Square Town (square.pov.town) has had one aggressive verb since launch: evict — pay double what a square's owner paid, $1 minimum, and their cell becomes yours. As of today there's a second one. Bulldoze 🚜 costs exactly the same, but you place nothing: no URL, no email, no name. The target is evicted, nobody moves in, and the empty lot goes straight back on the market at $0 — where anyone, including the site you just flattened, can claim it for free.
TL;DR — Bulldozing = eviction minus the moving in. Same 2× price, same $1 floor, same notice to the victim; but the payer is anonymous, the square ends up empty, and the price ladder resets to zero with it. Click any favicon: the option sits under the evict button. Or
POST /api/bulldoze— the API docs have the two-line request.
Why we built a button that buys nothing
Watching the feed since launch, a pattern kept showing up: people don't always evict because they want the square. They evict because they want that domain off that spot — off the cell beside the Throne's aura, off the corner of the launch 16×16, off the square next to theirs. The replacement favicon was an afterthought; some evictors parked a side project there just to have something to paste.
That's a different want, and it deserved its own price tag — which turns out to be the same price tag. Removing someone is worth what removing someone is worth, whether or not your icon takes the spot. So bulldozing costs precisely what an eviction costs: double what the owner paid, $1 minimum. No discount for nihilism, no surcharge either.
The three properties that make it a different game
It's anonymous. An eviction is signed — your favicon sits where theirs was, and the feed names you. A bulldoze reads "🚜 Somebody paid $4 to bulldoze example.com. Nobody moved in — the lot is free again." No square of yours enters the doubling ladder, nothing points back at you, nothing to retaliate against. (Stripe knows who paid, because that's how cards work. The town doesn't.)
It resets the ladder. Eviction prices only ever climb: free → $1 → $2 → $4. Bulldozing is the one move that goes the other way — the emptied lot is a free claim, so a square that had doubled its way to $16 drops back to $0 the moment the dust settles. You're paying for the eviction, not the land. Whether vaporising a rival's expensive ladder position is worth 2× their price is between you and your accountant.
It's repeatable. The bulldozed owner can reclaim their exact cell for free — their eviction email links straight to it. And then they can be bulldozed again, for $1, forever, because they claimed free. We are aware this is a stable orbit. We priced it as one: a dollar per demolition, announced in public, with the victim's return always free. The house takes $1 a round and the feed takes the entertainment.
What it looks like from each side
For the bulldozer: click the favicon, press "…or just bulldoze it", pay. There is no form — the modal has nothing to ask you. Stripe returns you to the wall with a toast confirming that you were never here.
For the bulldozed: your favicon vanishes in front of every open browser, and if you asked to be mailed, you get the one email Square Town ever sends — now with the sentence "They didn't move in — they just wanted you gone" and a $0 link back to your old lot. Your deed page survives, stamped EVICTED, kisses intact.
For everyone else: a 🚜 line in the feed, an empty cell where a favicon was, and the small communal question of who paid four dollars to make a square be nothing. That question is the product.
The rules, precisely
| Rule | Value |
|---|---|
| Price | 2× what the current owner paid, $1 minimum — identical to eviction |
| What you submit | the target. That's it. No URL, no email |
| What you get | an absence |
| What they get | evicted status, the notice email (if opted in), a free path back |
| The lot afterwards | empty, claimable by anyone at $0; the price ladder resets |
| Anonymity | total, town-side: feed, mail and API all say "somebody" |
| Reservation | the block is held for 30 minutes during checkout, so evictors and bulldozers can't collide |
| The Throne | bulldozable like anything else, at 2× the holder's price — the crown reverts to its $100 intro |
The full playbook — when to evict, when to bulldoze, what your competitor experiences — is on evict your competitor. The short version is on the glossary page, the prices are on pricing, and the two-field request is in the API docs.
Somebody's favicon is on a square right now. It doesn't have to be. 🚜