So, I used to go to Penn and now I go to one of the schools on that list. As far as I can tell, Penn CS students are better prepared to start companies, and probably as well prepared to be developers, as the students at my current school. They are not as well prepared to, say, go get a PhD in CS unless they go above and beyond the ordinary coursework.
But when the tech blogs talk about the "Stanford of the East" they're not really talking about grad school preparedness anyways. Stanford is set apart from the other schools on your list by its entrepreneurial spirit anyways.
The point is not at all that PennApps is more popular than Justin Bieber. The point is that, for a certain demographic, hackathons are getting crazy popular.
There are a lot of things that are scaled here. For one thing, this is about perception and expectation--who would think that a hackathon would sell out in less than an hour? Everyone expects Justin Bieber to do that, but a hackathon?!
I don't know how well it would work for commercial things, but for personal payments between people you know, Venmo is awesome. https://venmo.com/ (Still U.S. only though.)
Hah, well, I was surprised to get even FOUR upvotes. Good to know, I guess...?
Anyways, I had meant to bring up HN as more of an example of a bubble--both because it has an exclusive attitude (which is exemplified in part by a non-zero barrier to entry) as well as a self-selecting user base.
I'll give you another one. Not sure I agree completely though. Most popular communities do deteriorate in the quality of the discussion over time (even this one, spend some time here, you'll see pretty quickly).
The truth is I think it is important for people to "choose" to be real consumers of the services (yes even content services) they feel provide value to them. Otherwise what's the incentive to do anything but pander to the masses to get "eyeballs". Most importantly, there is clearly room for both models, what your post suggests is a false dichotomy.
But when the tech blogs talk about the "Stanford of the East" they're not really talking about grad school preparedness anyways. Stanford is set apart from the other schools on your list by its entrepreneurial spirit anyways.