How ranking works
Made the Cut ranks items by 1v1 duels, not star ratings. Every duel-placed position is the result of a real head-to-head comparison — “A or B?” — and you can always overrule it by hand.
What is a duel?
A duel shows you two items from your list and asks which one you'd rather have ranked higher. You pick one (or skip if you're not sure). That single answer is recorded and used to place items relative to each other — no separate scoring step, no weighted average.
How does one duel place a whole list?
Adding a new item doesn't require comparing it to everything already ranked. Made the Cut uses binary insertion: each duel eliminates roughly half of the remaining possibilities, so placing a new item among N already-ranked items takes on the order of log₂(N) duels, not N. A list of 100 needs about 7 duels to place a new entry correctly — not 100.
What is “the Cut”?
You set a cutoff line anywhere in your ranking. Everything above it “made the cut” — everything below didn't. It's a deliberate, visible line, not an arbitrary top-N truncation.
Is this based on community votes?
There are two rankings here and they never mix. Your list is only ever your own duels — no crowd vote moves an item in it. Separately, publishing a list adds it to the community census: a crowd chart that aggregates every published ranking on a topic into one consensus order, recomputed the moment anyone publishes. A topic's chart is marked as still forming until at least 5 people have published and 10 items are ranked, and items that appear in few lists are pulled toward the middle, so one enthusiastic list can't crown a #1. The daily duel takes one pair off the top of the games chart and asks everyone the same question; those votes nudge the chart, never your list.
Why not just use star ratings?
A 4-star rating and a 5-star rating don't tell you which of two specific items you actually prefer — most things end up rated the same. A duel forces an answer between two concrete choices, which is what a ranking is supposed to be: an order, not a distribution.