Erm, but ackhually, technically you don’t have to use Vercel or whatever, it’s just because that everyone does that

Huh? That’s not what I said. You’re combining 2 separate points I made into one that were never meant to go together. Please respond to what I actually said, instead of changing it into something stupid so it’s easier to have a come back against.

It’s like LG TVs asking you to accept…

What is like that?

Hack Club is putting big brands of their sponsors everywhere.

I assume you mean products, not brands? Not really. Sometimes sponsors donate items, and YSWS organizers might put the item as a prize if it makes sense.

But let’s see, Hack Clubs biggest sponsors are…

• Elon Musk. Haven’t seen anything about him or any of his companies or products in Hack Club, besides his name on a sponsor list somewhere.
• The Thiel fellowship. Same as above.
• GitHub. Some guides assume you use GitHub, but like I said previously, that’s because most people use it, and most non HC tutorials also assume you use it. It’s not because they’re a sponsor. Actually, Hack Club has their own free alternative to GitHub and GH Codespaces. They’re definitely not trying to get people stuck on GitHub.
• AMD: They donated 16 of their GPUs ig?
• NASA (their a partner, idk if they technically sponsored HC): They donated some tickets to the Kennedy Space Center as possible prizes for an event. Is that considered bad? I really don’t think so.
• CEO of Shopify: haven’t seen anything related to Shopfiy or any products, advertisements etc.
• CEO of Dell: same as above
• MIT: same as above
• Girls Who Code: same as above
• Open Sauce: like we talked about previously, they have partnered together for events, but not to promote any products. It doesn’t seem terrible to me.

Those are Hack Club’s 10 biggest donors. I think this should be pretty obvious: Hack Club accepts donations. They do not sell out to big tech.

The point is that you claimed that Zach promised something that he never promised. Why?

No CEO does any work of course, someone else does

He’s not a CEO. He’s the founder. And he did, and continues to do, a lot of work to make Hack Club what it is. He isn’t a billionaire with 15 homes.

As for the Claude counter, look at the leaderboard. That’s slightly more than a single person.

It’s a huge community. Of course there are a lot of people who use AI. Guess what… There’s also a lot of people who a very anti-AI. And personally, I think communities are healthier when we accept that not everyone has to agree on everything.

Also, you’re missing the point. You claimed that Hack Club was gamifying Claude, linking to a project that one community member made. That’s what I meant by one person. I wasn’t claiming that only 1 person in Hack Club uses Claude.

Got it to load. No, he did not promise to work towards an alternative (though I have heard him say elsewhere that he would like to switch to an alternative). He mentioned that one member was working on an alternative as their own project, that’s all.

This is the second time you’ve tried to make what one individual is doing as a personal project sound worse than it is, then making it sound like Hack Club as a whole is the one doing it (the first time claiming that HC is “gamifying claude”). Hack Club is a huge community, what a few individual members do doesn’t represent the whole of Hack Club. This just feels disingenious.

So accepting sponsorships is ok until a business donates or someone donates a substantial amount? And at that point you have to stop using Lemmy?

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.

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.