Their promised fix, "every presentation is getting a thorough screening from this hackathon onward", destroys something that was neat about their hackathon: an

Their promised fix, "every presentation is getting a thorough screening from this hackathon onward", destroys something that was neat about their hackathon: an essentially free minute on stage to do whatever wild/strange thing the entrants wanted. Yes, such freedom means some embarrassments, promotional spam, offensiveness, and weak/unfunny jokes get on stage. But no-prior-restraint errs on the side of project-inclusiveness and free speech, gets the most possible teams/ideas on stage, and avoids the endless rathole discussion of exactly what the "officially enforced content standards" should be. Now, the extra overhead of screening (or debating corner-cases) could easily mean fewer teams on stage, simply because of the extra effort required inside an already chaotic and time-bottlenecked get-on-stage process. Some teams will water down what would have been an interesting/memorable presentation, beyond what's strictly necessary, just knowing a content-screening filter must be passed. With screening in place, appearance-on-stage now implies a level of 'approval' from the organizers that didn't previously exist. That invites further controversies over the precisely-acceptable boundaries, and a bias toward more taboos and caution over time. Ultimately, the people such content-policing is purported to protect may not get a net benefit out of the smaller, tamer forum that results.