The Weekly Leaderboard

There are two kinds of competitive learners. One kind cares about getting good. They want to know, concretely, whether they're better than they were last week. The other kind cares about showing up. They want the small, daily satisfaction of putting in the work and seeing it recognized. Most learners are some combination of the two, in different proportions on different days.

Word Exchange Plaza's weekly points leaderboard exists for the second kind, and for the second part of every learner. It's a simple, honest ranking of effort — how many drills you ran, how many corrections you submitted, how many custom words you mastered, how many matches you played. Every Monday morning, it resets. Every week is a new chance to climb.

What Counts as Points

The leaderboard is fed by the stuff you already do in the plaza. No special action is required, and no "leaderboard mode" needs to be enabled. Every meaningful contribution earns points:

• Finishing rounds of the normal hands-free drills.
• Mastering new items (a bigger reward than just drilling one you already know).
• Submitting accepted live corrections — often one of the highest point-per-action things you can do.
• Playing 1v1 challenges, with small wins for participating and larger wins for winning.
• Custom word milestones — when your own added vocabulary crosses mastery thresholds.
• MadLibs rounds and MadLibs productions that use a lot of your vocabulary in a single run.

Not everything has the same weight. A drill round is worth a few points. A well-reviewed correction that fixes a problem other players had noticed can be worth a lot more. The point values are tuned so that spamming the easiest thing doesn't beat out thoughtful engagement — and where it does, that's a tuning bug and we want to hear about it.

Weekly Reset: Why It's Weekly

The leaderboard resets every Monday. Two reasons.

First, fairness. If the leaderboard were all-time, a player who'd been here for eight months would always sit comfortably at the top, and nobody new could compete with them. A weekly reset means the ranking is always about this week, and a new player who shows up on Tuesday can still finish the week in the top ten if they put in the work. Nobody is locked out because they arrived late.

Second, sustainability. Weekly is a natural human cadence. A daily leaderboard turns learning into a frantic treadmill and punishes anyone with a real life. A monthly leaderboard is too long to care about. A weekly leaderboard is short enough that you feel the stakes and long enough that a rough Tuesday doesn't ruin your chances. It's roughly the same cadence that fantasy sports, competitive video games, and most successful habit trackers converge on, and for the same reasons.

The Goal-Gradient Effect: Why Resets Make People Try Harder

There is a well-replicated finding in behavioral psychology called the goal-gradient effect. Originally proposed by Clark Hull in 1932 in his work on rats running mazes, and revisited memorably in 2006 by Kivetz, Urminsky, and Zheng using customer rewards programs, the effect is simple: as people get closer to the end of a goal, their effort accelerates^[1]. The Kivetz study famously showed that coffee-shop customers who were given a buy-ten-get-one-free card with two pre-stamped squares (effectively a "twelve-stamp card with two free") completed it noticeably faster than customers given the same card with no head-start, even though the actual work required was identical. The closer you feel to the line, the harder you push.

A weekly leaderboard with a fixed Monday reset turns the goal-gradient effect on every single week. By Friday, players who feel within striking distance of the next ranking band put in noticeably more effort than they did on Tuesday. By Sunday evening, the top of the board is a flurry. Then the reset hits, ranks zero out, and the gradient starts again. An all-time leaderboard does the opposite: anyone who is not already in the top ten learns, within a week or two, that the gradient is too far away to push toward, and the effort flattens permanently.

This is also why the reset is honest. We did not pick weekly because it produced the most engagement metrics. We picked weekly because it is the longest cadence at which the goal-gradient effect still pulls hard, while leaving any single bad day forgivable. Daily would extract more dopamine. Weekly extracts the right amount.

Global and Per-Language Boards

Every week you get more than one ranking. You get:

• A global leaderboard covering everyone in the plaza, all languages combined. This is the big one. Finishing in the top of the global leaderboard is a serious accomplishment because you're competing with players across all five languages.
• A per-language leaderboard for whichever language you're studying. If you're a Norwegian learner, this is your most realistic competitive ground — you're not fighting the Spanish learners for the same slots, just the other Norwegian learners.

Having both means there's always a ranking you can realistically climb. If the global board feels out of reach, the per-language board gives you a tighter, more beatable field. If the per-language board feels too easy, the global board is right there waiting.

Why It's Separate from Elo

The plaza has two competitive systems on purpose: the weekly points leaderboard and the 1v1 Elo ranking. They measure fundamentally different things.

Elo measures skill. It rewards playing well. A player who plays two matches a week and wins both will have a higher Elo than a player who plays twenty and loses half — regardless of how many total minutes each spent in the app.

The weekly leaderboard measures effort. It rewards showing up. A steady player who drills every morning, submits a few corrections, plays a few challenge matches, and finishes a custom-word run will beat a Elo prodigy who only shows up twice a week.

This is deliberate. Both kinds of progress are real. A player who is skillful but lazy and a player who is dedicated but slower are both valuable members of the plaza, and we wanted each of them to have a board they could realistically win.

What the Research Says About Streaks (And Why We Won't Use Them)

Streak mechanics — the kind that ask you to open the app every single day or lose a "streak count" — are the most-studied form of engagement loop in the consumer-app literature, and the verdict is mixed in a very specific way. Streaks reliably increase short-term daily-active-user numbers. They also reliably increase user reports of guilt, anxiety about "breaking" a streak while sick or travelling, and abandonment when a long streak is finally broken. Stanford and Cornell researchers studying language-app retention have documented this pattern repeatedly: the streak system creates a coercive habit that performs well in metrics dashboards and poorly in the lives of the people it's measuring^[2].

This is not a knock on the apps that use streaks. It is a different design philosophy. The plaza is built on the assumption that an adult learner who comes back because they want to is more valuable, over a year, than an adult learner who comes back because the app made them anxious about losing a number. We may be wrong about that. We are betting we are right, and the leaderboard is where that bet shows up most directly.

No Streaks, No Hearts, No Dark Patterns

We will never put a streak system on the leaderboard. We will never lock you out of rounds because you missed a day. We will never show you a guilt-trip notification telling you that your progress is "at risk." The leaderboard is there because it's fun to climb and satisfying to finish a week with a number you're proud of. It is not there to emotionally blackmail you into opening the app every twelve hours. We think language learning apps have lost the plot on this, and we'd rather lose the engagement metric than the trust.

If you miss a week, you miss a week. The board resets on Monday, and you can come back then. No punishment. No apology required.

What's Coming Next

The leaderboard shipped as part of the alpha and is being built in public. Near-term improvements we're working on:

• Friend leaderboards. A private board scoped to just you and the people you've added as friends. Much smaller, much more personal, much more motivating for some players.
• Historical view. See your position over the last six weeks so you can track your own trend line instead of just this week's snapshot.
• Category breakdowns. Who's grinding drills, who's submitting corrections, who's winning 1v1s. Right now those all roll up into one number; seeing them split can be revealing.

As always, if any of that is the thing that would hook you, the fastest way to get it is to come play, tell us what you want, and help us shape the next release.

Step into the plaza, play a few rounds, and check where you land on this week's board. The climb is the fun part.