How ranking works

Every competition week runs Monday 00:00 to Sunday 23:59 UTC. A launch competes in the week it goes live, and it stays in that week's archive permanently.

When a week closes, the ranking freezes. Upvotes shown on a launch page keep moving after that — the badge does not. A #1 finish in week 27 still reads #1 forever.

We never order the leaderboard by raw upvote count. A raw count is trivially cheap to buy, and a platform that ranks on one is a platform where the best-funded launch always wins.

Instead each launch carries a composite score. Upvotes are the largest input, but they're weighted — a vote from a verified account with a year of participation history counts differently from a vote cast by an account created eleven minutes ago.

The inputs are public even though the weighting isn't:

• Unique verified voters, rather than total votes
• Account age and participation history
• Vote velocity and whether it looks organic
• Clusters of accounts that consistently vote together
• Substantive discussion, which counts; one-word comments, which don't
• Device and network signals shared across supposedly separate accounts

Publishing exact weights turns ranking into an optimisation problem, and the people best resourced to solve it are exactly the ones we're trying to keep out.

We'd rather tell you honestly what the inputs are and accept that you can't verify the arithmetic, than publish a number that gets gamed within a month.

Editors can feature a launch. Featuring moves it to the top of the Featured filter and nowhere else — it does not touch the score, the leaderboard, or any category ranking. Nobody can pay for it.

Report it. Vote manipulation reports go to a human, not a queue that auto-closes. If we discount votes on a launch we tell the founder which votes and why.