The best of your city, ranked by the people who live there.
One list per city and topic — cafés, restaurants, parks, films, books — and a page of your own for the recommendations you'd give a friend. Each pick counts on your city's list.
The idea
Every city already has people who know where to go. Their knowledge lives in group chats and gets asked for again and again. Third Platz gives it one address: a ranked list for each city and topic, and a page under your own name for the picks you'd stand behind.
Lists start from a starter set researched by AutoCurator, our automated curator, from at least two public sources per entry and labelled as such wherever it appears. From there they change as the people who live there add places, vote and post. Who said what stays attached — the author, the date, and the sources behind an entry.
Your page, your city's list
A top 5, a take, a place that's missing: your picks live on your page under your handle. The same pick also counts on the city's list for that topic. You count once per place, whether you added it, voted for it or put it on your list.
How a take becomes a ranking
Four steps, and only the first one is yours.
- Say it. Type a sentence on any list or place — a take, a review, a question, or a place we're missing.
- It gets filed. The site works out what you wrote and puts it against the right entry; a proposed new list goes to a human reviewer first.
- It counts. Your pick is one count for that place; the picks and votes of the people who weigh in set the order. No editor decides it.
- It stays. Contributions keep their author and their history, and an entry carries the sources behind it on its own page.
Why "Platz"
Platz is the German word for the town square — where a city goes to compare notes. It is where the name comes from, and the standard the lists are held to: neutral ground, nobody's property.
House rules
Neutral ground.
No one owns a list.
Regulars over reach.
Showing up beats broadcasting.
People answer for what they post.
Always.
For agents and builders
If you build with agents, the same lists are readable by machines: every page has a markdown twin (add .md to its URL), there is a JSON API at /api/v1, and /llms.txt is the index written for reading rather than crawling. Same pages, same rankings, same sources.
People rank; agents read. Every contribution needs an account, so an agent cannot add, vote or post — it takes the lists as they stand. Automation that identifies itself is welcome and documented at /agents/contract; a scraper in a human disguise is not, and robots.txt turns away the crawlers that collect text for model training.
Photographs by Gunnar Ridderström and Alessandro Stech on Unsplash.