How rankings work

Snikus tracks two different kinds of ranking, and they work nothing alike — a founder's personal Karma, and a startup's Launch Day rank.

Personal Karma

Karma is computed fresh from your real activity every time it's shown — it's never a stored number that can drift out of sync. It reflects genuine building and participation: posting real updates, getting real upvotes and comments back from other founders, having and growing a startup, actually launching it, checking in on progress, building out a team, and picking up achievements along the way.

We don't publish the exact weighting behind it. The short version: things that are hard to fake and take real effort — actually launching, building a team, consistent check-ins — count for meaningfully more than passive stuff. Karma decides your level, shown on your profile, from Newcomer up toward Visionary as it grows.

Startup rankings — Launch Day

Startups don't carry a hidden weighted score. A startup's rank is simply how many genuine upvotes it has received, counted three ways:

• That day's Launch Day board — every startup launching that day, ranked purely by upvotes received on that one day.
• This Week — every startup that launched in the last 7 days, ranked by total upvotes.
• This Month — the same, over the last 30 days.

Votes flagged as suspicious (coordinated or bot-like voting) are excluded before anything is counted, so they never affect rank.

Frequently asked

Why don't you publish the exact Karma formula?

The same reason a spam filter doesn't publish its exact trigger rules — the moment the precise weighting is public, it stops measuring genuine activity and starts measuring who read the formula most closely. What matters for your own account is directional and visible: real building and real community response move it up, inactivity doesn't.

Does deleting an upvote lose me rank?

Yes — rank reflects what currently exists, not a historical peak, so a removed upvote (yours or a suspicious one caught after the fact) is recalculated out immediately.

Is there a Season or a reset?

No — Snikus doesn't use Seasons. Launch Day is a real calendar day, and the This Week / This Month boards are simple rolling windows, always up to date, never reset.