alt Hacker NewsRunning a software jam in a world of slop
I'm Fox. I'm a 16 year old, and I've been working mostly working on making projects I thought were cool & would do well on the internet over the last year. You can check out my other blog posts if you want to get a sense of what that means: <https://foxmoss.com/blog>.
Hack Club noticed these projects and thought I would be well suited to run an event. This was my reaction, I wanted to make something that could encourage the same competition as well the feedback I get from places like HN and appreciate well made projects. Hack Club does a good job at throwing money at people who make projects, but a iffy job at rewarding hard work. I wanted to change that. Radish Jam <https://radish.hackclub.com/> was my reaction to that, and this blog post goes through my thought processes in logistics. How something similar could be run again either by another Hack Clubber or an adult looking to run something for similar for adults :)
Comments
The website https://radish.hackclub.com reliably crashes my Safari so repeatedly that I simply cannot view the website whatsoever.
Why editorialize the link title with "I'm 15 and I..."?
Is there some weird SEO superstition that being a child prodigy helps HN posts
Lots of other "I'm 15" (or 16, 17, 18) HN posts are pretty obviously spam or AI slop. Im' 65, and I'm immediately suspicious and biased against such titles.
Allowing people to vote for any project they think is cool is an interesting departure from voting systems of most other Hack Club programmes (most of the time your project will battle for votes in a series of 1v1 matchups). I'm really interested to see how this plays out!
My main concern with these types of programmes is that highly technical yet difficult to demonstrate projects (think programming languages, distributed systems, OSs, CLI tools etc) tend to get disproportionately bad results in voting. People new to programmes like this could be strongly put off by their perceived bad results, and people with knowledge of how the game works will just take their projects to other Hack Club programmes. If I were running this it would have 2 separate groups of prizes: larger ones based on number of hours spent (tracked with Lapse or Hack Hour, because I strongly dislike Hackatime), and smaller ones based on number of votes. However the big flashy prizes (in this case, the Framework laptops) really do attract people – recall that Siege <https://siege.hackclub.com/> was one of Hack Club's best performing efforts despite how easy it was to sink dozens of hours into it and win nothing.
Nonetheless I see the potential and I do hope for a lot of submissions – the programme clearly distances itself from the usual Hack Club status quo ;). Good luck with it!