Pioneer manipulates scores to pick winners

Another point I'd like to bring up : the home page says winners get $7000, but the offer page mentions that it's $1000 cash and $6000 worth of shitcoi...sorry, stellar lumens. Maybe there's a pattern here? Misleading marketing material that we typically expect from tone deaf big corps, does not inspire confidence in the team behind pioneer.

Another point : for some reason they see the need to display the age and country of the participant. Like, if you know anything about hackers, it's that they greatly value privacy. That's pretty much the only reason that kept me from participating when it launched and now I have zero interest even if personal details were not displayed publicly.

We've all seen what happens when you let the algorithms run free.

We've got much to fix in terms of making the game more _fun_. Point systems are best when you _understand_ the underlying mechanism. There's a tension between that and moderation. Losing should feel educational, not frustrating. We've got some ideas on how to fix this, and we're burning the midnight oil implementing them.

(BTW, we're very open to any product suggestions here! In case you're wondering what the ruckus is about: the Pioneer idea is to make an online game that rewards productive, creative behavior. Which beckons the question: how do you quantify productivity in different domains?)

Also, it could help, in theory, to be forced to provide progress reports on a project, as Pioneer encourages. Also, Pioneer got a lot things right with their UI for participants.

However, it seemed like most successful projects on Pioneer are pre-existing projects that are shimmied into the Pioneer format: Often they're projects that already have a year of work behind them with significant existing funding that are dressed up as a 1 month project. Or, often they are projects that are completely impossible to evaluate within the Pioneer model (such as a new car suspension system or something, that an online reviewer can't possibly give feedback on without an in-person meeting to observe the device) And yeah, the algorithm of the point system is completely impenetrable to the participants.

I think it would be great if someone created something like Pioneer but with a more tractable ethos, supporting projects that truly are only 1 month old since inception and involve only projects on which progress can be directly observed online by community evaluations.

From the beginning, it has been apparent that expert voting plays a significant role. I'm not sure if they're still describing the Tournament like this, but I remember an early descriptor of Pioneer as being a system to find great talent, as a way for people to get the visibility. If that's the case, it serves its goal.

I definitely have seen problems with just letting the winners be determined solely off of score. If Pioneers were simply selected by the algorithm, it wouldn't result in a good experience, since what other applicants find important about other applicants can differ than what the actual tournament organizers and experts find important.

When I participated though, I certainly had some of the same concerns the OP presents about transparency. When we stopped participating in the tournament, I reached out to the Pioneer team via email to share some of those concerns, and they were very receptive. They took the time to reply to everything I wrote, point by point, and acknowledged their shortcomings. What Daniel (the founder) posted in this thread is true- they are working hard to try and improve the system continuously.

I've gone back and forth on my feelings about Pioneer, but I have come to truly believe that they have a really excellent team that cares a lot about their mission and their participants.

Pioneer has been changing the meetings rules and game each month, but since the beginning, the advisors have always had a influential role in determining the winners. The month I Was in the winning batch, I was never in the top 10 rank, but was pushed over the edge in the final evaluation period.

My understanding is that the winners are decided by a combined factor of perceived progress, points, and weighted evaluations by past winners and advisors.

The reason for this is that not all projects can be compared equally. Someone with a funded start up who has a team of 5 should be equally compared to a single founder starting a project in a developing country.

Overall, from the winners I have seen, there do seem to be emphasis on projects that are socially oriented or geographically diverse. One goal that has been expressed multiple times by the Pioneer founders is to create a global campus. Rather than allowing campus driven knowledge and social interactions to be limited to people who have access to coastal cities or urban mega cities, Pioneer provides an opportunity for access to the same social lift, but without the limitations of location.

EDIT: Changed "Ivy League" campus to global campus.

Of course, that's why it got VC funding in the first place.

> How will you select the winners?

The final step in the tournament has our experts providing a final review on the top applications, based on leaderboard rankings. After their votes have been applied to the leaderboard, we select the top-scoring players as Pioneers. We're experimenting with the number of winners per-week, so cohorts will vary in size.

So, yes, the leaderboard is manually updated following the "experts" recommandations. It's in the FAQ.

We've played every tournament since the second tournament, so I'm in a good position to speak: There have been times in previous tournaments when we were placing top 10 and after a round of peer voting (that means, no experts voting) we went down to top 40.

Also, there were times when we got more expert votes than this time and didn't win. This time we got fewer expert votes but placed first.

Maybe it's just one example and it's not statistically significant; but I just wanna say that crowdsourced voting can make the scoreboard volatile, without any form of manipulation.

You should treat them more as marketing, and that works if you already have the time and resources to go on this marketing circuit

Doing these to get the initial seed is a waste of time

Biggest shock of coming to silicon valley for me was the industry of silicon valley. Poor programmers, idea guys with no network or money or talent (just like everywhere else), hackathons where powerpoint presentations with mockups win, event hosts making a killing, all operating in parallel to the real action which is still only accessible by your network.

https://medium.com/@benjiwheeler/how-product-hunt-really-wor...

It's all good though. I understand that they are looking for pioneering ideas (hard sciences, research projects, AI, etc.). Perhaps B2B SaaS is a little less pioneering. I'm definitely going to stick with Pioneer though. As a bootstrapped solo-founder, having a weekly progress report to submit to my peers helps keep me focused and motivated. If I win a prize then that would be amazing, and if not then my startup will still benefit from my consistent progress :-).

edit: By the way, I'm working on a self-service tool for converting web apps to desktop apps: https://www.todesktop.com/

Did you sign a contract with any guarantees? Read the legalize? I bet you it's all in there.

But I say all that not knowing how the tournament was presented to the participants. I’d be pretty mad if I thought they asked me to do one thing and worked really hard to achieve that and it turned out they wanted something else all along.

Pure voting cannot (right now, it'll probably change in the future IMO), account for all the factors that make a good project.

The Pioneer team and expert voters should have higher than normal voting power and I believe that that is what you are seeing.