Reading the Trends Tracker

The Trends Tracker is the dashboard most readers ask about first and the one that needs the most explanation. Unlike a buying guide, it does not tell readers what to purchase. Unlike a popularity contest, it does not weight every vote the same. It is a calibrated read of where attention is moving in the hobby this week, expressed plainly enough that a reader can disagree with it.

This explainer covers the categories the tracker watches, the columns on every row, and — just as importantly — the things the tracker is not trying to be. The live tracker updates each Friday at 08:00 UTC, with the previous week archived under its ISO week label.

What we're tracking

Every row on the tracker belongs to one of five categories: switches, keycaps, layouts, vendors, and brands. The split is deliberate. A switch family like Gateron Oil King moves on different signals than a layout like Alice or a vendor like Mode Designs, and collapsing them into one ranking would flatten the texture that makes the hobby legible.

Switches and keycaps cover the consumable end — the parts that turn over fastest in a builder's rotation. Layouts move slowly and tend to ride macro waves (the gradual ascent of 65% over the last three years, the long thaw of ortho). Vendors and brands move on launches, restocks, and the occasional reputational shock. Keeping them in separate categories means a row can be small inside its bracket and still appear on the tracker, instead of being drowned by whichever category happens to be loud that week.

How to read a row

Five columns, left to right.

Name. The thing being tracked, written the way the community writes it. Gateron Oil King, not "Gateron G Pro 3.0 Oil King v2." If the community has settled on a shorthand, the tracker uses it.

Category. One of the five buckets above. Tag-color matches the same taxonomy used everywhere else on the site, so a switch row looks like a switch chip and a layout row looks like a layout chip.

Direction. A glyph for up, down, or flat. The glyph is the headline; the score is the detail. A reader scanning the table on mobile should be able to read the direction column alone and walk away with a useful summary of the week.

Week score. A signed integer between -100 and 100. Positive means the row's signal strengthened against its own four-week baseline; negative means it weakened. Zero is the resting line, and the tracker rounds to whole numbers because finer precision would imply confidence the underlying signals do not support.

Sparkline. The last eight weeks of scores, drawn small. Sparklines exist to answer one question: is this week's number a continuation of a trend, or a single-week anomaly? A row at +20 with seven prior weeks all near zero is a different story than a row at +20 with a ladder underneath it.

A current example. In 2026-W19, Gateron Oil King sits at +42 with a clean ascending sparkline (the climb has been visible since W12, when it was at +12). Alice layout reads -18 with the slope still pointing down — eight weeks of softening interest after the last wave of group buys closed. MT3 profile is holding flat at +4, which is the boring-but-honest state of a profile that has settled into its catalog role. Mode Designs is up at +24 on the back of the Sonnet R2 opening, and Wuque Studio is flat at +8, neither shipping nor stalled.

The tracker reads signals; it does not predict prices. — thock editorial

What this is not

The tracker is not a buying ranking. A row at +42 is not a recommendation, and a row at -18 is not a warning. Some of the best switches in the hobby spend most of their lives near zero because they are catalog staples; some of the loudest weekly movers are flashes that fade by the next snapshot.

It is not a popularity contest either. Raw mention counts would reward whichever launch happened to coincide with a slow news week. The week score is normalized against each row's own recent baseline, so a small-but-consistent vendor can post a meaningful move without being buried by the latest headline switch.

It is not a stock chart. The hobby is not a market, prices are not part of the input, and the sparkline is not a trade signal. Reading enthusiasm signals is a different exercise than reading prices, and the tracker is built for the first.

What it is: a weekly read of where the hobby is paying attention, with enough structure to be argued with. Future weeks will add a row-level "why this moved" annotation when an editor can name the cause, and a per-category filter for readers who only want the switches view. The shape of the table will not change. Watch 2026-W20 for the first annotated rows.