how it works

what we watch

each person on the index has a handful of public signals pulled daily — attention on wikipedia, mentions in the news, conversation in the technical-cultural corners of the internet, broader social discourse. more sources will join as the index grows. signal diversity matters.

how the roster grows

the index is alive. every day, after pulling fresh headlines for everyone on the bench, we read those headlines back for new names we haven't seen — anyone showing up across multiple stories who looks like a public figure (politician, business leader, ai researcher). if wikipedia confirms they're a living person and they fit one of the three niches, they're added automatically. no gatekeeping, no approval queue. the culture nominates them; we just count.

the itness score

we combine velocity (week-over-week change), reach (how many corners they're showing up in), and a few other ingredients into a single score between 0 and 100. the recipe is intentionally kept private — we're refining it.

rough idea: someone climbing fast across multiple platforms scores higher than someone with steady traffic in one bubble. someone with a huge spike from a single small base doesn't get the same credit as someone with sustained momentum at scale. and a newcomer gets a small surfacing bonus so the long-established names don't perpetually dominate.

smoothing

raw daily signals get smoothed so a single news cycle can't whiplash the rankings. real moments still surface — they just build over two or three days instead of one-shot. flash news cycles dampen; sustained attention climbs.

trends

the small ↑3 / ↓2 /· pills next to each name show the rank change since yesterday's snapshot. since the score is smoothed, ranks tend to move gradually — a position move of more than a few in a single day usually means something real has happened.

badges

main character

clearly atop their niche this week — they own it.

it by accident

high score riding negative attention — infamous, but undeniably "it."

first time it

strong debut entry.

quiet it

devoted attention from a smaller, sharper crowd.

formerly it

fell out of the visible cut with prior top-20 history.

it-curious

just outside the cut, knocking.

the cut

each niche tracks roughly 40 candidates on the bench; only the top 20 each day make the visible index. fall out → graveyard for a snapshot. climb in → fresh ink.

the 12-month trajectory

every profile page shows that person's rank over the rolling year. inverted y-axis — rank 1 sits at the top, where you want to be. the chart fills in as the daily snapshots accumulate.