How is a hackathon any different from a writeathon or a poetry contest?
You seem to be ignoring everything what I'm saying...
A successful software project can bring a lot of users, particularly paying users. And thus revenue. Potentially millions of people will buy Devcoins and use them for payments.
Closed source software like games? Yeah that brings a lot of users and money. Open source software on the other hand does not. Devcoin promotes free software and for this reason will have the same difficulty getting revenue from programming that it has from writing.
If you can do same with poetry contest, go ahead. But I just don't see how poetry contest can do that. You know, for some reason venture capitalists invest into software projects, not into poetry contest. And they kinda like market caps 
People make plenty of money from song lyrics. Song writers are making plenty of money and contests could generate money. Venture capitalists don't invest in small scale software projects that could be funded by Devtome. And I don't see Devcoin replacing venture capitalists, that is delusional. And higher market cap means that more people can get paid. So it makes sense to focus on high-impact projects first, and later expand the program to get more people involved.
We have enough software as it is. We need content. Just producing all this cool software isnt going to make people want to use it. What would napster be if there were no content? What about Bittorrent? Please understand me correctly, I'm not against writers and artists. What I'm saying is that we need to get incentives right, i.e. to optimize for a thing we are optimizing.
Writers and artists are the producers of content. Content is why people want to use the Internet for anything other than work.
Let's say I go to devtome.com, what do I see? An ugly page with tonnes and tonnes of mess on it. It is hard to find anything.
But that doesn't have anything to do with the quality of the articles on Devtome. How much does a cookbook cost? But you can find recipes on Devtome for free. So you're saying people who share their recipes are suckers and should keep it a secret or sell it to a cookbook company instead? Devtome exists to promote the creative commons, and not everyone is a computer nerd.Nobody is thinking about presentation because they are paid for writing words!
It's not the writers job to worry about the presentation. Now, say, if Devtome was done right, its front page would be nicely organized. It should also be aesthetically pleasing, rather than using default theme.
I agree. Wikipedia works well and it could be like that. Honestly it could be better than Wikipedia if done right because people would get paid and quality could be much higher.A visitor which gets to devtome front page should see general categories, features articles etc. Focus on content which is of high quality, is nicely organized etc. Sweep half-baked shit under the rug.
I cannot disagree with this.So perhaps it can work if you writers get your shit together and make presentation nice. But "getting your shit together" isn't incentivized, only writing more and more words is. So nobody even bothered to take 5 minutes and think how site can be made more appealing.
Writers aren't website developers or the admin of the site. Why are you blaming stuff on the writers when writers have nothing to do with the design of Devtome?This clearly demonstrates how incentives are important. It is rare for things to get done without incentive.
Now compare Devtome to http://bitcoinmagazine.com/ What's different?
I agree with you but blame it on the people responsible. Writers aren't paid to design Devtome.Now compare Devtome to http://bitcoinmagazine.com/ What's different?