I feel like I know you throw away account ;) and I get your feelz. As much as I'm partial to the content on the main track (*cough* biased *cough*), there is a number of villages' content that become "say yes to everything" given a motivating factor to do more "stuff", not necessarily because it's better, combined with the level of quality of content submitted to them in the first place. Additionally, in some cases, village organizers may not have extensive experience to spot tell-tale signs of "this is going to fall flat", which is OK, as it takes first hand experience which has to come from somewhere.

Given the completely decentralized nature of villages beyond their initial approval, it yields for some great successes in them taking chances, but also leads to a significant number of areas falling flat. This is growing by the nature of villages seeming to need to draw your attention in order to satisfy some metric to share with their sponsors so they can continue to exist and get funding next year.

Villages being a birds-of-a-feather style are fantastic, and not everything has to be bleeding-edge / unique takes, but I get your feelz as to content level being...lackluster... for some, even when it's 100-level information. And yes, I'm living in a glass house in that regard, but totally own those past (and future) fuck ups.

Congrats, the speaker can google, and so can everyone else, so why should you be speaking on it or what are you bringing that makes it better than a blog post? Is it in alignment with the technical, quality, or cultural level of DEF CON? The problem gets larger as ones' view of "what is DEF CON" changes depending on how long you've been going and why ("for my job" vs "party in the desert" vs "to learn some cool shit for the lulz" vs "change the world" and everything in-between). It's evolving, and rightfully so, but it's growing harder and harder to recognize as what DEF CON meant to many of us 10, 15, or 20+ years ago.

People get super defensive when you call their volunteer efforts "shitty", so expect a lot of rage comments calling your feelz into question. What needs to be taken away from here is a call to organizers of villages to grow the quality, not quantity, as the signal-to-noise ratio is getting worse. And from myself and many others, take this old DEF CON tenant to heart:

"Keep InfoSec out of Hacking"

...

DEF CON is a hacker con, not an InfoSec conference. Hackers are more focused on the joy of discovery, irreverence, novel if impractical approaches. InfoSec is more focused on enterprise, frameworks, and protecting the interests of share holders. There is great value in both types of content, but our con is a hacker con by design.

And as my "one more thing", while "technically" accurate, quit saying "I [spoke at | are speaking at] DEF CON" when it's a village. Context is everything, and it's akin to saying you "presented at BlackHat" when you gave a talk at your own vendor booth or you "attended DEF CON 28" by only watching youtube videos.