> 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.
In this image, two projects mention being upvoted by an "expert", and the two are in the top 10 indeed.
Overall, I find that the evidence fails to convey the point, I may be wrong and the case is strong but right now, I don't think it's convincing that anything shady is happening.
I'm not surprised that the ultimate choice of giving out money is closely guarded, because the very little amount of voting happening makes it very sensible to fraud. (When a photo of an egg can get 20 million likes on twitter, basing a contest on handfuls of votes would seem a bit...naive.)