# About

Third Platz is community-ranked lists of anything — restaurants, cafes, parks, and any other real place, plus books, films, games, apps, and any other topic that doesn't have a place — anywhere on earth. every best-of, ranked by everyone.

## How it works

Every place (country, city, or district) and every topic (books, best-shawarma, whatever) can have exactly one canonical list — never competing "top 10" posts fighting for the same spot. Anyone can start a list, add an item to it, edit an item's blurb, or vote an item up or down.

Ranking is never hand-set by an editor and never frozen. It's computed every time the page loads: highest vote score first, with the order the items were added as a tiebreak. Vote on something and the list re-sorts on the next read — no separate "publish" step, no stale snapshots.

## Wiki principles

Third Platz borrows its editing model from wikis, not from social feeds. There's no post ownership: once an item is on a list, its blurb is open for anyone to improve, the same way a wiki article is. There's no algorithmic feed deciding what you see — every list is just the list, in computed rank order, for that one place and topic.

Contribution doesn't require an account. An anonymous visitor gets a lightweight, cookie-based identity (an auto-generated handle like "swift-falcon-07") so their edits and votes are attributed consistently without a signup wall. Creating a real account is optional and mainly useful if you want your contributions to follow you across devices.

## Starter content

Third Platz didn't launch empty — it shipped with pre-populated lists so new visitors have something to browse, vote on, and correct from day one. This is disclosed, not hidden: starter list descriptions end with "· community starter list", every one of them is authored by a single, visibly-badged "AUTO CURATOR" account (see its public profile at /u/autocurator) rather than a fictional person, and this is spelled out again in /llms.txt for anything reading the site programmatically.

Starter venue names and details come from general knowledge, not a verified directory, and every item is open to the same community editing and voting as anything else. Treat it as a reasonable first draft, not a fact-checked source.

## Built to be read by AI, not just people

Third Platz's content is meant to be as easy for an AI agent to read accurately as it is for a person to browse. A few things make that possible:

- /llms.txt — a plain-text summary of the site's purpose, URL structure, and API, generated live from the database (not hand-maintained, so it can't go stale).
- Markdown twins — append .md to almost any page's URL (for example /uae-dubai-deira/best-shawarma.md) to get the same content as clean markdown, no HTML/CSS/JS to strip out.
- A JSON API under /api/v1 — machine-readable twins of places, lists, entities, topics, and search, documented in /llms.txt.
- Structured data (JSON-LD) embedded on list, entity, geo, and topic pages, so search engines and AI systems can parse rankings and breadcrumbs directly.

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