HOUSTON — Andrew Yang kicked off his third appearance at a Democratic debate with a throwback to the Oprah show: promising to give away $120,000 in campaign funds by extending a pilot program of his universal basic income plan to 10 Americans across the country by promising to give them $1,000 a month if they’d just go to his website and register for the chance to randomly win a spot in the program.

“In America today, everything revolves around the almighty dollar,” Yang said in his opening statement. “Our schools, our hospitals, our media, even our government. It’s why we don’t trust our institutions anymore. We have to get our country working for us again instead of the other way around. We have to see ourselves as the owners and shareholders of this democracy, rather than inputs into a giant machine.”

“It’s time to trust ourselves more than our politicians. That’s why I’m going to do something unprecedented tonight. My campaign will now give a freedom dividend of $1,000 a month for an entire year to 10 American families, someone watching this at home right now,” Yang said, making his pitch.

But Yang wasn’t just talking to a television audience; he was barely talking to them at all. Instead, he was, as he has been since he announced his campaign in 2017, playing for the retweets and the redditors, reinvesting in the extremely online approach that’s propelled him into both the September and October debates.

“That’s original, I’ll give you that,” South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg told Yang before his opening statement, while other candidates laughed in the background.

Buttigieg’s dismissiveness — and reporters’ raised eyebrows about campaign finance rules — didn’t register on the platforms where Yang is actually running. In the first hour of the debate, “Andrew Yang” was the fourth-most-trending phrase on Twitter, and “#YangsDebateSurprise” was the 11th-most-trending hashtag. Yang’s digital director tweeted that over 116,000 people had gone to the campaign’s website after the announcement.