part of: the tour · chapter 7 of 12
The front page, and what makes something hot
Ranked by where evidence is moving — never by how loudly something is being said.
A wall of open questions, not a feed
The front page leads with open Questions, each shown as a card with its top branches, its unknown share, and why it is ranked where it is.
Why Every news product ships a feed of the latest. Almost none ships the set of things currently unresolved, which is the more useful object and the harder one to fake. Leading with Questions makes the front page a statement about what is not known.
Connects Every card is the same leaderboard component used on the Question page itself, so the front page cannot present a rosier summary than the page behind it.
See it live The front page · All open questions
The full index — and the “much asserted, little shown” sort
Beyond the front page, every open Question in one table: top answer and its share, the unknown residual, how many evidentiary legs it has, its heat and when it moved. Sortable by heat, by newest, by most evidence — and by most residual.
Why That last sort is the one worth knowing about. It puts at the top the Questions with the most assertion and the least discriminating evidence: precisely the stories that feel most settled in ordinary coverage and are least settled in the record.
Connects Each sort is a plain URL, so “the most unknown questions in the model” is a link you can keep.
See it live Sorted by what is least known · Sorted by most evidence
What a card tells you before you click
Branch count and source count, the top two branches with their shares, the unknown share, a heat badge naming its reasons, and when it last moved.
Why Enough to decide whether to open it, and never enough to substitute for opening it. In particular the unknown share is on the card, so a Question can never look more settled from the front page than it is.
Connects The same card appears in search results and on story pages.
See it live The front page · The Question currently leading it, in full
Latest — the change log, in brief
A slice of the most recent changes as sentences, above a count of the day by kind: 74 evidence · 164 questions · 9 inference · 66 belief · 8 housekeeping.
Why It is the answer to “has anything actually happened here”, in a form that distinguishes new evidence from routine recomputation — a distinction most activity indicators deliberately blur.
Connects Every line is the same rendering used on the full change log and in the Atom feed.
See it live The whole change log
Movers — and what it says when nothing moved
The largest belief shifts in the window. When there are none, the module says so and says why: “Stillness is a real reading: assertions may be arriving without anything to discriminate between them.”
Why A movers list that quietly disappears on a slow day teaches the reader that something is always moving. Saying “nothing moved, and here is what that means” is more informative than the list would have been.
Connects Movement is computed from belief snapshots — the same records the sparklines draw and the ?asof scrub replays.
See it live The front page
New questions, with their honest fat residuals
Recently promoted Questions, each with its unknown share — usually enormous, because nothing has been linked to them yet.
Why A new Question is at its least informative and most interesting: it is the moment the model has noticed a disagreement and not yet resolved anything. Showing the residual rather than hiding the newness is the whole point.
Connects Questions are promoted by machine when the record disagrees with itself — no editor picks them.
See it live All open questions, newest first
Much reported, little shown
A module for Questions where assertions keep arriving and the evidence has not moved. The copy is counts and nothing else — how many assertions, from how many sources, and the unknown share — with the note that no accusation is being made, and none is needed.
Why This is the site’s anti-propaganda surface, and its restraint is the design. Naming a pattern is defensible; naming a culprit is not. The numbers say the whole thing.
Connects It is only possible because heat and volume are separate quantities here — the module is precisely the gap between them.
See it live The front page · Repetition is not evidence
Fog watch — too early to know
Recent events the record has barely corroborated: event time, source count, evidentiary legs, and how long it has been known. Featured, not buried.
Why At the start of a story, thin is the honest state. Giving under-corroborated material a place on the front page — rather than waiting until it is safe to show — is how this site says “we do not know yet” as a headline.
Connects It is the two clocks made into a module: recent in event time, thin in knowledge time.
See it live The front page · Two clocks
Stories — questions that constrain each other
Groups of Questions that have to be answered together, each with its ranked possible worlds and a link to walk the leading one.
Why It is the closest thing here to a “story” in the ordinary sense, and it is deliberately not a container: the group exists because a choice in one Question restricts the others, which is a fact about the model rather than an editorial grouping.
Connects Following “walk the leading narrative” lands in the explorer with that world preselected.
See it live The front page · Stories and worlds
What “hot” actually means here
Ranking is a judgement, so it is published like every other number on the site: heat is decayed, weighted activity multiplied by how close the race is, plus how far belief actually moved, plus a bonus if the lead changed. The window is 7 days and activity halves every 36 hours.
Why Any ranking is an editorial act. The only honest version of one is a stated procedure a reader can disagree with specifically — which is why the formula is on the method page in words rather than described as “relevance”.
Connects Every term in it is a dial in configuration, not a constant in code, precisely because the weights are a policy choice and not a fact.
See it live The formula, in words
The weights are the honesty rule written as numbers
A new contradiction counts 5, a ruled-out combination 4, an inference 3, a new question 3, an answer linked 2, a corroboration 1 — and a restatement counts zero, however many arrive. Corroborations from one source are capped at 3 a day.
Why This is where “repetition is not evidence” stops being a principle and becomes arithmetic. A wire story running everywhere produces a great deal of activity and no heat at all.
Connects These numbers are read from the same configuration the ranking uses, so this paragraph cannot drift away from the behaviour it describes.
See it live The weights, on the method page · The front page
Contention — and the fog as a contender
Activity is multiplied by how close the race is, with the unknown share counted as one of the runners.
Why A Question where the leading branch is far ahead is less alive than one where two branches are level — and a Question the fog is winning is very much alive, which a naive closeness measure would miss entirely.
Connects It is the same argument as the residual bar, applied to attention instead of to belief.
See it live The front page
Movement counts, and a lead change counts more
How far belief actually shifted is added directly (weighted 10), and a Question whose leading branch changed inside the window gets a further 3.
Why These are the two events that most deserve a reader’s attention and are least detectable from the outside: the model changed its mind, or nearly did. Neither can be produced by publishing more of the same.
Connects Both are read from belief snapshots, which means they are visible in the change log too.
See it live Belief changes in the log
Reasons, never a number
Heat orders the page and then explains itself in words: 🔥 13 contradictions · 3 inferences · 4 promotions. The score itself appears nowhere on the site.
Why A visible score invites optimisation and tells the reader nothing. The reasons tell them exactly what happened, and are themselves links to the changes that caused it — the number is plumbing, the reasons are content.
Connects Each reason is a slice of the change log, so “13 contradictions” can be read as thirteen specific entries.
See it live The badges in place · The changes behind one badge
The test: a syndication storm must move nothing
The ranking is unit-tested against a synthetic flood — hundreds of restatements of one source’s claims. It scores exactly zero, at any size, and a single new contradiction outranks it.
Why The claim “repetition cannot push a story up this page” is either enforced or decorative. A test that fails when it stops being true is the only version worth printing.
Connects The same tests check that a burst of corroborations from one source stops counting at the cap, and that a wall of “no, this is unrelated” verdicts is not activity.
See it live Repetition is not evidence
The page does not reshuffle under you
Near-ties are bucketed before ordering, so two Questions with almost identical heat keep a stable order between requests.
Why A front page that reorders itself on every reload is unciteable and slightly dishonest — it implies movement where there is only noise.
Connects It is the same instinct as pagination you can link to: the page should be the same page when you come back to it.
See it live The front page
When there is no belief to rank with
If a Question has no computed distribution yet, the contention and movement terms simply do not apply, and it ranks on activity alone. Nothing is invented to fill the gap.
Why Degrading to a smaller true answer is always better than completing a bigger one with guesses — the same rule that produces “track record: not yet computed” and “narrative ranking pending”.
Connects It is why the front page worked before the belief layer existed, and why it will keep working when a new lens is added.
See it live The front page