How the Arena works, no filler.

This is the whole mechanism. Nothing here is a simplification for marketing — the actual ranking math lives in one file in the codebase and every rule below maps to something it enforces.

1. 01

   Bid to get in. A bid sets your baseline position on the board and in the feed. It does not buy a permanent rank.

2. 02

   The crowd votes you up or down. Every listing can be voted on, from the board or from the feed — it is one product with two windows onto it, so a vote cast anywhere moves you everywhere. Votes shift your rank away from your bid baseline, for better or worse.

3. 03

   Votes are confidence-weighted, not just counted. A Certified (signed-in) vote counts more than a guest vote, and suspicious voting patterns get discounted automatically — a raw vote count is never what moves you.

4. 04

   −5 sentiment steps evicts you. If the crowd turns hard enough against a card, it is pulled from the feed outright. No bid buys immunity from this.

5. 05

   Nothing erodes on its own — only the crowd moves you. Your paid baseline does not tick down over time. The only thing that takes position away from you is the crowd voting you below someone else. If that ever changes, it will be announced before it takes effect, not slipped in.

6. 06

   Refueling costs more each time. You can re-bid to reclaim position after a fall, but the price curve is escalating — camping on #1 gets more expensive, not less.

7. 07

   The threshold to move adapts to traffic. How many votes it takes to shift a rank stretches with how many people are actually watching right now, so a small raid can’t swing the board during a quiet hour and get "locked in" once traffic returns.

8. 08

   Founders do not vote. If you have a listing, you cannot vote — not on a rival, and not on your own. Founders have a direct stake in every other ranking, and the crowd signal is worthless if the people being ranked are the ones casting it.

9. 09

   One IP, one ASN, real limits. Votes are rate-limited per IP address and per network (ASN), on top of the confidence weighting above. Spinning up more connections does not multiply your voting power.

10. 10

    Every card is moderated before it’s public. Automated screening plus a review gate runs on every upload before a card ever reaches the feed. Until it clears, it does not exist to anyone but you.

11. 11

    Zero tolerance for illegal or abusive content. No adult content, no illegal goods or services, no hate speech, no harassment, no scams. Cards that violate this are pulled and are not refunded — see the Terms.

12. 12

    Comments require a Certified account, and never a link. Anonymous comments and comments containing URLs are rejected outright. This is enforced server-side, not just by a UI hint.

13. 13

    The click count you see is a verified count. Raw clicks are filtered for obvious bot and non-human traffic before they’re shown. It will always read lower than raw hits — that’s the point.

14. 14

    Every payment is public in the ledger. Every bid, refuel, and refund shows up with its amount, timestamp, and effect on rank. Nothing about how a card got where it is happens off the record.

15. 15

    Sponsored pins are placement, not rank. A pin buys one of a category’s limited 24-hour slots above the ranked list — it never enters the score formula and never decays. Every pin is clearly labelled "Sponsored" so it’s never mistaken for an earned position.

Breaking rules 10 or 11 gets a card pulled and, for repeat cases, the account or fingerprint blocked. See the Terms for the full legal version of all of this.