Mode Labs Papers · 015
Completed
A mission asked 3,280 people to thank one person and report back with the name. A third thanked a friend. Mothers were thanked more than fathers, five to three. Seventy-eight thanked someone who is gone.
- This is
- Paper 015 · A finding
- Part of
- The Game · Act I, Transmission 002
- Status
- Filed · v1 · 31 Aug 2026
- Source
3,294
COMMENTS
31 Oct 2025
DATES
In plain words
On 31 October 2025, the second transmission of the Game gave a mission with two steps. Send a message or a thought to one person you are grateful for; if they are gone, write what you would tell them. Then come back and comment Completed with the receiver's name.
3,280 people came back. 3,141 of their comments follow the form, which is the highest compliance in the record for a rule with a word in it. Read for who was thanked, the list is friends first by a wide margin, then partners, mothers, siblings, fathers. 121 people thanked themselves. 78 thanked someone who has died.
This paper is a count of gratitude, taken from people who were asked to act on it before they reported it.
The question we asked
Asked to thank one person, and to actually do it first, who does a crowd choose? The mission put an action before the comment, which is rare in the record. Most posts ask for a comment; this one asked for a message to someone else and treated the comment as the receipt.
What we did
- Instruction: Send a message or a thought to one person you are grateful for. Then return and comment Completed, then the receiver.
- Where: one Instagram reel, 31 October 2025. 3,294 top-level comments in the archive, 3,291 with text, from 3,280 people.
- In form: the comment contains the word completed. 3,141 did.
- Receiver: each in-form comment was placed in the first matching bucket from a fixed list, in this order: someone who is gone (passed, died, left too soon, miss them); myself, only when the comment says myself or names me as the receiver; mother; father; grandparent; sister or brother; partner; friend; teacher or mentor; pet; god; the Game. Comments naming a person by first name only, with no relation given, are counted as named but unclassified.
- Not read: the messages people say they sent. Only the receipt is on the post.
What happened
| Receiver | Completions | Share |
|---|---|---|
| A friend | 1,052 | 33.5% |
| A person named without a relation | 666 | 21.2% |
| A partner | 299 | 9.5% |
| Mother | 288 | 9.2% |
| Sister or brother | 242 | 7.7% |
| Father | 172 | 5.5% |
| Myself | 121 | 3.9% |
What it means
The finding
Asked to thank one person, a young online crowd thanks a friend first, a partner or a mother next, and a father about half as often as a mother. One in twenty-five thanks the dead. One in twenty-six thanks themselves.
Friends at a third is the number that describes the audience. This is a crowd for whom the closest person is a peer, not a parent or a partner, which fits an audience the check-in later placed mostly in South Asia and Europe. The 666 comments that name a person without saying who they are almost certainly lean the same way.
Mothers over fathers, five to three, is the finding a reader can carry out of the paper. It is not a small gap and it is not noise; the intervals are well apart. The record does not say why. It says that when 3,141 people were asked for one person, the mother was chosen 288 times and the father 172, and that both were chosen less than a friend.
The two small buckets are the ones that make the post more than a survey. Seventy-eight people used the mission to write to someone who has died, which the caption invited and which a comment section does not usually hold. And 121 people, offered anyone in the world to thank, chose themselves, and the third most liked comment on the post is one of them.
What this does not show
- We cannot see the message. The mission had two steps and the count sees only the receipt. Whether the message was sent is unknown.
- One in five is unclassified. 666 completions name someone with no relation given. If those are mostly friends, the friend share is nearer half.
- Buckets are one-per-comment by priority. A comment thanking a mother who has died counts as someone who is gone, not as mother. That moves a few completions out of the family rows.
- Keyword matching in several languages was partial. Indian-English kin terms were included; other languages were not.
What we would run next
The same mission with one extra word in the receipt: the relation. Completed, then who they are to you. That closes the unclassified fifth and makes the mother-father gap a clean number.
The whole round
The transmission this paper reads is one post. Its numbers on the platform, and what the comment archive holds of it, are below.
| Post | Date | Views | Reach | Comments | Archived |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Transmission 002 | 2025-10-31 | 98,700 | 69,669 | 6,415 | 5,398 |
Views, reach and comments are the platform's figures from the Instagram API, snapshot 2026-08-31, and keep growing. The reach total adds each post's reach and overlaps between posts, so it is not a count of distinct people. Archived is the number of comments the archive holds for the post; ingestion is selective, so a gap between the two columns is expected and is stated wherever it changes a count in the paper.
In the record
The transmission is filed in the Chronicle as THE COMPLETED, ⟡013, the second transmission after THE FLASH WARNING, ⟡011.
The posts, as issued
The instruction as it went out: the reel frame beside the caption, captured from the operation's own signed-in account. What the paper counts is the answer to exactly this.
The receipts
Native captures of the comments this paper leans on, taken from the operation's own signed-in account on 31 Aug 2026. Handles and like counts are as they stood that day; the numbers in the paper are the round-time count.
Method note
- Source of truth: the comment archive, top-level comments on the post, counted on 31 August 2026. No round ledger exists for Act I.
- Counting rules: as described in the method; the script is in the repository beside the paper data.
Sources, by link
- 01Transmission 002 · 2025-10-31 · https://www.instagram.com/reel/DQfJd0JEyeF/
Where the numbers come from
- Post-level counts
- Views, reach, comments, likes, shares and saves per post come from the Instagram Graph API (Meta), read with the operation's own access token for its own business account. Each paper states the date of the snapshot it uses. These are the platform's counts of events, not of people: one person can view a reel twice and comment ten times, and the counts keep growing after a round closes.
- Comment text
- The comment archive is the operation's own database of public comments on its own posts, pulled through the Instagram Graph API comments endpoint and stored with the comment id, username, text, like count, timestamp and whether it is a reply. Ingestion is selective: the most engaged posts were backfilled and recent posts are pulled daily, so some posts are held whole and others only in part. Every paper states how much of each post the archive holds. Every count that reads text (exact matches, categories, keyword themes) is run as a read-only script against this archive, and the scripts are in the repository beside the paper data.
- The round ledger
- For Act II rounds, the counts filed on The Game's round record at the time each round closed. Where a paper uses a ledger figure it says so, and where the archive re-count differs from the ledger both numbers are shown.
- Receipts
- Every comment and post shown as evidence is a native capture from the operation's own signed-in Instagram session, taken by opening the exact permalink, with the source URL, a description, the rights basis and a file hash recorded in a manifest that is checked on every build of the site. Nothing shown is recreated, retyped or edited beyond cropping to the post header and the comment.
- Statistics