Every day you get four words to say how you are. Not four sentences. Four words. That constraint is the entire product, and everything else in the app exists to protect it.
Most social apps ask an impossible question — "what's on your mind?" — with an unlimited box underneath it. An unlimited box is an invitation to perform. You draft, you reconsider, you make it funnier, and what comes out is a version of your day rather than your day.
Four words is too short to perform in. There is no room for a joke that isn't already true, and no room to hedge. What you get instead is the thing underneath: tired but still here. She said yes finally. Rain again all week. Nobody writes those to impress anybody.
It is also short enough to actually do. The reason most journals die in February is that they ask for a paragraph on a night you have nothing. Four words you can manage on the worst day of your life, and the entries from those days turn out to be the ones worth having later.
There is no bio. Your profile is your last several four-word days — who you are is what you've actually been going through, not a sentence you wrote once about yourself and never updated.
There are no follower counts. Nobody can see how many people follow you, including you. The graph is useful; the public number is a scoreboard, and a scoreboard changes what people write.
There is no infinite feed. Everyone gets four words a day, so a day's reading is finite by construction. You reach the end and there is nothing more, which is a feature that has quietly disappeared from the internet.
There are no likes and no reaction buttons. If you want to acknowledge somebody's day, you reply, or you send them four words directly — which costs you something, and therefore means something.
Most days carry an optional word game. One day every word has to start with S; another day the first and last word share a letter; another day one of your four has to be the word "again". There are 25 of them and they rotate on a fixed schedule, so everybody in the world is playing the same one on the same day.
Playing is never required — ignore it and nothing happens. Play it and you earn a wild word: a fifth word, tomorrow, that doesn't have to obey anything. The rules exist because a constraint on top of a constraint turns a status update into a small puzzle, and a small puzzle is a reason to come back on a day when you don't especially feel like talking about yourself.
You can reply to anybody's day. To go further — to actually connect — you send four words, and they decide whether to accept. That's the whole mechanism. It's deliberately asymmetric: anyone can knock, and it costs four words to knock, and nothing else reaches you until you say yes.
Everything you write is kept for you, searchable, and downloadable as a file at any time. After a few months there's a wall: a year on one screen, one square per day, coloured by the words you used rather than by how often you showed up — so a quiet month looks different, not worse.
This is the part that compounds. Four words is nothing on Tuesday and something else entirely when you scroll back eighteen months and find the week you'd half forgotten.
Nothing. There are no ads, and your words are not sold, licensed for advertising, or used to train models — that's written into the privacy policy, not just into a blog post.
say your four words →FOUR is a small independent project, not a company with a growth team.