Rankings
What gets ranked
Every listed app carries a position within its category, shown on its Explore listing as #3 in Finance or #22 in AI & Machine Learning. There is one ranking per category, not a single global leaderboard, so a good tool in a small category is not buried by a large one in an unrelated field.
Ranking is automatic. It cannot be bought, and Cladior does not hand-place apps.
How position is calculated
Two rules, in order:
- Net votes, highest first. Net votes are upvotes minus downvotes from users.
- Earliest published wins ties. Two apps on the same score keep the order they earned, and the older one holds the higher position.
That is the whole calculation. There is no hidden weighting, no recency decay, and no editorial adjustment.
Why the tiebreak runs that way
If ties broke toward the newer app, an established app could be displaced by a newcomer that merely matched its score rather than beating it. It would also make position briefly winnable by re-registering. Sorting the older app first makes a rank something you keep until someone genuinely overtakes it.
Why votes, and not usage or revenue
Usage looks like the fairer signal and is not. The developer whose rank it decides is also the one able to generate traffic against their own API, so ranking by requests or kilobytes would reward whoever was most willing to call themselves.
Votes are harder to manufacture:
- One vote per user, per app. Enforced in the database, not just the interface.
- Voting requires Trust Point standing. An account with no standing in the ecosystem cannot vote at all, so a pile of fresh sockpuppets does not move a ranking.
The signal costs something to produce, which is what makes it worth ranking on.
When a rank is shown
An app must reach +1 net votes before any position is displayed. Below that it appears in Explore normally, with no rank badge.
The floor exists because "#1" in a category with one entrant would read as an endorsement Cladior never made. A rank should mean users chose the app over alternatives, not that nobody else had registered yet.
Changing category
Category is editable, but it is deliberately not free. Moving an app into a thinner category to inherit a better position is the obvious way to game this, and it costs nothing to do repeatedly if unrestricted. See the dashboard for the current Trust Point cost and cooldown.
Moving category resets nothing about your votes. They travel with the app; only the pool you are compared against changes.
Related: App of the Day
The daily featured slot uses the same vote data but selects differently. It is a rotation among apps that clear a higher bar (net score of 3 or more), not a ranking, so being #1 in your category does not reserve the slot and not being #1 does not exclude you. See App of the Day for that selection process in full.
What this means in practice
- Ship something people want and ask users to vote. That is the only input.
- A downvote is worth exactly one upvote against you, so a real complaint costs a real position.
- Positions move when votes move. There is no schedule and no refresh delay.