Community methodology.

What we measure

• Unsolicited mention rate. How often the tool comes up when no one asked — the highest-signal proxy for daily use.
• Recommendation polarity. Whether mentions trend positive, mixed, or negative across rolling 90-day windows.
• Author authority weighting. Posts from accounts with sustained founder activity count more than first-day accounts. Vote velocity is sanity-checked against account age.
• Comparison context. Threads explicitly comparing two tools count toward both, weighted by which one the conclusion lands on.

The community sources

How the Founder Sentiment Score is calculated

1. Collect mentions across the live community sources over the snapshot window.
2. Normalize each source's signal to a 0–100 scale so a tool isn't punished for being absent from a low-volume surface.
3. Weight by source coverage — averaged equally across the live community sources; framework-only sources are excluded.
4. Apply audience-fit context — community ranks are interpreted against enterprise ranks to surface founder-vs-procurement splits.

Reddit expansion (Phase 48)

Reddit is being expanded from a single presence signal into five internal sub-signals: mention volume, subreddit breadth, recommendation rate, discussion depth, and AI-classified sentiment polarity. To preserve methodology integrity, all five roll up to the same one consensus source — Reddit still counts as one opinion, never five. Same pattern as GitHub's adoption facets.

Ingestion uses app-only Reddit OAuth (no username/password flow, no scraping, no public-endpoint workarounds). Sentiment is classified server-side with strict caps: max 45 tools per weekly run, max 20 snippets per tool, snippets under 80 characters are skipped. We store only normalized metrics and short derived summaries — raw Reddit comments are never publicly displayed. Each run logs its AI classification count and estimated cost. Until OAuth credentials are configured, the expansion is disabled and the existing seeded Reddit signal continues unchanged.

Guardrails

Framework-only community sources (Hacker News, X founder sentiment) do not affect Founder Sentiment Scores, winners, FutureFounder Score™, awards or report rankings until their ingestion is live. Until then the score is derived from the seeded Reddit signal alone — and category community winners are shown as "Signal coming online" when no seeded community source has ranked the category.

See how consensus works for the overall scoring contract, and /sources for the live state of every source.