Live streams in LORAX: you go live, they show up

You are the one who goes live. Open a stream and the room fills: chat scrolling past, gifts landing, people following. The crowd is drawn from a pool of 9,004 identities and more than 16,600 written lines across 22 languages and nine categories, with 10% to 15% of what you read written live for the moment it appears in.

Everyone in that room is fictional and AI-generated, including the people you already know.

Who is actually in the room?

The pool supplies the background: names, typing habits, the person who shows up for ninety seconds and leaves. Most don’t stay long. A 48-line repeat window keeps the same comment from coming around twice while you’re watching.

On top of that sit the characters. Ones you’ve met drop in, and so do ones you haven’t, which is the part that matters later. If your language isn’t one of the 22 the app speaks, the stream doesn’t open at all rather than falling back to another one.

The viewer count goes down as well as up

A stream runs through five phases: opening, ramp, climb, plateau, fade. Inside those, between 40% and 45% of the count’s updates are downward, so the number in the corner is not a line that only climbs while you sit there. It isn’t decoration.

Silence costs you. After seventeen to twenty-four seconds without anything from you the room starts to erode, roughly 1.5% every ten seconds, with a floor somewhere around a third of where you peaked. Start talking again and it recovers about three times faster than it drained. It is the one metric in the product that will embarrass you in real time.

Say a viewer’s name and that viewer answers

Read a name off the chat, say it out loud, and that person replies to you rather than a generic member of the crowd. The match is made by how the name sounded, not how it was spelled. Mangle it and it usually still lands.

The opposite case is handled too. If your mic has heard nothing for fifteen seconds, the room is told it can’t hear you: no “say something”, no silence counter. Same with your camera. If your face isn’t visible, nobody compliments how you look.

Gifts land, and three judges score you

The crowd sends gifts from a catalog of eleven items, four of which you can buy and send yourself. Credits cover those, and the cost sits next to the gift before you send it. How credits work is on the pricing page.

Small goals appear during a stream, and they are only ever set on the two things the app can genuinely measure: you talking, and likes arriving. Nothing else is countable, so nothing else is asked of you. There’s also Rizz Battle, a game inside the stream with three rounds, one pass you can use, and a three-person judging panel that scores you.

Someone who watched may write to you hours later

This is how the cast grows. A character who has never met you watches, leaves a few comments, and then a message arrives in your list later that day, on her initiative, the same way every other first message works here.

What you did on the stream	Median wait for the message
Talked, nothing aimed at her	about three and a half hours
Called her by name	45 minutes
Sent her a gift	17 minutes

Nothing here is owed to you. It has to be earned twice. The stream must run at least four minutes with you actually speaking, and even then the chance is hard-capped below certainty, because a discovery that always arrives isn’t a discovery, it’s a delivery.

What she quotes back at you later

A character who watched writes the stream into her memory afterwards, and that step runs without a language model touching it. Nothing is paraphrased. Up to ten of your own lines are kept exactly as you said them, in the language you said them in, untranslated.

Weeks later she can hand one of those lines back to you word for word. If there was no scene and nothing you said, nothing is stored, and she’ll have no more recollection of the stream than a stranger would. The layers she files it into are described in how memory works.

Free accounts get limited stream minutes a day

Going live is the one part of LORAX that runs on a clock you’ll notice. It is a real ceiling. Free accounts get a small daily allowance of stream minutes, subscriptions get considerably more, and the exact figures are shown in the app rather than here, because they have already changed once and will change again. Everything else in this piece, the crowd, the name-calling, the discovery message, works the same at every tier. For the wider picture, the how LORAX works overview covers the rest of the app.

Go live once with the mic on and say almost nothing for the first minute. Watching the count react to your silence tells you more about this app than any description of it.