may update these terms. If a change is material we'll say so on the site. Continuing to use Whittle after a change means you accept the updated terms.
Questions, complaints and legal notices: sysop@whittle.lol.
We do not ask for your real name, phone number, location, or date of birth beyond confirming you meet the minimum age.
Two reasons for everybody: to log you in, and to run the game — drawing the board, counting votes, ranking the ladder, and keeping your record straight from one night to the next.
There's a third that applies only if you ask for it. The nightly digest is one email each morning telling you how your line did the night before — your rank, whether you survived, and whether your streak held. It is opt-in: it starts off, you turn it on yourself on your profile, and turning it off there stops it. Every digest carries an unsubscribe link that works without logging in.
We don't use your address for anything else, we don't send marketing, and we don't track whether you opened a digest or clicked anything in it — open and click tracking are switched off deliberately, partly because we don't want that data and partly because rewriting links would break the sign-in links this address exists to receive.
These are processors acting on our behalf. We do not sell your personal information and we do not share it with advertisers.
When you log in, our authentication provider stores a session token in your browser (cookies and/or local storage) so you stay logged in between visits. That's what it's for and that's all it does. We don't run advertising or cross-site tracking cookies. Clear that storage and you're logged out.
Account data is kept while your account exists.
Lines you post stay with the board they were posted to. When a board is judged, the lines below the cutline are out of the game — they don't carry forward, they can't be voted on again, and they never appear on another night. They do remain visible on that finished board, marked as cut, because that board is the record of what happened that night. Surviving and crowned lines stay too.
Email sysop@whittle.lol to request a copy of your data, or to close your account.
What closing your account does. Your logins are cut, so nobody can sign in as you again — not with the email, not through Discord. Your username is replaced with a placeholder, and the link to your Discord account is removed. What's left is not you: it's a row with no name and no way back to a person.
What it does not do, because you should hear it from us rather than find out. It does not erase the lines you already posted. They stay on the boards that judged them, under the placeholder. We can't pull them out: those boards are how everyone else's streaks and survival records are counted, and removing one person's lines would quietly rewrite other people's history. If you were ever crowned, the crown stays as well.
One more, and it's the one most policies would leave out. The email address you signed up with is held by our login provider, and cutting your logins is what stops it being used — it is not the same as scrubbing it from their records. If that matters to you, say so in the same email and we'll tell you exactly where it stands rather than guess.
Anything other people have shared or screenshotted is outside our control, as it is anywhere.
Depending on where you live you may have further rights over your data — access, correction, erasure, portability, objection. Use the same address. Where we can do the thing, we'll do it; where we can't, we'll tell you why in plain words instead of going quiet.
Whittle is for people aged 16 and over. We don't knowingly collect data from anyone younger; if we find out we have, we close that account the same way as above — logins cut, name replaced — and take out whatever else we can.
If this policy changes materially we'll say so on the site. Questions: sysop@whittle.lol.