The Overlay Ranking

Hitchhikers Field Guide specified the map's ranking terms in a table and left them unimplemented. A ranking rule that lives only in a table is a rule nobody can break a test on, so here it is mechanical.

Metres, not points

Every term is expressed as an effective distance rather than a score. A curated pin with real narration is worth −350 m. A pin from someone you have met is worth −400 m. Your own trail is worth −600 m.

This is deliberate. A score invites a leaderboard; a distance in metres cannot become one, because every term has to answer how many metres is this worth? out loud. "Maya was here" is worth walking four hundred metres for — that is a sentence a designer can argue with, which "+0.3 trust weight" is not.

The cut is on true distance

No band ever moves a pin into the viewport. The hard radius applies to real metres, before any bonus, so the Greenwich invariant holds no matter how beloved a place is. A peer pin can outrank a nearer floor pin — the band has to do something or it is decoration — but it is bounded: four hundred metres of goodwill does not beat seven hundred metres of walking.

This is not Yelp

The spec says so in its first section, and the property makes it mechanical: a pin's rank for you never depends on how many other people have witnessed it.

A hundred strangers pile onto the same pub, and the map you see does not change by a single position. There is no aggregate, no trending, no popularity term — not because it was left out of this version, but because there is a test that fails if one appears.

See Audience Is Granted Not Computed for the same instinct one layer up, and Phase 0 Acceptance for its companion check.

Memorial and plaque clutter is filtered out, the cap of twelve applies after ranking rather than before, and origin changes the marker ring — teal for yours, gold for a peer — and nothing else about the pin.