I've been to several of them in Toronto, this year and last. Teams nowadays just `git clone` some repo, put in some crappy logo and then say "I made this", and they mean it.

This is a general trend I've observed to be prevalent with zoomers (but not Gen Alpha), they just lie to others as if it was nothing. No idea what are the social cues that led them to this, but I would find that interesting to study. I don't think they're ill intentioned, I think they don't consider lying to be bad and it's some sort of way of going through life.

Not long ago I was having dinner w/ some scammers (one of them is on the latest YC batch, btw) and this guy was telling everybody that you need to lie to get ahead, "if you don't lie to your investors they will invest in someone else who is lying to them". This guy was somewhere between milennial and zoomer by age, but with a mien and mind more akin to that of a zoomer (TikTok, etc...).

Very vulgar individual. That's SOTA these days.

When I was a teenager in the mid-90's, I would go to a monthly Boy Scouts Explorer Post group hosted/sponsored by CompuServe (at their headquarters). My brother and I were a couple years younger than some of the "cool hacker" dudes (it was almost all dudes), like this guy Travis who had already had multiple Dade Murphy-esque run-ins with the feds and would give little talks on why it's not worth it and was honestly really supported by the alpha-nerd adults (not pejorative) who worked for CompuServe who ran the thing and were trying to keep us all from life-changing mischief (while still encouraging safer mischief).

Other attendees would give presentations on MODs (FastTracker / Impulse Tracker), or show off software they wrote (or found) that was cool, that kind of thing, and the only sponsor was CompuServe itself (which gave us all free dialup accounts).

I remember one time we set up a booth at the fairgrounds, like inside of one of those giant, long open-air pavilion buildings that normally would have horse/animal stalls, with a row of computers to demo either their brand new service "WOW!" [0] or maybe it was WorldsAway [1] to the general public. I had no idea what I was doing lol, but it sure did feel important!

Anyways, my rose-tinted vision of what a hackathon should be is some amalgamation of trading rainbow books at Cyberdelia mixed with those monthly CompuServe meetings where elders guided the young through the labyrinth of technology mixed with like a LAN party where instead of games, people get together, code, push boundaries, exchange ideas, and make something cool. Or something.

Not a brutal, forced interaction with your coworkers that wastes time, produces jack shit, and is sponsored by SliceLine Pizza lol

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6BQzd2km58

[1] https://www.pcworld.com/article/424450/this-old-tech-remembe...

The only exception was one I went to put on by Atlassian a long time ago which was a hardcore geek-vs-geek live coding night with lots of drinking and real prizes. This was before they went public and didn’t care about offending.