Top Shelf List is a community-curated catalog of Amazon products. Anyone can submit a link; from there, the community votes, tags, reviews, and discusses it — the same product can rise or fall in the feed based on what people actually think, not what's paid to be here. See the affiliate disclosure for how that funds the site.
Every product, review, and comment can be upvoted or downvoted. The Hot feed ranks by recent vote velocity, not lifetime total — so something suddenly getting attention surfaces even if an old favorite has more votes overall.
Upvoted contributions earn karma, and karma promotes an account up a ladder — NEW → MEMBER → TRUSTED — automatically, based on activity. Higher trust levels unlock things like weighted votes and category tag merges. MODERATOR/ADMIN are granted manually, never earned automatically.
Separately from trust, every action (submitting, reviewing, commenting, getting upvoted) earns XP toward a level shown on your profile. Hit certain milestones — 10 submissions, 25 upvotes, level 10, and more — and you earn a badge.
The small badge next to a highly active username means over 90% of that person's votes across submissions, reviews, and comments have been upvotes — a shorthand for "this account's contributions are consistently well-received."