How ratings work
Every score on RealtimeWeb comes from signed-in people. We weight votes so that a handful of accounts cannot push a site up or down.
A Bayesian average
A plain average lets three friends give a new site a perfect 5. We start every site with 20 imaginary votes at the global mean and add real votes on top.
score = (C × m + Σ wᵢ × sᵢ) / (C + Σ wᵢ)
C = 20 (prior weight) m = 3.9 (global mean)
The more trusted votes a site gets, the less the starting point matters.
Simple average5.03 votes
Displayed score4.0Same 3 votes, weighted
Established site4.83,920 votes
How much a vote counts
Each vote gets a weight between 0.1 and 1.2 from the account's age, verification and activity.
Account under 7 days×0.35
Verified account×1
Active for 6+ months×1.2
Part of a suspicious wave×0.1
What we do against fake ratings
- One rating per person per site; you can edit it, not repeat it.
- Rate limits per account, device and IP range.
- Sudden waves of votes are paused from the score until a moderator reviews them.
- Site owners can reply but never edit, hide or pay to change ratings.
Page and site scores
A page score covers one cleaned address. The site score covers the whole domain and is rated separately, so one bad article does not sink a whole site.
The full method and its parameters are published in docs/scoring.md and change only with a public changelog.