Is the voting process of Startups of the Year really democratic?

If you haven’t noticed already, HackerNoon launched Startups of the Year to honor almost 40k+ startups in 4k+ cities with over 100k population in all continents of the world, except for Antartica! Check out our annoucement blog post here and our awesome promo video here.

We try to come up with a voting policy that imho feels the most appropriate and democratic. Depending on who you are in relation to HackerNoon, your votes might weigh more!

Hacker Noon weighs votes to further elevate the voice of our contributing writers, reward verified expertise, and prevent spam.

The three tiers are HackerNoon published writers, authenticated users, and unauthenticated visitors.

HackerNoon Published Writers Votes Count as 10

• The contributing writer, by publishing their words and expertise on Hacker Noon, has earned the right to have their voice count the most when it comes to who deserves HackerNoon rewards. Learn how to publish with HackerNoon at publish.hackernoon.com

Authenticated Users Votes Count as 3

• Authenticated users have much lower spam rate so their vote should count more

Unauthenticated Visitors have their Votes count as 1 (pending spam reviews)

• We want to continue to ensure that anyone can vote. All users can vote once on each award in voting season.

So, yes, we think this is quite democratically thought out. Let us know if you have any questions!