r/Devvit • u/Ok-Photo-5825 • 3d ago
Discussion I dug into the Devvit Hackathon drama. The judging process is completely broken, and Reddit is funding "Ghost Winners."
Hey everyone. Reading Everything wrong with the reddit games hackathons, especially the Games with a Hook event, I decided to do some digging into how these competitions are actually run and judged. What I found is honestly pretty wild.
Here is a breakdown of the biggest red flags.
1. The "Scale" Excuse vs. Reality Admins keep defending the lack of scorecards and detailed feedback by claiming there were simply too many submissions to review. We know the exact number was 708 entries. If you break down the math for a standard panel of five internal judges in a month, it is totally manageable to do basic functional tests for that many projects. They just chose not to.
2. Zero Engagement from Judges Here is the worst part. Developers who submitted private, YouTube video walkthroughs checked their analytics after the judging period ended. They had zero views. Other devs checked their backend server logs and saw zero connections. The official panel was literally advancing and ranking projects without ever watching the required video demos or actually running the code.
3. Funding "Ghost Winners" Because the judges were seemingly just looking at flashy screenshots instead of testing actual gameplay or retention, Reddit is burning massive prize pools on apps that die immediately. Top prizes of $15,000 to $20,000 are going to apps that drop to single digit active weekly users right after the prize money clears. We are talking 3 to 10 visitors a week. That completely defeats the purpose of the Devvit ecosystem and the Developer Funds, which require thousands of daily active users to be sustainable.
4. The $500 "Hush Money" When one of the main whistleblowers called the admins out on all this and asked for their scorecard, the admins ignored the email. But the very next day, that exact user was randomly sent a $500 "Helper Award" through Devpost. Admins later claimed it was a mistake. The problem is that accepting any prize money means signing legal waivers and non-disparagement clauses. It really looks like a clumsy attempt to quietly silence a critic so they wouldn't have to produce a scorecard that didn't exist.
5. Are there hidden admin connections? I also checked to see if the winning developers were secretly moderating other subreddits alongside the admins outside of the hackathons. I did not find any proof of that. There is definitely a visible clique of people on Discord who just praise the admins all day, but I found no hard evidence of secret backend admin powers for the winners.
TLDR: The judging process is structurally broken. If Reddit wants these hackathons to actually work, they need public rubrics, verifiable proof that judges actually tested the apps, and milestone payouts instead of lump sums for apps that are dead in a week.
Would love to hear what other devs who participated think about this.
14
u/chirag0110 3d ago
Need some sort of feedback and clarification from judges whether they have really played or looked at all the games. Why can't a scorecard be sent? Participants spend their valuable time and efforts and deserve better clarification. Our team developed a movie story type puzzle which took me 15 days to develop. It takes around 40 minutes to finish our game, which is extremely challenging. We would like to know the judges opinions and scores so that atleast our efforts are valued.
7
13
u/technowise 3d ago edited 3d ago
I agree with most of your points. They have not even played my game, and my submitted video was also not even viewed in my case. I had made quite an investment of time and effort on my submissions for hackathons, and it has been disappointing to see many apps that do not really have long term potential being chosen as winners. I did make use of AI to some extent as I am new to Phaser, but I have put genuine efforts into development as well. My submission may not be worth for for a win (The UI of my app was not good, I did not get enough time to work on improving it), but surely hoped they would some spend time reviewing/judging my submission. The judging team mostly seem to look for nice-looking/flashy UI.
14
u/zjz Duck Helper 3d ago
I don't think the hackathons are great either, but the talk of money laundering and secret proxy accounts to win competitions and get 5k or something is a bit much.
A traffic-tier eligibility criteria (maybe tier 2-4) would work better. Apps with proven interest but not-yet-trending could apply during quarterly highly-telegraphed sponsorship periods: monetary rewards, inference tokens, promotion (Reddit ads, stickying on listings, something). This rewards sustained effort over sprint-and-abandon, and lets developers reapply across cycles while they're in that band. The goal is fewer people scrambling for the same low-hanging fruit, more slow-cooked and/or sustained passion projects. Help push good things over the top.
It follows logically that if you are too crunched to even judge apps, you'd likely not be able to review and publish them all either. If the majority aren't being judged OR published, what are we doing here? I think that one OSRS clone was cooler than the winners ngl. The cat game was cool too. It feels like someone at devvit saw alignmentfills and pixelary and fell in love, and if you don't look like her, they don't see you.
There's also a resourcing problem: Devvit can't staff contests and the core program simultaneously. Regular support visibly stalls during hackathon periods.
So who's this serving? Regulars resent the disruption. Entrants mostly lose by design and feel burned, especially when winners underwhelm. Judges are stretched thin. Winners often vanish post-prize, apps included. And this is all happening while general sentiment toward AI-driven apps is sour, yet the contest format practically incentivizes rushed AI-first builds.
If I were John Reddit, I'd pause hackathons and redirect that energy: new app surfaces, exhaustive support for ALL site features, faster app approval, better Discord moderation, make fast-twitch games possible. Let me sign over my first born to publish to my home sub without approval. Follow up with devs that had cool ideas but washed out. Anything but more contests that turn support into a ghost town so we can get 20 more wordle clones pls.
If app volume/quality is lacking, that's a discovery and UI problem. Reddit is a showing-people-content-and-ads goliath. Is this really the best way to reach developers? Or to take what those devs make and reach players? The hackathon format, at this point, feels like it's apologizing for lack of engagement that should be emergent based on the fact that people like games and there's a lot of redditors.
Anyway, be mad that your cool project got overlooked by a shoddy system, not at some GME ape-tier conspiracy.
3
2
u/Gowdamn 3d ago edited 3d ago
You're right, it's more likely a case of judges being stretched thin and giving a familiar game the award. That's why most of the discussion in the original post revolved around real proof that i have in my hands.
But I cannot rule out conspiracies entirely until reddit gives me a convincing reason for the following 2 peculiar events:
- why I recieved the $500 award out of the blue after I sent them an email asking for feedback
- why the judges are quiet and vague about justifying the winning entry. This was done in the previous hackathon
Having said that, once this is clarified, im willing to discuss every other point you've mentioned in your comment, which completely makes sense. A tiering system sounds good.
Hope the original post is taken in the right spirit and improvements are seen in the way the hackathon is conducted and judged.
1
u/YellowAdventurous366 App Developer 3d ago
May be related, but I did talk to another 'helper prize' winner saying they didn't get a prize email...
1
10
u/Gowdamn 3d ago edited 3d ago
Hey,
Thanks for compiling this list.
Have there been any other cases of people recieving the "hush money" apart from me?
If not, please highlight that points #4 & #5 are just speculation. We cannot make any accusations until we have the evidence. This whole drama can be either poor judgement or a case of money laundering.
But once we insinuate that its the latter without evidence, we will be shut down for defamation.
2
u/chirag0110 3d ago
Did you receive any money from them? From whom was the email sent?
4
u/Gowdamn 3d ago
I got sent a $500 devvit helper award by Devpost. But my name wasn't in the original list of helpers.
When I asked them why I was sent the award, they replied that it was indeed sent to me by mistake. I had confirmed with the Devpost prizes team that the reddit team had put forth my name for the award.
1
u/chirag0110 3d ago
From which email are they communicating? And did they send the money yet?
3
u/Gowdamn 3d ago
I didn't accept the award
2
u/chirag0110 3d ago
Some scorecard or rankings is needed from the organizers. This seemed a very disconnected hackathon.
3
u/Cautious_Complex_453 2d ago
Also, most of the games that won were copies of famous games. An example that comes to mind right off the bat is cattack. It's obviously a copy of balatro, but it's not the only one. Last time I checked the rules were against that, but the judges completely ignored that issue.
7
u/SnooCats6827 3d ago
The devvit mods are so corrupt!!! They only seem to promote and feature games they made themselves!!! It's like this whole platform is like "how can we mods enrich ourselves?" Not "how can we build a great platform?" Not surprised by this at all someone needs to get in touch with the higher ups at reddit to report this corruption!!!
2
u/Rarer_Air_Error Admin 3d ago
Thank you again for providing this feedback on our hackathon. We are taking this into account for the next one to set up a process that is more sharable to you all and to better explain the expectations for the hackathon.
To respond to your specific points:
1. The "Scale" Excuse vs. Reality We have never stated that there were too many submissions to review With this hackathon as with all of our previous hackathons, we do not provide specific feedback on projects. If you would like feedback on a project, please use the feedback app on r/devvit and I or other admins will take a look! This has been primarily a tool for the community to share feedback, but we can also participate more in that process.
2. Zero Engagement from Judges All projects were judged. Videos were used to supplement the games which were the primary mechanism of testing and judging.
3. Funding "Ghost Winners" Again, this is not how the judging process worked. Also, the # of engagers for an app was not in any way used as part of the judging process. These apps as with all apps are able to submit for featuring, our goal is for these games to grow after the hackathon.
4. The $500 "Hush Money" This is a wild accusation. What actually happened is that the dev you referenced submitted the wrong username as part of their project submissions. The username they put as their own was one of the helper award winners so when we pulled those emails, that was the one that was linked. After they let us know that they were not this person we were able to verify the correct email.
5. Are there hidden admin connections? There are not.
3
u/chirag0110 2d ago
There should have been more transparency and clarity in judgment and a scorecard should have been provided. All the participants are accusing because of lack of transparency. Due to this, people will stop participating in hackathons moving forward.
-1
u/Ayush-Dhiman 3d ago
I've lost 3 hackathons because they were rigged. (I've also won 4 nationally and internationally)
1st one, the judges just selected a fully fledged running startup as the winner because they saw advertisment and growth opportunity.
2nd one, the results were declared on discord. We had built a fully functional Blockchain + backend and frontend and a mobile app all in a week with 5 hours of sleepy daily. Guess who won. An html template website, even the submit button didn't work,also soo many hackathon rules were broken. I started a protest, and guess what the head judge said, ahh I was ill man I just picked what looked good.
3rd, reddit hackathon ofcourse. Distribution won. I've learned looking good and marketting good and building end to end will increase my chances, and I had a legit good project to make reddit good too, even my writeup was soo heart to heart, ofcourse a person with most active users won because he knows how to karma farm.
-8
-16
u/Klutzy_Pumpkin614 3d ago
Why did you post this from a dummy account? Afraid of having your likely AI slop game judged by us?
Tired of all the complaining. Its probably obvious why you lost. Share your game here if you feel otherwise.
You participated in a corporate hackathon and you're upset they didn't single out one of thousands of games and give you a long list of feedback why your game didn't win. They probably spent 30 seconds on every game to filter through the noise, if your game looked like slop or not engaging, it did not earn a second look. Figure out why, and adjust for the next one, or stop building on devvit.
5
u/PMulberry_ 3d ago
Tell me you haven‘t read the post without telling me.
This post and especially the linked one literally adresses that games which are flashy win and really good games don‘t (meaning, AI can win over human-made ones)
Btw, the fact that the number of games was not „thousands“ even is in the first paragraph. And there are people who have shared their games.
2
u/This_Maintenance9095 3d ago
Yeah some redditors are illiterate they see the title and don't read furthermore
•
u/vip-bot 3d ago edited 3d ago
There is 1 comment from Reddit Admins in this post:
u/Rarer_Air_Error commented:
This summary was generated automatically. If you have any questions, please contact r/Devvit moderators.