How our community voting works, and why it beats editorial curation

Nobody on our team decides which deals matter. The community does, through voting, and that produces better results than editorial curation for a specific reason.

## The incentive problem with curated deals

A site that picks its own featured deals has an obvious conflict. Affiliate commissions vary by retailer, and the temptation to promote whatever pays best rather than whatever saves most is structural rather than a matter of individual integrity.

Community voting breaks that link. The people voting have no commercial interest in the outcome. They vote up things that saved them money and vote down things that did not.

## How the ranking works

Every deal starts at zero. Members vote up or down, once each, and the score is simply the net total.

The **Hot** view ranks by score, so the deals the most people found genuinely useful sit at the top. Deals crossing our hot threshold get flagged.

The **New** view ignores score entirely and shows the most recent submissions, which matters for time-limited offers that would otherwise never accumulate votes before expiring.

The **Top this week** view weights recent posts above older ones, so a deal from three months ago with a huge score does not permanently occupy the top slot.

## What a negative score means

It usually means one of three things: the discount was calculated from an inflated RRP, the stock sold out almost immediately, or there were conditions the post did not disclose. All three are useful signals, which is why we leave downvoted deals visible rather than deleting them.

## Moderation

Submissions are reviewed before publishing. We remove referral-only links, deals with no actual discount, and anything where the poster stands to gain personally without disclosing it. We do not remove deals for being unpopular.

## Posting well

The most valuable posts include context the retailer’s page does not: what the item usually costs, whether shipping is included, stock levels, and any catch worth knowing. A deal post that saves someone from a bad purchase is as useful as one that saves them money.