How the Index is calculated

The Doom / Boom index is one number, from 0 to 100, that says where AI news sits today. 0 means everything is going wrong. 100 means everything is going right. 50 means the day is even. Right now it reads 49, which we call Split down the middle, built from 362 stories published in the last 24 hours and 144 published reactions to them.

1. Every story gets a content score. When a story is summarized, the model also rates the event itself on the same 0 to 100 scale: harm, layoffs, lawsuits and safety failures sit low; funding, adoption and capability jumps sit high; policy and procedure sit in the middle.
2. Reactions pull the score. Every published reaction is sorted into a camp. Accelerate pushes toward 100, Alarm and Displaced toward 0, Middle holds at 50. Top-20 watchlist voices count double and viral posts count one and a half times. This reaction score is blended in as reactions arrive, up to 70% of the story's displayed number by 20 reactions.
3. The Index is a weighted average. Each story published in the last 24 hours contributes its displayed score, weighted by 1 plus the natural log of 1 plus its reaction count. A story with 20 reactions weighs about four times a story with none, and no single thread can run away with the day.
4. Movers are the pull. For each story we take how far it sits from 50 times its weight. The four largest are the “Moved it today” row.
5. One point a day. The live number updates on every pipeline run. At 23:59 UTC the day is frozen into the history you see above.

Camp share of today's reactions: 47% alarm, 34% middle, 15% accelerate, 3% displaced. The watchlist is the curated set of accounts whose takes are always pulled, regardless of reach.