Selling Out and the Death of Hacker Culture | Hacker News Reader

Selling Out and the Death of Hacker Culture

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55 pointszeeshanm18 comments

I was in university when I first heard the word 'hackathon'. The CS club had reserved a student lounge on campus for 24 hours and donated a bunch of snacks and drinks. I don't think I made it through the whole 24 hours, but I sure loved the spirit and sense of community that event had. No prizes, no corporate sponsors. Just building cool stuff.

By the end of my time at university, they had already become a for-profit idea mill for big companies. Those things never felt quite right to me.

And then, a few years later, I was involved in planning and running a few of those corporate hackathons. Even helped run one at YC a few years ago.

I don't think I would ever go to a hackathon with a corporate sponsor again. After seeing it from the inside, I realize how true the old saying is: "If you're not paying for it you are the product."

I've thought about trying to run a hackathon that gets back to the roots of what I remember about hackathons. Just a bunch of people hacking away on a project for an unbearably long time, with whatever snacks and drinks I could afford to provide. I don't think hacker culture is dead. I think there are a lot of folks out there, like me, who remember the hackathons of 2008 - 2010 and would like to re-live it. I guess I should stop thinking about it and just do it!

What about you? Is that something you'd go to?

I've had a hard rule for a while: Don't go to Hackathons where the prizes are over $1000. This is why:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/19/victoria-walker-rod...

I was at that Hackathon. The prize was pretty cool; certainly the largest I had seen at a Hackathon. I'd done other AT&T hackathons ("won" some, "lost" most) so I figured it wouldn't turn into a giant marketing/PR stunt - Silly me! Not only was AT&T's local head of marketing there but they had a professional artist there to help the kids with their slide show and a reporter was brought in for the presentation/judging phase. Their presentation was well choreographed and polished (professional artwork, animations, well written copy). For everyone else the judging went a bit different. I wrote an app using Twillio rather than the AT&T texting API and the marketing head was fairly overt in her distain for not touting their API. A few more instances of that happened with a couple other entries. Honeslty it was the least professionally run event I've seen out of that camp. Since then I've limited my parcipitation to events that have Amazon gift cards and EC2/Sponsor API credit as prizes.

The kids that won were very nice, well behaived, etc. I hope they actually got the prize money for being part of AT&T's stunt.

Author here. This was written for Hackathon Hackers, a group of people who go to collegiate hackathons, to (1) critique what I perceive to be our community's focus on measuring success by $$$ and size instead of individual impact, and (2) express my displeasure with the way we've let corporations take over community events.

Especially re: @candu's and @detaro's comments, I agree that there are lots of community-supported meetups and spaces. However, I don't find that the collegiate community gives much, if any, weight to these sorts of events - there's a glorification of giant hackathon events that far outweighs anything else. I know where to look, but someone newer to the scene will only see the sort of event that I criticize. My hyperbolic title is a rhetorical device to counteract the marketing machine that MLH and hackathons have going :)

Then I can only hope that it takes a long time for that trend in student perception to get over to my side of the big pond... Yes, some people get more excited for the more business-oriented stuff, but it's an even distribution and different people like different things.

So don't go to hackathons, and maybe look a bit farther afield for this "hacker culture"?

There's so very many open-source projects, LUGs, meetups, civic open data hack nights, hackerspaces, mesh network initiatives, workshops run by community-minded coworking spaces, IRC (or equivalent) channels, etc. out there nowadays that I can't help but feel you're just not looking very hard.

I think IRC is slowly dying, unfortunately, going the way of the plaintext mailing list and moving to things like Slack.

Does anyone know if there's a site that espouses the benefits of text/plain? If it doesn't exist, I think I should build it (read: push on to the unfinished projects array)

>I think IRC is slowly dying, unfortunately, going the way of the plaintext mailing list and moving to things like Slack.

No way :D.

irc.freenode.org is booming and the live stream of conversations with strangers is far more interesting than the limits of 140 characters and Slack teams limited to company.

Here are some wonderful IRC channels on irc.freenode.org

##security - There are spooks in this channel! (800 people)

#RubyOnRails - People fixing each others rails code (500 people)

#DN - Community for UX (40 people)

and more!

I've been enjoying IRC as much as Meetup now.

Thanks for the new channel recommendations!

Is there a way to stop myself being disconnected from Freenode so often? (~once a week on a DO shell)

I use Textual because of the nice UI.

Also, check out ##GRC. Its a spin-off from ##security involved with Governance, Risk, Compliance.

I found the commercialization of hackathons quite amazing and a bit scary as well. Something I don't know if it has been tried however is having a hackathon where every team pays $100 to attend, and then they vote on the best hack at the end, the winner gets 1/2 the total gate, second place 1/4, third place 1/8, and the organizers get 1/8 to offset costs.

That could be interesting, but as a collegiate organizer I'm worried that a lot of students wouldn't have the means to participate. $100 is roughly double what's in my bank account right now :)

the $100 is only a place holder. You could have teams contribute $5 to be "in". The point is that everyone puts some "skin" in the game, and the winner gets a prize, and 3rd place gets probably more than their $5 back (everyone assumes they can at least make it to 3rd place :-)

Is having a "sizeable" prize pot really that important for a hackathon? And I have a hard time seeing how the hackathon could provide the value that I'd be willing to spend $100 on as a student using that model (obviously, since it would only use $12.50).

No it isn't about "sizable"ness, its about competing for something real. The psychology here is that everyone puts in a contribution, and 3 groups walk off with it. So that adds a bit of "pain" if you lose out, and a more positive affirmation when you "win". Per the original article, you want some competition to bring out the best in people, but you also want the system to naturally self limit so that it doesn't get crazy and bring out the sociopaths.

I'm also not fan of the fact that nowadays most hackathons are big competitions. And/or overly strict in what you should build, to be able to compare things better. Not every result should be an app or a potentially viable product!

Corporate sponsorship isn't necessarily bad, even limiting scope to products of the company can be fine (e.g. I participated in a very nice hackathon with a guideline of "build something fine using one of XCorps APIs"). Sadly many PR departments love turning things into "events" and do things bigger and more impressive than others.

But hacker culture isn't just hackathons. And of course, in university etc you still can just assemble a bunch of friends and hack on stuff together if you want. Not much needed.

I couldn’t believe this, had to look it up for myself: “This is why Walmart is MHacks’ title sponsor, and why Comcast (lol) was PennApps’ title sponsor"

Something has been bugging me about hackathons recently. I think this put it quite well.

I always liked the collaborative and learning environment of a bunch of nerds coming together – the current prototypical hackathon seems far, far from that.

The death of hacker culture? Would most of these people otherwise would have been into what would be more traditionally considered hacker culture?

Most hackathons now are for PR and for recruiting. Fine. With all the preaching about how everyone needs to be able to program, and the number of jobs available, is this a surprise?

People who enjoy hacking for the sake of hacking will continue to do it outside of these sponsored events.

Yeah, late capitalism is a real downer.

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