[morgante]

This is why I only attend university hackathons. For the most part, they are still about building cool new tech—not startups. Plus, their increasingly high admissions standards ensure that everyone who attends is either already a developer or eager to learn. Nobody walks away without coding.

One point I disagree with in the article is that cash prizes are harmful. I just don't see evidence of that—prizes at university hackathons have been getting bigger and bigger (tens of thousands of dollars) but it seems like the technical sophistication of hacks continues to rise. So long as you have good judges (ie. hackers, not marketers), large prizes just provide an awesome reward for awesome hacks.

Also, most of the shitty bizathons I've been to actually had relatively small prizes (some API credits, maybe "mentorship") relative to the major hackathons.

[TeMPOraL]

> One point I disagree with in the article is that cash prizes are harmful. I just don't see evidence of that—prizes at university hackathons have been getting bigger and bigger (tens of thousands of dollars) but it seems like the technical sophistication of hacks continues to rise. So long as you have good judges (ie. hackers, not marketers), large prizes just provide an awesome reward for awesome hacks.

I think the point of "avoid big cash prizes" rule in the article was to foster inter-team collaboration and minimize competition. It's a good goal. On one hackaton I attended where prizes were cool but not that big (items worth less than $1k each) it was not uncommon to see people spending some time talking to other teams, helping them set up, solve some obstacle they encountered or just playtesting their project.

Competition creates a bad atmosphere and it's better to reduce it to minimum. It's much more fun to care about maximizing the amount of cool projects being created than just fighting for the top spot.

[morgante]

> Competition creates a bad atmosphere and it's better to reduce it to minimum. It's much more fun to care about maximizing the amount of cool projects being created than just fighting for the top spot.

I understand that theoretical viewpoint, but I've never seen it play out that way.

Even at huge hackathons with prizes of thousands of dollars, I see lots of people helping each other across teams. At the end of the day, true hackers will like the money but also like helping out new developers.

I don't like the societal assumption that competition is automatically evil.

[TeMPOraL]

> Even at huge hackathons with prizes of thousands of dollars, I see lots of people helping each other across teams. At the end of the day, true hackers will like the money but also like helping out new developers.

Thanks for the data point.

> I don't like the societal assumption that competition is automatically evil.

The societal assumption, at least the one I grew up with, was that competition is Good and Awesome, because it drives the Great Capitalist Economy (as opposed to socialism that ended just around the time I was born). But it seems more and more evident that competition has only very limited applications.