ok! I looked into it more. how it works for all jams is that entries with less than the median number of ratings get a small penalty applied to their score, mostly because it's hard to get an accurate rating if there are less votes to aggregate. the way ludum dare does it (which i like) is that you don't even see your score/qualify for ranking unless you get a certain number of votes (20), but there's not a way that i can see to implement that on itchio unfortunately.