Rankiwiki
Public voting pages for ranking anything
I am building Rankiwiki as a public voting site for rankings where there is no single official answer.
The hardest product problem right now is not creating more pages. It is making early, low-activity ranking pages feel honest enough that visitors understand what is still thin, where the useful choices are, and why adding a vote or suggestion would improve the page.
For now I am focusing on a few basics:
- fewer, stronger ranking pages instead of endless empty topics
- clear choice submission and voting flows
- related rankings so people can keep exploring
- improving public pages before pushing more generated topics live
The project is here for context: https://rankiwiki.com/
If you have built a UGC, directory, review, or community product, I would be interested in what made strangers trust a page enough to contribute before network effects existed.
4 Comments
Quick public-surface check on Rankiwiki: the site is reachable over HTTPS and robots.txt is a real file, but the main response I checked did not show HSTS, CSP/frame protection, X-Content-Type-Options, Referrer-Policy, or Permissions-Policy, and /.well-known/security.txt returns 404.
For a UGC voting/ranking site where strangers need to trust thin early pages enough to contribute, I would add those browser trust headers and a public security/contact policy alongside the product-level trust signals you are already thinking about.
for UGC effect to kick in, first you have to do two things :
1. Add a unique value to the ranking system
2. Modify the design and structure of the platform to increase engagement, improve accessibility and built authenticity and trust.
3. Set up guardrails for wrong information input by users.
Currently, the site is all about multiple ranked lists of non-related topics. For any individual topic, the items are ranked based on user voting. This method has been the convention for years. Instead of just voting you can set different ranking parameters for different type of categories. For example, for movies and media, you can put parameters like : unwatchable, skip, time pass, worth your time, recommend and must watch. A logic for these parameters would define the rank of a media.
This way you separate your ranking from other ranking databases and build authenticity. This uniqueness can help you with sponsors down the line. Some businesses would love to know " how many people chose the 'recommend' or 'bad service' parameter for rating their apps in your database".
Improve design, add chat features to increase engagement and make the search feature very detailed and intuitive. These are in-product methods to increase UGC. Once product is doing good job in sustaining good UGC, then comes outside strategies to increase UGC.
What vision do you have for this ? Do you want it to be just a 'top 10 or top 20 for everything ' OR do you want it to be a ranked database for everything
Thanks, that distinction is useful. The vision is closer to a ranked database than a generic top-10 list, but I want to earn that gradually: start with a few page types where votes and choices have clear meaning, add category-specific criteria where they help, and keep guardrails/review so thin or noisy pages are labeled honestly instead of looking authoritative too early.
I'd be careful with one thing.
The interesting question may not be how to make early ranking pages feel trustworthy.
It may be what users need to believe before contributing at all.
Those sound similar, but they can lead to very different decisions about what gets improved first.
I wouldn't make that call casually from the current signals.