THE VOTING METHOD

The community votes on items. A seller’s standing is rolled up from those votes and from nothing else. This page is the whole of how that works, including the parts that are deliberately unflattering.

A seller with no votes is not ranked as bad

• It is unranked, and we assert nothing about it. Every seller starts at exactly the same neutral prior — 0.5— and no seller’s starting point is ever adjusted by anything we know or think about them. With no votes, this site does not know whether a seller is good, so it says nothing.
• Until the shelf has run, that is every seller here. There is nothing to roll up, so the site carries no standing for anyone — and every listing page says so in its own text, with a live count, rather than hiding it behind an order that looks like a verdict. See where that stands right now →
• An unvoted ITEM is unknown, not bad. It scores 0.5, the same as every other unvoted item, which is what lets a new item enter the shelf at all. Score an unvoted item zero and nothing new can ever rank, so the shelf could never rotate.

What a vote is worth

• One vote per person per item. Not one per person per seller, and not one per click: a second vote on the same item from the same browser is the same vote, and it is told so. The cap is a unique index in the database, not a check in the app — app logic can be raced, an index cannot.
• A vote is worth less on a thinly voted item than on a busy one. An item at one up-vote and nothing else has a perfect record and tells you nothing. We rank items by the lower bound of a 95% confidence interval on the positive share (a Wilson score, z = 1.96), which places a 1-of-1 item below a 400-of-412 item automatically, with no special cases. A consequence worth stating: the FIRST vote an item receives usually moves it down, because one vote carries almost no information.
• One browser counts at most 5 times toward any one seller — however many of that seller’s items it votes on. Vote every item a seller has and only the first 5count toward their standing, so voting forty items in one seller’s favour is worth far less than forty votes spread across the shelf. The votes are all still recorded; what is capped is how far one person can move one seller. Item placement on the shelf is not capped this way — there you already get one vote per item.
• And a seller’s standing is shrunk toward the neutral prior by 50 votes’ worth of weight. At 50 votes a seller is half crowd and half prior; it takes roughly ten times that before the crowd owns most of it. This is a separate thing from the cap above and does not replace it: shrinkage damps every vote equally, so on its own it would make concentrating votes on one seller worth more, not less.
• Votes are capped per browser and per network, per rolling hour. 20 from one browser and 120 from one address. The first number is the size of the live shelf, so an honest voter cannot reach it without repeating themselves, while a script working a single seller hits it in under a minute.

How the shelf ranks

• 20 items are live at a time, for about 4 weeks each. That is a deliberate constraint, not a limitation. Spread the votes this site actually receives across every item that exists and each one gets a vote every few human lifetimes; concentrate them on 20 items and a ranking becomes possible. A shelf you can rank is worth more than a catalogue you cannot.
• Quality times freshness.An item’s place is its score multiplied by a decay on its age, set so that an item that has served its whole 4-week life is worth about 37% of its score. Without it, whatever won in week one would own the shelf forever.
• Fewer than 22 votes and an item gets no position at all. It is still on the shelf, in the place the votes so far suggest, marked with a dash where a number would go. A confident-looking 4th built on three clicks is worse than admitting we do not know yet.
• Fewer than 50 votes across a seller’s items and that SELLER gets no position either — for the same reason, one level up. Below that the roll-up is mostly the prior, so any place we printed would be the tiebreak wearing a vote’s clothing.

Why we never show vote totals

• “347 likes” makes gaming visible, measurable and rewarding. It tells anyone who wants to move an item exactly how far they have to go and exactly when they have arrived. A position does not. So the site publishes places, and the line that says what a ranking was computed from, and never a counter beside an item.
• Every ranked surface states its basis.“Ranked from 340 votes across 18 items” is a sentence about the whole ranking; “347” beside one photo is a target. The first is on every page here. The second is on none of them.
• No seller score is ever shown as a percentage or a star rating. The number exists inside the ranking and does not leave it. What you see is a place, or an honest statement that there is not one yet.

What we keep, and what we can undo

• Every vote is stored, and no vote is ever deleted. The rankings you see are derived from that log on every read — they are a cache, never the truth. If we get the rules wrong, we can re-derive everything from what actually happened instead of discovering we kept only the answer.
• A brigade discovered later is a query, not a catastrophe. Because the raw events survive, we mark the offending ones excluded and recompute. The rankings correct themselves and not one honest vote is lost. If we stored only counters, a brigade would be permanent and undetectable.
• We never store your IP address. What is stored is a salted SHA-256 of it, alongside a salted hash of a random id your browser keeps. Both exist to count one vote per person; neither can be turned back into you.
• Voting needs JavaScript; reading does not.The vote buttons are absent without it rather than present and dead. Every item’s photo, title, seller and place, and every word on every seller page, is in the HTML either way.

What breaks a tie, and what it is not

• Before votes, the order is our Reddit corpus — 237 quoted comments across 124 sellers, every one linked to its thread and dated. Sellers are listed by how much the community talked about them. That is a description of what we collected. It is not a measure of whether anyone is good, and we will not turn it into one.
• It is a tiebreak and nothing more. It decides the order of sellers who score identically, which today is all of them. It never adds to a score, and it can never push a seller above one the community actually voted for. Read the corpus itself, with its sources, at the evidence we collected.
• No placement is paid, ever. No one can pay to be number one, or to be on the shelf, or to be on this site.

Every number on this page comes from the code that runs the ranking, not from prose somebody remembered to update. All of them are first guesses at this site’s current traffic and all of them are expected to change.

Vote on the shelf → Browse all 124 sellers →