Most feeds rank what gets clicked. We rank what carries weight — and we publish the math. Say it out loud: "Five measurable signals — how many independent newsrooms, how fast it's spreading, how many people it touches, whether power is being exercised, and how fresh it is — combine into one score. High gravity rises to the Board. Low gravity stays in the Lobby."
| Signal | Weight | Plain meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Corroboration | 25 | Independent owners carrying it. Forty sites under one parent count once — coordinated echo can't buy a row. |
| Velocity | 20 | Acceleration of coverage in the last 45 minutes. Speed of spread, not volume. |
| Consequence | 25 | How many people it touches, how directly, for how long. Rubric: 9–10 war/national crisis · 6–8 major national policy · 3–5 regional · 0–2 minor. |
| Power | 15 | Is institutional power being exercised, abused, or checked? The civic filter — the reason a tax bill outranks a red carpet. |
| Freshness | 15 | Half-life decay from the last development. Ink cools. |
| 85+ | FLASH — and only with 5+ independent owners and under two hours old. Machine-raised flashes say machine-seated until the desk confirms. |
| 70–84 | BULLETIN — the maroon row. |
| 55–69 | URGENT |
| 40–54 | DEVELOPING |
| <40 | THE LOBBY — it's news; it just isn't the front page. Honestly labeled, never hidden. |
Promotions must hold across consecutive sweeps; demotions must fall clearly below the floor; at most six re-seats per sweep beyond new arrivals. The board moves like a newsroom, not a stock ticker.
weights sum: 100 — same scale as the house
Loading the live board…
Move a slider, watch the front page change. Now you know exactly what an algorithm deciding "what matters" is — ours, and everyone else's.
| v2.0 | GRAVITY: consequence + power join the signals; the Lobby split; weights published and reader-tunable. |
| v1.0 | First published method. Corroboration counts owners, not domains. Orange reserved for FLASH. |
The desk owns the weights; changing them bumps this version, in public. See also the Tilt Meter and the board method.