Okay, maybe "rigged" is a strong word, but Hack The Valley IX was certainly an experience. In hindsight, perhaps we had a bit of a skill issue, and our project idea wasn't the absolute best-best, but hear me out. Our project was technically complex, considering how shit AI was at the time (this was pre-vibecoding, pre-cursor).
Interestingly, many of the winning projects seemed to lean heavily into technical complexity, rather than the "wow" factor often seen at events like Hack The North. However, the judging felt incredibly biased. Multiple judges explicitly told us they ranked our team first, yet we somehow didn't win a single prize.
And then there was the second-place winner. Their project was essentially a direct clone of ChatGPT's interface except there were multiple chats at the same time and they can "prompt into each other". Upon investigation, they also copied an entire frontend from one of their old projects, and privated their GitHubs immediately after judging (so people can't see it during closing ceremony). Interestingly, they also have significant amount of private contributions right before the hackathon started (🤔), and it was not like casually working a side project, it was like a small peak. Anyways, their project was literally just ChatGPT prompting into another ChatGPT prompt. While I'll admit they definitely had really good pitching strengths, the technical merit felt questionable, especially when compared to the effort we and other teams put in. To add to the questionable judging, one of the hackers' moms was a judge, and most of the organizers were also part of the judging panel, which made the entire judging process very questionable and biased.
Anyways, that's my rant for today.