The rules that keep it honest

Every meritocracy that ever failed failed the same way: the people at the top acquired enough weight to decide who joined them. These seven rules exist to make that impossible here, and they are stated in the specification rather than left to good intentions.

1. The ceiling is bounded, deliberately

Two-times weight, maximum. Enough to reward a decade of work; far too little for anybody to own an outcome. An unbounded merit weight is how a meritocracy becomes a hierarchy in about three years.

2. Merit is earned by information, never by money, invitation, or an admin's favour

A paid supporter gets zero merit weight for paying. This is a rule, not an oversight, and it is written down in exactly those words so that nobody can later present it as an obvious optimisation.

There is no invite, no appointment, and no admin discretion that grants merit.

3. Anonymity never caps the ladder

A fully pseudonymous citizen can reach the top rung and full merit weight. Merit is about work produced, not identity disclosed.

4. Merit buys attention, never authority

No merit score approves anything, publishes anything, or overrides an admin. It changes how loudly a citizen is heard in one arithmetic, and that is the entirety of what it does. Nothing is ever auto-approved at any level of trust.

This is the rule that does the most work. It means the worst case for a captured top rung is a skewed average — not a captured publishing pipeline.

5. It is legible to the person climbing

You can see your merit score, what feeds it, and what would raise it. Hidden criteria are how a ladder becomes a court.

6. Demotion is symmetric and audited

Merit falls the same way it rises, with the lapsed criterion named. Sealed past records are never rewritten.

7. Flat is the fallback, not the default

Where merit does not yet exist, weighting is flat and the record says so. The system is honest about being new rather than pretending to a precision it has not earned.