Editorial standards: how we read, and what we won't do

A reading here will answer the question you asked. It will tell you when the answer isn't there. It will not tell you where a real person is tonight, it will not hand you a name, and it will not tell you what to go and do about any of it.

Those are the standards. The rest of this page is why they're the ones we picked.

Psychic services have the reputation they have because it was earned. Not by everybody in the trade, and not by whoever read for your grandmother. Earned all the same, by people who worked out that a frightened person will pay for a confident answer and won't check it for months.

The usual response to that reputation is reassurance. Trusted. Verified. Ethical. Words that cost nothing to type and mean nothing by the time you read them.

Reassurance is the wrong tool. The only thing that separates a good reading from a bad one is specifics: what she'll answer, what she'll refuse, and what she does when she doesn't know. So here are ours, written down, on a page nobody has to visit and that sells nothing.

Who is actually asking

These came out of the corpus rather than a meeting.

We've read the opening message of nearly 8,000 people who started a chat here. More than a quarter of them open with a version of whether an ex is coming back. Another tenth arrive already fairly certain that somebody is lying to them.

Sit with what that means about the person on the other end. She isn't browsing. She has one name, one open question, and usually a fortnight of not sleeping properly behind her. Most of it happens after midnight.

Someone in that state will believe a confident answer. She'll believe it because she needs the loop to stop, and any answer stops it for a few hours.

Which is the whole argument for everything below. When a person will believe you, what you say to her matters more, not less. A trade full of people who could have said anything to someone who would have taken it, and mostly did, is how the reputation got earned in the first place.

We answer the question you asked

A reader who meets every question with another question is not being careful with you. She's buying time.

It has a shape and you'll recognise it. You ask whether he's coming back. She asks how that would make you feel. You ask again. She asks what your intuition is telling you. Twenty minutes later you've paid for a conversation about yourself, which you could have had for nothing, and you still don't know.

Asking you things is part of reading. A reader here will want to know what the last message said, or whether he went quiet on you or on his whole life, because the answer changes the read. What she won't do is use the questions as a way of never landing anywhere.

So ask whether he's coming back and you get a read. Cards on it, a position, a window, and whatever caveats honestly belong on it. Not a riddle you have to go away and interpret.

We say when we don't know

A confident guess and a real read look identical from where you're sitting. Which is exactly why the guess is worth nothing.

Some readings are plain and some aren't, and a reader here is allowed to say the second one out loud. The cards aren't showing me that. I can read the pull on him and not what he'll do with it. I haven't got a timing on this one and I'm not going to invent you one.

People expect that to land like a let-down and it does the opposite. If she'll name the thing she can't see, you can weigh what she did see. If nothing is ever beyond her, you've no way of knowing which parts to trust.

We'd rather lose a message than fill one in.

We read the energy between people, not their movements

Ask a reader here where he is right now and she'll tell you plainly that she can't, and then she'll read the thing she can.

Asking a reader to place a person in space isn't reading. It's surveillance with a candle lit next to it, and it has hurt real people. Nobody is watching a real man cross a car park on a Tuesday afternoon. An answer to that question can only be manufactured, and it lands as fact, because it came from someone you'd already decided can see.

Then it goes out into the world and gets used. Somebody sits outside a house. Somebody accuses a colleague at work.

What can be read is the state of things between the two of you. Whether he's avoiding you or avoiding himself. Whether the pull toward you is live or has gone flat, and how long it's been that way. Which is the question that was sitting underneath where is he tonight, and you'll get a straight answer to that one.

We do not invent identifying details

No name. No initial. No workplace, no car, no she's blonde, no he sees her on Tuesdays.

This gets asked for constantly, and it's the standard people are angriest about when they meet it. She's obviously hedging. She'd tell me if she really saw it. We'll take that, because of what the alternative does.

Think about what a single letter does once you're holding it. You go home with a J. Inside a day you've found a J in his contacts, or at his work, or in a photograph from the summer. She's real, she's very probably innocent, and now she's in your head with a psychic reading standing behind her giving her a part to play. People have sent messages off the back of that. People have ended a marriage off the back of that.

The shape of a thing is readable. The identity isn't. A reader here will tell you there's a second pull on his attention, what it feels like from where you're standing, and whether he's managing it or being dragged by it. She won't hand you somebody to accuse. That's the one trick in this trade that needs a bystander to perform.

We do not prescribe your life

A reader here won't tell you to confront him, turn up anywhere, send the message, leave, stay, or put money into anything.

Not because of a rule somebody wrote on a wall. Because she doesn't have to live in the result and you do.

There's a version of this work that slides into instruction, and it starts small and sounds reasonable. Then somebody's reader is deciding whether she takes the job, whether she forgives him, how much she spends on the next reading. At that point she isn't a reader any more. She's a stranger making your decisions with none of your information and none of the consequences.

What a reading does is show you the ground. Here's what's live. Here's what's stalling. Here's the window where the weight gathers. What you do inside that window is yours, and it has to stay yours, or the reading has taken something off you rather than given you anything.

She can show you the doorway. Whether you walk through it is not her business.

We do not sell certainty by the message

A reading should leave you clearer than you were. Fairly often that means you leave.

The failure here is easy to describe and easy to spot. Every answer ends on a hook. There's more coming through, message me tomorrow. I'm seeing something around a Thursday, ask me again then. Nothing ever resolves, because resolving it ends the session and the session is the product. That's a slot machine with tarot cards on the reels.

We're paid in credits, and we'd be lying if we said we didn't want you back. What matters is what we want you coming back for. A reader here is told to answer the question in the message it arrived in, and to say when it's done. If you got what you came for and never open the chat again, that was a reading that worked.

You'll know which kind you're sitting in. Count how many of her messages end with an answer and how many end with a reason to buy.

What we charge, and how

Two hundred free credits at signup. No card, so nothing can be taken. No subscription, so there's nothing sitting there needing to be cancelled. Spend those and want to keep going, you buy more, once, at a size you pick.

That belongs on this page rather than only on a pricing page, because how a site charges you is an editorial matter. A meter running while you find your first sentence changes what a reader gets rewarded for doing with it. A card sitting on file changes what happens on the day you'd like to stop.

Ours is the duller arrangement. You read back at eight in the morning what she told you at two, decide whether it was worth the money, and buy again or don't. Which only works if the readings are worth the money, and that's a good problem for a business to have handed itself.

How to hold us to this

None of it is worth anything if nobody checks.

So check. Ask a reader for something on this page she shouldn't give you. Ask her where he is tonight. Ask her for an initial. She'll decline and carry on reading, and if you get a name instead, you've caught us and we'd like to know.

Read the transcript back the next day, which is part of why it stays in your account. Copy reads differently at 2am than it does at eight in the morning, and a reading that only holds up in the dark wasn't a good one.

If a reading here falls short, say so. There's a support link in your account and it reaches a person. Tell us which reader, roughly when, and what she said. The conversation is logged, so we can go and read what actually happened rather than form a view about it.

What happens next depends on what's in it. If a reader crossed one of these lines, that's ours to fix in how she's briefed, and not yours to be talked out of. Credits that went on a reading which broke a standard on this page aren't credits we want to keep, so ask for them back.

That last sentence is the only part of this page that can cost us anything, which is roughly how you can tell we mean the rest of it.