Huh. Personally I think developers getting paid is not inherently evil.

So you recommend Lemmy? Personally I like it so far too. Totally unrelated fun fact… Lemmy also has sponsors. Are you gonna leave Lemmy now? https://opencollective.com/lemmy

Ahh I see. I thought you meant advertising through Slack, not advertising Slack itself. Honestly the fact they use Slack is one of my least favorite things about Hack Club. That said, although I heavily prefer using only open source software, there are very few organizations who do that… Yk, “you can’t let perfect be the enemy of good”. Rejecting anything that’s not perfect is unrealistic. What we should do instead, is try to improve things.

I don’t know about this promise Zach supposedly made, and I can’t read about it since that article is paywalled. Kind of ironic trying to hate on a organization for using a paid product, while you’re evidence is hidden behind… A paid product.

No, most YSWSs don’t force you to use bun.js lmao.

Most tutorials assume you use github because it’s… What most people use. Just like how most tutorials about coding in general (not related to Hack Club) also assume you use GitHub. But Hack Club programs intentionally allow you to use any Git service, even your own self hosted one.

About forcing you into using Bambu, I haven’t seen or heard of that and can’t really comment since I don’t do much hardware stuff. All I can say is that is not a thing in the YSWSs I’ve participated in.

This event literally tells you that you will get less if you don’t use sponsored tools

EasyEDA donated discounts to their services you mean? Oh No ThAt’S sO aWfUl TeEnS cAn GeT a DiScOuNt!! It’s just a discount to get your PCBs manufactured. It’s not like it’s encouraging people to buy in to some sort of closed ecosystem or anything, and you still can get stuff from other companies if you want. And from what I can tell, they didn’t raise prices for getting it from other companies.

And as you may already note, they are normalizing Claude and gamifying it

What are you talking about?? One community member made a website that has statistics on how much people use Claude, and suddenly that means that Hack Club is gamifying Claude??

Look, it’s clear you know a lot about Hack Club, so I’m sure you know this, but it seems like you’re pretending it’s not the case, so let me state this: Hack Club is very loose about what tools you can use. Whether that’s what brands you pick, whether or not you can use AI (up to a certain point), etc. Each Hack Club program can have its own restrictions as they see fit (EG completely banning AI, or having a program about a certain type of software), but Hack Club is not forcing people to use certain brands or use AI, that would be individual YSWSs, which you can choose to participate in or not.

I’m not sure what you mean. I joined so I can chat with other people who are interested in Open Source and coding. What’s your point?

Also, you’re avoiding answering my question…

I don’t disagree that that happens in our world, but Hack Club really isn’t advertising products like you insinuate. And I really don’t see how simply accepting a sponsorship is inherently evil. By that logic, do you also think that open source projects like KDE Plasma, GNOME (both sponsored by Google, Canonical etc), Fedora (sponsored by red hat) etc are also bad because they’ve accepted sponsorships from giant tech companies?

Also, how are they advertising through Slack? I’m active on there and I haven’t seen that. They have announcements about their own events, but they don’t advertise products at all.

And yes, it is unusual for Slack to be used as a non-formal space. They use it because most other options can’t handle such a huge amount of users. Not sure how that’s even relevant though?

Yes, I just joined. So?

How do you expect them to get money without sponsorships? Yes, they accept donations from companies sometimes as prizes for events. So what? Is there something inherently wrong with that?

As you pointed out, Prototype is an exception. I had forgotten about that, but yeah they did have some AMD hardware at the Hackathon that you were expected to use. And I’m not a fan of that. I’m pretty sure that’s the only time they’ve ever done that though. Even things like GitHub is one of their biggest donors, yet they specfically make a point to allow you to use whatever code hosting server you want.

Donors benefit because resources going to help teens build technical projects benefits the industry as a whole, rather than the donor specifically.

Do you have a spec of evidence for this supposed “circling money around”? The finances for that game jam are completely open (as are all Hack Club events).

Also, if I remember correctly, Jabrils didn’t come because he was sick.

FYI, the game jam was not part of Open Sauce, it was completely separate. William created Open Sauce, but he was not very involved in the making of the game jam, he was just invited as a guest.

That said, I agree with the sentiment of your post. I really don’t see anything wrong with the video.

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What products are they supposedly promoting to kids? The link you gave for that doesn’t work. I’ve never seen them do that, and I’ve heard Hack Club staff specifically state that they do not do that, even if a corp sponsors them.