[TeMPOraL]

Part of the confusion here is that, I think, people treat different kind of hackatons differently. I took part in 48-hour coding contests long before they were even called 'hackatons' (back then we called them Jams). Those are some of the best coding experiences in my life. Working in small teams on something fun and creative with tight deadline was absolutely exhilarating and reinvigorating. But there's one caveat.

We did this by ourselves, for ourselves. For fun.

What I personally strongly dislike are the 'company hackatons', in which developers from a company are basically tricked to do some unpaid work for the company. In my opinion, it's dishonest. You can feel the difference in the air - events that are created by the dev community for themselves to play and improve just smell different than the ones started by managers.

So for me, the problem with hackatons boils down to the problem of "fun" vs. "work". Things started as fun, but they seem to be turning more and more into work. Just like in case of SEO and the Web, it's all great until someone from outside comes who wants to profit on this, and this is why we can't have nice things.