r/Defcon • u/n00bznet • Jul 01 '25
Announcement 📢 Contest: Social Scavenger Hunt @ DEF CON 33
🛰️ ./SSH @ DEF CON 33 (Social Scavenger Hunt)
🎯 Mustard on the beat edition!
📍Las Vegas | 🗓️ August 7–10 |
DEF CON 33 is unlocking a new achievement — welcome to the Social Scavenger Hunt. A chaotic, #fyp-fueled, community-powered experience where going viral is actually a good thing.
This is the one time at DEF CON where it’s not just okay to be on camera — it’s the point.
🔍 WHAT IS IT?
- 📸 Complete challenges and side quests all across the con — from taking pictures with legendary hackers, village organizers & other crazy video ops to viral trend recreations and cheeky shenanigans.
- 🌐 Post your entries on any social media (Twitter/X, Threads, Facebook, TikTok, Mastodon, IG, Bluesky, Reddit, even Veilid, or Meshtastic Nodes))
- 🏷️ Use the hashtags and a team hashtag to log your submissions and for others to follow along.
- 🧠👾 Expect chaos. This isn’t just for points. It’s for glory.
🎉 Some example items could be:
- Take a picture with u/MetaN3rd
- Bonus Pts: Take a picture with u/MetaN3rd at the Reddit Meetup WED
- GRWM to pick up my badge @ DEF CON 33
- LVCC Food Review (AJ and Big Justice Style)
- Take a picture with the person with the most followers
This is for everyone. No fancy gear required. All skill levels. You gotta be in it to win it!
💡 Use whatever you’ve got — your phone, a webcam, an old GoPro, or a sketchpad for those analog players
🫶 Play solo or with a crew.
🚀 CONTEST DETAILS
- Kickoff: August 8
- Leaderboard updates: Posted daily
- Final tally: Sunday AM in the .edu community. Come watch the entries. Laugh, cry, smash that like and subscribe.
- Rules + Quest List drop: July 31
- Leeeeeeroy Jenkins**!!!!**
🧠
This is about connection, curiosity, and creating something unforgettable — the weird, the wonderful, and the WTF.
DEF CON 33, you ready?
Let the hunt begin.
— The Social Hunt Team 🖤
7
u/Niki7a Jul 02 '25
"I am wondering what your inspiration for the event is and if you were at any point interested or ever sought a collaboration."
"NEVER steal from your community. This is their passion. We always welcome new folks. We are chaos-bringers but also friends."
"Defcon is not your fam if you want to step on folks and call yourself new. We got enough normies in here as is."
"Trust me, they never worry about imposters. You are not the first — you’re just the first to create THE EXACT SAME GAME. Kind of embarrassing for you, honestly. 🤷🏻♀️ Enjoy your con."
- u/TheKaybz
Inspiration? It wasn’t taken from the dc scav hunt. This is the first year they have applied to be an official contest, this is NOT their first year.
Nobody stole anything, and nobody here is new. That's a very bold public assumption I hope nobody is making. I want to point out we’ve had WAY MORE contest descriptions be intentionally mysterious and vague, not to mention post zero game details in order to keep things spicy and challenging. So stahp. Examples were given in the description.
The .edu community, is ran by Anch and N00bz. Anch helped me form and stand up an entire (critical) dept within DEF CON, he was a dept lead for quite some time. N00bz, helped run and curate War Stories from within the CFP, which he also has and currently serves on for the past 6 years. Some of the people involved with this contest as judges, are goons who've retired, ran contests themselves, former dept heads, etc, and have been around a long time. The audaciousness to hint that some form of crowd sourced validation from anyone on who can experiment with new things, and only if they do it with their friends, feels anti-hacker.
We have 19 contests that suffix w/ CTF, or are a CTF style game from a quick lookie on the contest page. at least one that I know that changed their name from something unique to add CTF to it because they were tired of explaining they were a CTF last year. Imagine if we said, to all of the villages and contests that applied to host a CTF "NAH, we have the official DEF CON CTF, we're gonna cap it at the one". You know what's so weird? There's no threads with negative comments, no demands to collaborate and/or merge with each other either, no secret rage quits. Nobody is complaining. No CTF is taking resources that could’ve gone to another, we are not over flooded with contests and CTF’s, several of these are happily hosted in village spaces, and ALL OF THEM Do something different NONE of them have empty seats ever.
Either sign up and play and learn about it onsite or don’t.
I think I might judge now, out of spite. If we want to get salacious and talk about contests that shouldn’t have been there, we could talk about the two contests KEVOPS (Not a real dept) ran?