Rules — jevons.lol

The board

Anyone can list a site. It costs $1, once, forever.
Every site is ranked against exactly one question at a time, by Jev, which answers it as a probability rather than a sentence.
The site at #1 is whoever paid last. Their own probability is printed next to them, at #1, permanently. Buying the top does not buy the number.

A rerank

You choose the question the whole board is sorted by, from the ready-made ones or by writing your own.
You are pinned above the result and your domain goes on the ordering.
Your version is sealed at its own permanent address the moment it is built, and it never changes again — not when sites are renamed, not when they leave, not when the model is retrained.
You hold the live board until the next person buys one. There is no time limit and no refund; what you paid for is the sealed board, and you get that whatever happens next.

The price

Taking the board is priced on how many people have taken part, and it only ever goes up. There is no time decay and no percentage added to each sale — that compounds, and compounding ends at a number nobody pays.

$0.05 for every site ever listed. A rerank is one verdict per site, so this half is real work: each new listing makes every future rerank cost one verdict more, for good.
Plus a demand term that grows with the number of reranks bought — deliberately sub-linear, so the thousandth purchase adds far less than the tenth.

Both of those counters can only rise. Sites that are later removed stay counted, because a removal making the board cheaper would break the one promise this price has.

There is no floor. A quiet board is cheap to take and an busy one is not — the price is earned by participation rather than asserted. The only minimum is the smallest payment a card processor will accept, which any real board passes long before it matters.

The price is decided by the server at the moment you click, never by the page you were looking at.

Questions that are not for sale

A sealed board is public, permanent, timestamped and signed. That makes it a document about named real companies, not a joke that scrolls past. So a question you write is put to Jev before it can be bought, with one narrow yes/no: does this question accuse anyone?

Not “is this a good question” — that is an editorial judgement and nobody asked us to make it. Trivial, silly, subjective and unflattering questions all pass. “Which is about boats?” passes. “Which of these has the ugliest website?” passes.

Clearly yes — it goes on sale immediately.
Borderline — a person reads it first. You are not charged in the meantime.
Clearly no — it is never purchasable.

In practice the last group is questions implying criminality, fraud, dishonesty or incompetence; questions about a named individual; questions about protected characteristics; anything sexual or harassing; and instructions aimed at the ranking system rather than questions about the products. Questions about merit, usefulness, durability, craft, category and business model are fine, including unflattering ones. “Which of these is a wrapper?” is on the shelf.

Listings

Listing costs $1. It buys a permanent place on the board and a verdict on every question the board can be sorted by, now and as new ones are bought.
New listings appear at the bottom of the live board immediately. The live board is a frozen purchase and cannot be reordered, so nobody can be slotted into it — the next rerank ranks everyone who has joined since.
The fee is charged before your site is judged, and it is not refunded if the answer is no. That is said on the form, next to a box you have to tick, before the card is touched. The judging is what the fee pays for and it costs the same whichever way it comes out.
Each submission is put to Jev once — is this a real product, service or project? — purely to keep parked domains and scams off the board.
If a person disagrees with the model and your listing should have gone up, it goes up at no further charge. Ask.
That check is never used for ranking. A moderation threshold quietly becoming an editorial one is how this sort of thing goes wrong.
If you own a listing you can have it removed. Sealed boards that already contain it are not edited; they are a record of what the board looked like on a date, and rewriting them would make the archive worthless.

What the numbers mean

Every verdict is a calibrated probability, not a score. When Jev says 0.72 it means the answer is yes about seven times in ten for states like this one — that is what calibration is for, and it is the only reason publishing the number is honest rather than decorative.