hack club: a story in three acts (aka, the shit sandwich)
how i got here
november 2024. i got an email from github education with the subject line "Set sail with Hack Club High Seas 🚢" and something about it just caught my eye. probably the ship emoji, if i'm honest. but i thought "wow, this looks fucking amazing, i ought to take part."
and i did. got properly hooked, actually. made a few projects - they weren't particularly good, but i had FUN doing them. and that's kind of the whole point, isn't it? there were issues, sure - high seas being slow as hell sometimes, peer voting being a bit dodgy, the inevitable flood of AI generated projects - but most of the other projects were full of heart. you could tell people were actually building things they cared about.
that's what got me invested in hack club. not the free stuff (though that's nice), but the feeling that there was actually a community of teenagers building things and helping each other out. it felt different from everywhere else online.
which is why what i found later was so disappointing.
act one: what they got right (the top slice)
look, i need to start with this: hack club's mission is genuinely brilliant. empowering teenagers to build, ship, and create things they care about? that's important work. most schools treat you like you're just there to absorb information and regurgitate it on tests. hack club says "no, you can make stuff that actually matters, right now."
and the community, when it's working properly, is something special. you know how stack overflow is? ask a question, get downvoted, someone tells you "this has been asked before" without linking to where. discord servers are full of people being passive-aggressive. but hack club built something different - a space where teenagers actually help each other. where you can ask "how does this work?" and get a proper explanation instead of being made to feel stupid.
one person put it perfectly: "if i post in this slack - i get a person who is kind enough to explain it to me in detail and a community to support me on. hack club tolerates none of what i described before, which is the social-norm everywhere else."
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