I'd like to widen my horizons, possibly see things from additional PoVs, and maybe learn a thing or three about how humans tick.

For starters, ask yourself these two simple questions: • What is a Leaderboard? • What is on a Leaderboard?

Don't try to overthink these, just answer with what you think is the correct thing. We can always go deeper afterwards, but for now this should suffice.

~HDK

I don’t know why I found this so hard to answer lol.

To me, an LB is a place to historically track runs of a game over time. It’s also (obviously) a place to compete with others to post the fastest time.

To me, what’s on a LB is anyone's run who wants it there. I know this has been the concept of debate in the past because some people treat LBs more seriously and feel that every run should be on there for accuracy. To me, I view them less “strictly” (even though accuracy is important and nice) and more about just having a place for people to submit who want to. Some people don’t want to submit for various reasons and I don’t think they should be there if they don’t want to.

That last point is where I imagine everyone sees it most differently. This is also way too meta for my brain after a day of work OpieOP

What is a leaderboard: A database

What is on a leaderboard: Data

That's at a very basic level, but it's pretty much what I believe. I prefer leaderboards to be akin to encyclopedias that pertain to speedruns of that game. All the existing times are tracked, all the resources hopefully in one place.

me: a thing that helps catalog runs against one another also me: i gots to know who got wr cuz muh wr culture

To me, a LB is a list of recorded data in descending or ascending order according to a certain criteria. Game pages are another thing, you've got discussion, resources, extra information and so on, but I see a LB as being a part of that, rather than the encompassing term.

A leader board is the place to know the ranking of x people about x thing. Here, it's like an all time top since you can come whenever you want to be in. There are also "race" leader board but you cannot interact with these once the race is over

And yeah, on the leader board, you can see who's first, last and in-between about x thing.

There can be other stuff added, but this is the base of a leader board.

• What is a Leaderboard?

A "place" with different rankings and categories. Sometimes more. If we consider the fact that forums are also a thing (like it is here : every leaderboard has a forum), then i guess you could consider each leaderboard as a small community, where each runner is a "member" of it.

• What is on a Leaderboard?

Kinda depends if it's a good leaderboard or not to me. A "decent" leaderboard would just have rankings and categories (and everything would look nice and organized, ideally).

A "good" leaderboard would probably have more than that (guides, ressources, or atleast a link to where to find all these).

I'd kinda like to add more stuff, but at the same time i'm not sure what, for some reason it's really hard to answer these questions...

What is a leaderboard? A competitive ranking table.

What is on a leaderboard? Participants.

I guess I feel a bit differently but I hope this is not wrong ^_^

I feel a leader board is a place for the community or just random people to come together and show off there runs and have fun

And what is on the leader board is peoples personal bests, guides, and people helping each other out.

What is a leaderboard? A unique page for a game. Where you can keep track of new findings, new ideas in how quick you can actually beat the game. More a source of info about running it. And who did a run. In my opinion it's more a source of information about speedrunning a specific game.

What is on a leaderboard? Information about the game on speedrun level. Rules. Who actually did it in what time.

It feels more to me then just 'a board with runners'.

@MelonSlice You are not different, it's just that the question is what is a leaderboard, and not what is a -good- leaderboard on speedrun.com. Drhelix said the same thing as you mostly.

But most of us are just thinking about leaderboard in general, since speed run.com isnt the only place with leaderboard in the world