Lording It.
Leaderboards, kept inside the parish boundary and reset every season. There is no national table and there will not be one. This page is the argument for why, at slightly tedious length.
Why there is no national leaderboard.
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A global board has one winner and twenty-three thousand losers.
That is not rhetoric, it is arithmetic. Put every member on one table and by definition almost everybody is in the bottom half, and a great many are in the bottom thousand.
The people at the top enjoy it enormously. Everybody else looks once, works out roughly where they stand, and never opens it again. Every scheme that has tried this has produced the same graph: a spike at launch and a floor two weeks later.
A global board is a machine for making almost everybody feel inadequate.
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The top of a national board would be bought, not earned.
Any board that counts spending is topped by whoever spends most, and this estate sells cases of lager. A national table would be a list of people with money, presented as a list of people who care, which is a lie that everybody can see through.
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A parish board is a competition you might actually win.
Six hundred and eighty-eight people in The Wolds. Fifty or sixty active. Somebody who turns up to three walks and brings seed to the swap is genuinely, visibly near the top, and they know the people they are above and below.
A competition against people you might meet is a competition. Against twenty-three thousand strangers it is a weather report.
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Resetting quarterly stops it calcifying.
Without a reset, the person who joined first is permanently unbeatable and everybody arriving in year three is playing for second. Four resets a year means anybody who starts in October is starting level.
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And a third of members want nothing to do with any of it.
Thirty-one per cent have opted out of leaderboards entirely, which is a large enough proportion that making the board unavoidable would be actively unpleasant for about seven thousand people.
Opting out hides the board and removes you from it. It does not affect anything else and nobody is asked why.
Thirty-one per cent opted out. That is not apathy, it is a preference, and it is a perfectly good one.
What a parish board actually counts.
| Counted | Weight | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Turning up to a meet | High | The behaviour worth encouraging, and the hardest one. |
| Contributing to a parish goal | High | Seed brought, wall built, trial returned. |
| Answering somebody’s question | Medium | Marked useful by the person who asked, not by a vote count. |
| Hosting a Neighbouring visit | Medium | Confirmed by both sides. |
| Spending money | Not counted | Deliberately. Spending is what Hoarding is for. |
| Posting frequently | Not counted | Volume is not contribution and rewarding it produces noise. |
The two designs, side by side.
| A national leaderboard | A parish leaderboard | |
|---|---|---|
| Number of people who can plausibly reach the top ten | ~10 | ~600 |
| Do you know the people above and below you? | ||
| Can it be topped by spending? | ||
| Resets | Rarely | Every season |
| Opt-out available | ||
| Reads as a competition | ||
| Reads as a weather report | ||
| Makes almost everybody feel worse |
The rules of a parish board.
Shape
- Scope
- One parishNever aggregated upward. There is no code path that would allow it.
- Reset
- Every seasonFour a year, on the equinoxes and solstices, which amuses nobody but us.
- Visible to
- Members of that parish
- Opt-out
- One tap31% have taken it.
- Effect of opting out
- You disappear from itNothing else changes, and nobody asks why.
What it is not
- A tier mechanism
- NoPosition affects nothing you can buy or access.
- A spending table
- NoMoney is not a counted input.
- Permanent
- NoSeasonal reset, always.
- Aggregated nationally
- NoThis is the whole point of the page.
The people at the top of a national leaderboard love it. That is roughly ten people, and the other twenty-three thousand only look once. Lording It, the design note
The goals instead.
Collective, tied to the farming calendar, and with no bottom of the table.
