How ranking works

TopTake ranks projects by a single score called Momentum. More support means more Momentum, and more Momentum means a higher position. Here is exactly what feeds it.

What builds Momentum

Votes: Free votes from anyone. This is the largest single contributor for most projects on the board.
Boosts: Paid support. Boosts add Momentum, but on a curve — see below.
Referrals: People who arrived through a project's share link and then supported it.
Recent activity: Distinct supporters in the last 24 hours. This rewards being alive right now rather than having been popular once.

Money helps. Money does not decide.

Boosts do not convert linearly into Momentum. Each additional euro is worth less than the one before it, so a boost of €500 is worth roughly twenty times a boost of €1 — not five hundred times. The effect is that a project with a large budget cannot simply buy the top position away from a project with a large following.

Disclosure: Boosts are paid support and they do influence a project's position in the ranking. Momentum is calculated from votes, paid boosts, referrals and recent activity, with paid boosts subject to diminishing returns as described above.

Every week starts over

The board resets each Monday at 00:00 UTC and ends on Sunday at 23:59 UTC. Nothing carries over except a project's history of wins and finishes, and last week's finishing order — which decides nothing except the order the new board opens in, before the first vote of the week is cast.

A week in which a project scores nothing gives it no position at all, and a week in which nobody votes has no champion. Placing means somebody turned up.

Who stays on the board

The board is a weekly competition, not a directory. It is kept to around thirty projects, because a contest you have to scroll through for five minutes is not a contest.

A project submitted by the person who made it is never removed automatically. It stays until they ask us to take it down — or, if they chose that option themselves when submitting, after four weeks with no votes and no boosts. That choice is off unless it is switched on.

Some projects were put on the board by TopTake, to fill it before people began submitting their own. Those are held to a stricter standard than anybody else's: after three completed weeks with no votes at all, or — once the board is above its target size — three completed weeks without reaching the top ten, they come off to make room for projects somebody chose to enter.

Coming off the board is not deletion. The project page stays, every past result stays in the Hall of Fame, and a single vote puts it back.

How a project gets here

Most projects on this board were not chosen by a person. An agent reads what people publish about the things they have built, applies the rules below, and proposes at most one project a day. Nobody picks favourites: the rules decide, and these are the rules — the same text the agent is given, published here word for word.

What a project must meet

1
It is a digital project somebody built — an app, a site, a tool, a game, a library, a service. Not an article, a blog post, a newsletter, a course, a job board, a directory of other people's work, or a page whose purpose is to sell advertising.
2
The page loads and shows a real, working product. Not a waitlist, not a landing page for something that does not exist yet, not a repository that has been empty or untouched for over a year.
3
It says what it does in plain language, clearly enough that a one-line description can be written from the page itself without guessing.
4
It is somebody's own work. Not bulk-generated content, not a scraped or republished copy of another project, not a thin wrapper presenting somebody else's product as its own. A name on the page is welcome and is not required.
5
A week of votes could plausibly change its position. Household-name products from large companies are excluded — not for being bad, but because a contest they cannot lose is not a contest.
6
No adult content, no gambling, no cryptocurrency token or coin offering, nothing whose main purpose is to harass, deceive, or sell access to somebody else's data.

What a human can still do

Every proposed project waits for a person before it appears. That person can refuse it, and only on grounds anybody could check by looking: it is broken, it is already on the board, it is unsafe, it is not a project, or the entry describes it wrongly. Not because they did not like it.

That distinction is the whole point. A refusal on any other ground would make “the rules decide” untrue, so the grounds are a fixed list rather than a free comment.

You do not have to wait to be found

Anyone can submit their own project, and a project somebody submits themselves is never removed automatically. The agent exists because the board started empty — not to replace people arriving on their own.

Nobody gets to write about your project

There are no comments on TopTake, and there will not be. A project here can be voted for, boosted, and beaten. It cannot be reviewed by a stranger who has never opened it.

That is a decision taken for the people who submit, not a feature we have not got round to. Anonymous opinion about somebody's work, published under our name and indexed for years, costs the person who built it far more than it is ever worth to whoever reads it.

Disagreement still has a voice here, and it is the one that counts: vote for something else. A ranking whose only currency is support says everything a comment thread says — and nobody has to defend their work from a stranger for you to hear it.

The same rule binds us. The one-line reaction the board gives back after a vote is aimed at the person who clicked, never at the project, its team, its technology or its country. If we will not allow ourselves to do it, we are certainly not handing the microphone to somebody passing through.