Tier List
Sort anything from S down to D.
Free to use · No sign-up needed
Put everything in order, roughly
A ranked list of twenty things is a fight nobody wins. Is the fourth best film really better than the fifth? A tier list gives up on that question on purpose. You are not sorting things into positions, you are sorting them into buckets, and inside a bucket nothing is better than anything else. That one concession is why a group can actually finish one.
Type your items, press Add items, and they land in the unranked area at the bottom. Then walk each one up to where it belongs. The board updates as you go and nothing needs saving.
How to use it
- Type your items into the box, one per line, and press Add items.
- Rename the tiers to whatever you are actually measuring. S and D are only a suggestion.
- Press the up arrow on an item to promote it, the down arrow to demote it.
- Add or remove tiers until the number of buckets matches the number of real distinctions you have.
- Press Copy share link and send the board to whoever is going to disagree with it.
Good uses
- Films, albums, games: the arguments these were invented for.
- Snacks for an office order, where the middle tiers matter more than the top one.
- Features on a roadmap, when a full priority order is more precision than anyone has.
- Holiday destinations, so a group can rule things out before it argues about dates.
- Anything a team keeps re-litigating: agree the tiers first, then the placements.
Getting the tiers right
The usual mistake is too many tiers. Five is plenty and three is often better: yes, maybe, no. If you find yourself unable to say why something is in B rather than C, the honest fix is to delete one of them rather than to keep staring. Remove a tier here and everything in it goes back to unranked, so you re-place it deliberately instead of inheriting a position you never chose.
When a tier fills up
A top tier with nine things in it is not a top tier, it is a list of things you like. When that happens, either rename it to something broader and honest, or add a tier above it and make yourself promote only one or two. The point of the exercise is the things you decline to promote.
Questions people ask
- Why buttons instead of dragging?
- Because dragging only works for some people. A drag needs a pointer, a steady hand and a screen big enough to aim at, which rules out a keyboard, a screen reader and most phones held one-handed. Every item here carries an up and a down button, so the whole tool works by Tab and Space, and works with a thumb.
- What do S, A, B, C and D mean?
- Nothing, until you say so. They are the labels the internet settled on and S came from Japanese arcade grading, where it sits above A. Rename any of them: Would Recommend, Fine, Never Again works exactly as well.
- What is the unranked area for?
- Everything starts there, and anything you are not ready to judge can stay there. It sits one step below the bottom tier, so pressing up on an unranked item moves it into your lowest tier and pressing down on a bottom-tier item drops it back out.
- How many items and tiers can I have?
- Sixty items and eight tiers. Past sixty you are not ranking any more, you are filing, and the tiers stop meaning anything; past eight tiers the gap between neighbours gets too small to defend. Both caps also keep the share link short enough to paste into a chat.
- Does my list get sent anywhere?
- No. Everything happens in your browser and nothing reaches our servers. Copy share link packs the whole board into the link itself, so only the people you send it to can read it.
- Can two people compare their tier lists?
- That is the best use of it. Send the same items round with everything unranked, let each person sort them and send their link back, then open the links side by side. The rows that match are the boring ones. The argument is in the rows that do not.