It's very disturbing that a dollar auction on absolutely nothing isn't even the most unethical tactic I've seen … this week.

We are transparent about the fact that there is no tangible benefit to bidding.

If only the winner pays, it's just a silly game. But when the losers also pay, it becomes a genuinely abusive exploit of human irrationality which most people are not aware of. Please take it down.

http://www.mediate.com/articles/noll1.cfm

http://www.heretical.com/pound/dollarl.html

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/body/mind-over-money.html

Except none of those are good analogies to what's going on here, where people aren't actually bidding on something of monetary value. I find it hard to buy your argument that this is in any way unethical.

The losers are winners until another winner comes along.

Lots of huge businesses are based on irrationality. Cigarettes, gambling, etc. A fool and their money are easily parted.

And those businesses are accordingly regulated by society. But good luck trying to foster that winner-takes-all free-market world of yours. I'm sure it'll be a real blast.

To those of you who are just dying to type your credit card information into a website right now, I'd like to suggest http://www.kiva.org instead.

pfft... Kiva doesn't tell me I'm rich! For only a buck and a quarter, I can get my name on the site!

Similar to the "I am rich." app released on the app store so long ago. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Rich was art. I'm not sure if I think your site is imitation or art as well.

I remember that as the best news story when the app store launched.

All these negative comments are a good thing. You've made something that polarizes people. I'd take that any day over something that makes people say "meh".

If I understand it, it's a pretty horrible idea. For a lot of reasons. But, the most obvious, is how easy it'll be for you to game it. When someone makes a bid, you can simply outbid them but not actually pay any money.

I see your concern, but we haven't done this yet - we have no reason to. There is no actual reward for being the "richest", we could care less as to who claims the title.

If we ever auto-outbid people, they would find out right away, and wouldn't return to the site.

  we could care less as to who claims the title

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auction#Chandelier_bidding

Also, how would people find out? You just need to "be smart" about it. Don't always use the same username, change how long you wait.

Anonymous submissions are allowed... so it could be you hit the nail on the head and they are doing this right now (and simply publicly denying for obvious reasons).

Oh gawd, please remove yourself from the Internet. You're disqualified.

Ok, I'll try!

The real richest on the web is you from this. Reminds me of Million Dollar Homepage. Great idea :)

First thing that came to my mind. Really gimmicky idea that could see the creator make a pretty penny if it catches on.

Exactly. I mean I'm not bidding on it. But I wasn't one of the people who helped milliondollarhomepage.com reach its goal and then some either :) I'm just calling it like it is, a really good idea worth trying :)

First of all, congrats for polarizing crowds. :)

This can be a good way to increase your Twitter account visibility and hope to gain some followers through this site.

Right now, the bids are low but if this idea sustainable or not needs to be seen. You can hope to make it big if businesses find it a good way to advertise and promote products and product launches.

Some time ago I registered 100EuroTweets which I guess was kind of a similar idea: you would be able to send messages to that account by paying 100€. Presumably people would follow the account to see who would be crazy enough to pay, and in turn the tweets would actually get some exposure for their money.

I never got round to implementing it, because I wanted it to be fully automated (checking a bank account), which is slightly complicated in Germany.

Anyway, it was just a silly idea in the spirit of the Million Dollar Page, for fun - just like yours, I guess. I actually like your variant better, I wouldn't be surprised if it turns out to be quite successful.

You're asking people to enter their credit card details on a non-SSL page?

Care to elaborate on how this works? I couldn't find any about page (and the site's down now).

From what I could gather, this looked like "person-who-just-spent-their-fortune on the web". :)

If the money went to charity, this could actually have some potential.

Why did the price go up when vowelnoun and netspencer were retweeted? https://twitter.com/richestontheweb

Very similar to http://www.thebigballer.com/

On Firefox 7.0.1 on Windows 7, the bid overlay automatically comes up and blocks the leaderboard with no way of dimissing it. Works on Chrome 15.0.874.120, though ;)

We used Twitter Bootstrap for the overlay, with the understanding that it may be unreliable. I'll look into a fix as soon as I can.

If people have been paying in 1 cent increments, that site already made 80$ - not too shabby for a Hackathon project :-) (126*127/2 was my calculation).

The "RichestOnTheWeb" would then always be the hosting one as they always get the sum of all bids.

Of course who actually cares to bid?

I love the idea :) some of the comments from 'haterz' kind of make sense, let richest person leave a message

The background is funky in the top 20 pixels or so. Also, this is a really unattractive idea.

Rename it to 'richestFOOLontheweb'!

I don't mean to be critical, but your idea doesn't have any real point. It isn't selling a service or a product, which is a requirement of a startup company, especially in technology sectors. So I'm not saying it has no point, but what do you intend to do with the website? Where is it going?

I didn't make this site, but this is something whipped up for a hackathon, not a real attempt at a company.

You should rename it to dumbestontheweb

Maybe you should make it the newest bidder can leave a message?

Yup, thats coming soon! We will show the newest bidder's most recent tweet.

I think it's a fun idea. I do think there should be a FAQ or About page or something.