The dead-link problem: why every pixel wall rots (and how kissing fixes it)

A wall of links is a wall of things that will eventually stop existing. The question is what the wall does about it.

Every pixel wall rots because it sells permanent space to websites that are not permanent. Sites die, domains lapse, nobody prunes, and after a few years a good share of the wall links to nothing. Square Town (square.pov.town) is a $1-a-square favicon wall that treats rot as a game mechanic instead of a fact of life: icons nobody kisses for 90 days fade to grayscale, any square can be evicted for double its price, and sites without a working favicon are put in a public Hall of Clowns.

TL;DR — The Million Dollar Homepage, sold out in 2005, has roughly 40 % dead links as of August 2026. Almost every clone has the same problem and does nothing about it; a few expire pixels on a timer instead. Square Town doesn't delete anything. Unkissed icons fade (still owned), evictions let anyone recycle a spot for 2× its price, and broken favicons are surfaced as clowns until they're fixed. The wall stays legible without a moderator.

Roughly 40 % of the original pixel wall now points nowhere#

The Million Dollar Homepage sold a million pixels at $1 each in 10×10 blocks and sold out in five months in 2005 for $1.04M. It has been frozen ever since. As of August 2026 it's a sold-out archive where roughly 40 % of the links are dead — the buyers' sites folded, moved, or let their domains lapse, and the wall has no way to notice.

That's not a knock on the original; it was a one-off stunt and it finished. But it is what happens to every wall that sells "forever" and then stops touching the data. Twenty-one years is long enough for most small websites to die at least once. Full autopsy: the Million Dollar Homepage 21 years later.

Why walls rot: sites die and nobody prunes#

Three things happen to a link on a wall, in this order:

1. The site changes. It moves to a new domain, gets acquired, redirects to a parking page. The link still resolves, so it looks fine, but it isn't what the buyer paid to show.
2. The site dies. DNS goes, TLS expires, the host returns 404 or nothing. The block on the wall is now a picture of a company that no longer exists.
3. Nobody prunes. The wall operator has no incentive to remove a paid block (the money's already in), no signal that it's dead (nobody's checking), and often no operator at all any more. In our August 2026 survey of 434 pixel walls and logo boards, 160 are dead outright — the wall itself is the dead link.

Uploaded images make it worse. A pixel block is a static PNG the buyer sent in once. It can't go stale on its own, so it keeps advertising a dead thing with perfect confidence. A favicon, by contrast, is fetched live from the site; when the site goes, the icon goes with it. That's one of the reasons favicons beat pixels.

What other walls do about it: mostly nothing, occasionally a timer#

Source for the competitor rows: our pixel wall graveyard survey, August 2026. The pattern is clear enough. Timers and rentals fix rot by making nothing permanent. Doing nothing keeps "forever" but lets the wall die from the inside. Square Town tries to keep the one-time price and still have a pruning mechanism — three of them, in fact.

Answer one: unkissed icons fade to grayscale (they are not deleted)#

Every icon on Square Town has a last-kissed timestamp. Anyone — owner, stranger, rival — can click any icon and press 💋. It's free, public, and counted (there's a "Kiss of the World" leaderboard). If nobody kisses an icon for 90 days, it fades to grayscale with a small 💔 and its card says "Unkissed for 90 days — it's fading. Be kind."

That is the entire penalty (the whole rulebook is on how it works). The square is still owned. The link still works. The deed is still valid. One kiss — from anyone — restores full colour instantly. Nothing is deleted and nobody has to appeal to a moderator.

Why this works against rot: a site that people still visit tends to get kissed, because its owner cares, its users find it, or a passer-by clicks 💋 out of respect (or pity). A site nobody's touched in three months goes grey, which is exactly the visual signal a wall of links needs: this one may be stale. Grey icons don't drag the wall down the way dead PNGs do; they read as dormant, which is honest. The full mechanics are in kiss the icon: decay explained and the glossary entry.

The tuning is deliberate. 90 days is long enough that a working site with a handful of fans never fades by accident, and short enough that a wall full of abandoned domains would grey out within a season.

Answer two: evictions recycle valuable spots#

The second mechanism is money. Any square on Square Town can be taken by paying double what its current owner paid. A $1 square costs $2 to evict; the next evictor pays $4; then $8. The evicted site is announced in the live feed ("💀 x evicted y for $2") and disappears from the wall; the evictor gets the exact cell.

For rot, this means the desirable spots can't stay dead. If a square next to the Throne is owned by a site that folded in 2027, and it's greyed out for want of a kiss, someone will pay $2 for it. The wall prunes itself where pruning matters most: the centre, which everybody sees first. Cheap, unloved corners may sit grey for a long time, which is fine — nobody's looking there anyway, and $2 buys them back the moment someone does. See the economics of eviction for how the doubling plays out.

Evictions also mean "forever" on Square Town is honest: it's forever*, unless someone pays double. That asterisk is the price of a wall that doesn't rot.

Answer three: the Hall of Clowns surfaces broken favicons#

The third mechanism catches the sites that never had it together. When a square is bought, Square Town asks Google's favicon service for the domain's icon. If the service answers 404 — no favicon at all — the square shows a 🤡 instead of an icon and the domain is listed in the public Hall of Clowns in the side panel. There's a public recheck ("I fixed my favicon"), and escaping the Hall is announced in the feed too.

The same detector runs on every recheck, and rechecks are public (POST /api/recheck/:id, no key, no throttle — it's in the API docs). So a domain that loses its icon later — because the site went away and the favicon service eventually stopped returning one — can be flipped to a clown by anyone who bothers to ask. A clown is a visible flag on the wall that something's wrong with that site. Nothing is removed. The owner can fix the favicon and recheck; a rival can pay double and take the spot; or it can sit there in a red nose, which is a kind of public service. More on the mechanism at What is the Hall of Clowns?.

What this doesn't fix#

Honesty section. Square Town's mechanics don't check whether your page is alive. A domain that redirects to a parking page but still serves a favicon looks healthy on the wall until nobody kisses it. A dead site with an enthusiastic ex-founder who kisses it every 89 days stays in colour indefinitely (that's allowed; kissing is a signal that someone cares, and someone does). And Square Town's own clicks go through /go/:id, a plain 302 redirect — no link equity, no crawler magic, so a dead link on Square Town is only a dead link, not an SEO problem for anyone.

What the three mechanisms buy is a wall that converges on being alive: dead things fade, valuable dead things get bought out, and broken things get labelled, all without an operator pressing delete. That's the difference between a monument and a place — and it's the reason Square Town launched with three pruning rules instead of a moderator.

FAQ#

How many of the Million Dollar Homepage's links are dead?#

Roughly 40 % as of August 2026, per our landscape survey of 434 pixel walls. It sold out in 2005 and has been a frozen archive since; the wall has no mechanism to notice a dead link.

Does Square Town delete squares whose sites have died?#

No. Nothing is deleted. Icons not kissed for 90 days fade to grayscale (still owned, still linked); anyone can evict any square by paying double what it last sold for; and domains without a working favicon show a clown until fixed.

What does kissing an icon actually do?#

It resets the icon's 90-day timer and increments its kiss count. Anyone can kiss any icon for free by clicking it and pressing 💋. A single kiss restores a faded icon to full colour.

Can I keep my own square alive by kissing it myself?#

Yes. Kissing your own icon once every 90 days keeps it in colour indefinitely. Kisses are public and counted, so a self-kissed square is visibly a square someone still cares about.

Do other pixel walls expire pixels?#

Some do. As of August 2026, 9Mpixels (now dead) expired free pixels after 24 hours unless paid for; Pixel Spotlight rents blocks for 12 months; New Million Dollar Homepage allows edits for 5 years then locks for 20. Most walls, including the original, do nothing.

Is a grayscale icon still clickable?#

Yes. Fading is cosmetic. The link, the deed, the click and view counts all keep working; the icon just loses its colour and gets a 💔 until someone kisses it.