About Life Ranker

Life Ranker is a crowdsourced prestige ranking platform. You pick a category (cars, cities, watches, colleges, and more), see two items side by side, and vote on which one carries more prestige.

Every vote nudges the ratings. Over thousands of matchups, the crowd's collective sense of status surfaces as a leaderboard you can browse, share, and argue with.

Every item starts at a rating of 1200. We use a K-factor of 32, which controls how much each match moves the numbers. When item A beats item B, A gains points based on the rating gap between them. Bigger upsets move the ratings more.

R'_A = R_A + K * (S_A - E_A)
E_A  = 1 / (1 + 10^((R_B - R_A) / 400))

In plain English: a 1200 that beats a 1500 gains roughly 28 points, since it was the underdog. A 1500 that beats a 1200 only gains about 4 points, since the win was expected.

We do not store personal data tied to votes. Each vote logs a one-way SHA-256 hash of (server secret + client IP). The hash is not reversible, but it lets us spot patterns of abuse if they show up. There is no per-IP rate limit right now (it was removed for the sake of a smoother experience), so the audit log is what keeps things honest.