Makey or Takey?

The internet rewards two kinds of people: those who build things and those who extract value from things other people built. The Morty Awards exist to make the distinction visible.

"Makey or Takey?" is the only question that matters. Makeys are the creators, engineers, scientists, and educators who produce real value. Linus Torvalds built Linux and Git. Margaret Hamilton wrote the code that landed humans on the moon. These are people whose work you use every day whether you know it or not. Takeys are the grifters, the vaporware merchants, the people who announce partnerships that do not exist and demo products that were never built. They extract capital, attention, and trust, and leave nothing behind.

The platform profiles both. Each Makey gets a narrative covering their contributions, impact metrics (reach, innovation, community, consistency), and the projects that define their legacy. Each Takey gets an incident timeline, pattern analysis (Demo-Driven Development, Partnership Fabrication, Credential Inflation), damage metrics (financial, reputational, community, deception), and published responses from journalists and investigators. The profiles are sourced, the ratings are structured, and the community votes on who belongs where.

Finals happen in December. Top 16 per category earn nominations. The rankings are decided by the crowd, not the platform.

The content pipeline is the bottleneck. Every Makey profile needs sourced contributions, verified project histories, and measured impact metrics. Every Takey profile needs documented incidents, pattern analysis, and published responses. This is not a wiki anyone can edit. It is editorially controlled content with a specific voice and evidentiary standard. Scaling that without a writing team is slow.

The voting system raises its own questions. Is "Makey or Takey" a binary that captures reality, or does it flatten nuance? Some people build genuinely useful things and also engage in extractive behavior. The platform currently treats the two categories as separate lists, but a version where any person can be voted either way (and the ratio becomes the signal) might be more honest. That redesign is significant.

Rate limiting at 10 votes per day via browser fingerprinting and IP tracking is adequate for low traffic but trivially circumvented at scale. If the platform grows, the anti-gaming infrastructure needs to grow with it. Upstash Redis handles the current load, but the trust model assumes good-faith participation.