The ranking is the votes

On a community list — which is nearly all of them — an item's position is its vote count, highest first. When two items tie, the one the list's creator placed higher stays higher. That's the whole formula. We don't weight votes by who cast them, we don't boost lists we like, and we don't put a thumb on the scale for anyone who pays us — nobody can pay us for a ranking.

You can always re-sort a list back to the order its creator chose. Whichever view you're in, the ranking you see is the one the votes produced.

One exception, and it's visible. A creator can pause voting on their own list. The votes already cast are kept — nothing is deleted — but the counts stop being shown, the order goes back to the one the creator chose, and the page says Voting paused where the vote count used to be. Turn voting back on and every vote returns exactly as it was.

Some lists are the creator's order

A curated list is ordered by whoever made it, and every page and card that shows one says Curated on it. Votes play no part — there are no vote buttons and no vote counts, because there are no votes. If you disagree with the order, you can fork the list and publish your own.

A creator can hand a curated list over to the voters at any time. When they do, it starts its community life from zero votes in public view, like any other new list — nobody's order gets a head start. It doesn't work in the other direction: a list the community has been voting on can't be turned into a curated one. Its creator can pause voting on it, which is a different thing and says so on the page.

This is why a ranked list here is never quietly the creator's order. Creator-ordered is a separate, visible thing, and it says so.

Who can vote

You need an account, and you need to confirm your email address first. One account, one vote per item — voting again removes your vote rather than adding a second one.

We have never added a vote to a list you can see

Not to a seeded list, not to a new one, not to anyone's. Every vote on a list you can see was cast by a signed-in person clicking a button.

Some of the lists here were written by us to get things started. Those are published under accounts named ListWorld Music Desk, ListWorld Film & TV Desk, and so on — so you can always see when a list came from us. They get votes the same way everything else does: from readers, or not at all.

Seeded lists go through a person first

The lists we publish ourselves don't go straight from a script to the site. Each one is researched, checked item by item against the catalogue it draws on, and read by a person before it's published.

We don't display vote counts below 10

A list with three votes doesn't show “3 votes” — it says fewer than 10 votes until it crosses that line. On browse cards and grids we leave the count off entirely rather than print a number that small. A handful of early votes says almost nothing about whether a ranking is any good, and a number that small is easy to manufacture and easy to over-read. Once a list has enough votes for the count to mean something, we show it.

The ranking itself still works normally below 10 — the items are still in vote order. It's the number we don't put on screen.

Unusual voting gets challenged, then looked at by a person

We watch for voting that doesn't look human — one account voting far faster than a person reads, or a sudden spike on a single list. When that happens, the account has to pass a “prove you're human” check before any further vote is recorded, and the incident goes into a queue that a person works through.

We won't publish the thresholds, because that's a recipe. We will say that the check happens before a vote is counted, not after.

Anything on the site can be reported

Every list and every item has a Report control. Reports go to the same queue a person works through, and a list can be hidden or removed from it. If something looks wrong to you, that's the fastest way to get a human to look at it.

What we'd tell you if it changed

If we ever start weighting votes, accepting payment for placement, or seeding votes, this page changes first and says so plainly. It's dated so you can tell when it last did.