What changed, and what it cost.

What changed

Reviews survive. Any signed-in developer can still write one and anyone can read it. They now earn nothing, unlock nothing, and move nothing. The 800-character minimum, the 48-hour dispute window, the release step, the credit award, and reviewer reputation and tiers are all gone with the economy that needed them.

Credits and boosts are gone. Nothing earns credits and nothing spends them. All five boost products are retired: leaderboard, featured, newsletter, review request, and backlink. Every balance that existed was converted into placement bid dollars, once, and that conversion is the rest of this page.

Why

The review economy never reached the size the product needed. 319 reviews came from 16 accounts, against 307 submitted repos and 254 registered users. The ranking formula those reviews fed was ordering a board almost nobody had contributed to, and asking a few hundred people to write 800-character reviews to keep it fed was not going to compound.

The traffic said the review product was not the thing working anyway. Over the 30 days to 2026-08-27 the site took 1,071 sessions, 298 of them from Google. Sorted by Google entry page, the category pages (/languages, /topics, /types) pulled 67 entries. Every individual repo page combined pulled 11. Six to one.

Search finds the ranked lists, not the repos on them. A position on a ranked list is therefore the thing with value, which is the thing now being sold. It is also why the board stayed ranked instead of becoming a wall of paid rows: strip the ordering out and the category pages stop ranking, and the traffic being sold goes with them.

Traffic figures: Microsoft Clarity, 2026-07-28 to 2026-08-27. They are small on purpose to publish. A $3 floor against roughly a thousand sessions a month is a cheap slot on a small board, and saying so is the point.

How the conversion worked

25 credits became $1, spendable only as placement bid dollars. Nothing else on this site can be bought with money, so nothing else can be bought with a converted balance. It ran once and cannot be run back. $778 went to 253 accounts.

Of those, 2,870 were the founder's and were destroyed rather than converted, which is the next section. The remaining 19,450 became $778.

Why 25 to the dollar

The rate decides whether the board is contestable on day one. At 10 credits to the dollar the same balances release $1,945 and the largest single balance is $42.50, more than fourteen times the $3 entry price. One holder would have started that far above everyone arriving after them, and the ladder would have been locked before it opened. At 25 to the dollar the strongest converted balance is $17 and $18 takes it. The rate is also symmetric with the retired signup grant: 25 credits became exactly $1.

The $3 floor does not apply to a converted balance. $3 is the entry price for new money through Stripe. A bid funded from a converted balance may be any positive amount. That carve-out exists because 166 of the 253 balances are under $3, and a floor that applied to them would have handed two thirds of the userbase a number they could look at and never spend.

What the founder took: nothing

thejaycampbell held 2,870 credits, 6.7 times the largest balance anyone else held. At 25 to the dollar that was $114.80 of bid power, and it would have been the largest holding on the board before a single bid was placed.

It was zeroed, not converted. The board's headline claim is that every price on it is public. A founder quietly holding $114.80 of undisclosed bid power makes that claim false from the first minute, so the balance was destroyed instead of migrated. It is the first row of the CSV, at $0.00.