A live map of the United States where you pay to claim a state and fly your flag over it. Say something loud enough that somebody pays 1.5x to say it differently.
Hey Product Hunt 👋
I built this because I wanted to see what a comment section looks like when every comment costs money.
culturewar.lol is a live map of the United States. You buy a state $5, $15 or $25 for an empty one , pick from 77 real political flags, and write whatever you want on it. Your flag flies over that state until someone pays 1.5× to take it off you. Then theirs does. No refunds, no take-backs.
The part I actually care about: nothing is ever deleted. When you get outbid your words don't disappear they stay on the wall underneath the new owner's, with what you paid and the date still attached. So the site slowly turns into an archive of what people were annoyed enough about to spend money on, week by week. Most comment sections are a river. This one is sediment.
There are no accounts and no logins. There are also no bots, for the boring reason that bots don't have credit cards.
Build notes, since this is Product Hunt: Next.js on Cloudflare Workers, D1 for the database, a Durable Object fanning live flips out over WebSockets, and MapLibre drawing pre-projected GeoJSON so there's no tile server anywhere in the request path.
You can also buy the entire country for $999,999. Nobody has. I would very much like to find out what happens when someone does.
One thing I'd genuinely like your read on: is 1.5× the right flip multiplier? Lower and the map churns constantly. Higher and states get frozen by whoever showed up first. I've gone back and forth on it more than anything else in the build.