In the recent months, the number of trash blogs on Codeforces has risen. Thankfully, they are mostly being ignored, and are very often recognizable by their title and/or author handle, but they still show up in the Recent Actions, making navigation through actually meaningful and good content like tutorials/contest invitations/etc harder. And very often, it's the same person posting one useless blog after another, not getting banned even after five or six instances. Personally, I am sick of those blogs, and I don't think I'm the only one.
I understand why they don't get banned. Mike, Gera Nazarov and other people responsible for the platform are very busy maintaining the testing system, catching cheaters, improving Polygon and doing other work which lets Codeforces continue running and improving. They don't have time for digging through everything that gets posted, and that's perfectly understandable.
So, I think we need some other people who can do this. Maybe a crew of some universally trusted contributors can volunteer for the job of cleaning Codeforces from garbage blogs and people who post them? (If I were asked, I'd volunteer.) I don't think they'll be able to resolve the whole issue, since some people will definitely register a new account to post all sorts of BS on the platform, but I believe it will at least reduce the number of such blogs. The current system when someone can avoid getting banned after posting even, like, five or six trash blogs doesn't mitigate this issue.
Some other possible solutions for the issue (and why I think they won't work):
Poll:
I am annoyed by useless blogs, and I think CF needs a moderation system
I am annoyed by useless blogs, but I don't think that moderation system will improve the situation
I am annoyed by useless blogs, and I think there is a better solution than moderation system
I am annoyed by useless blogs, but I don't think anything needs to be done
I usually don't notice useless blogs
I think everyone should have the ability to post whatever they want
Talking of moderation, the one practiced at StackOverFlow is a good one, it takes the combined agreement of 2-3 mods to take down a question if it doesn't meet the community standards and mod elections are held every year to de-monopolize the power of a mod. Since CF blogs resemble StackOverFlow Q/A format, a similar system should work out.
You can turn on "hide low rated blogs" from codeforces sidebar to avoid such blogs.
Enjoy missing my next rounds.
That's not how it works, if your blog is upvoted we can still see it.
Won't help, since A) mentioned in blogpost B) you literally can see this which is rude and unfunny, and posted by cm and having 200+ upvotes. I also ask someone having moderator privileges to delete that blogpost, as codeforces is not place for something like that.
I can't anymore, it seems that CM deleted the blog.
I'm glad this happened
If there are too many low rated blogs, the "detailed" view of recent actions becomes smaller (rather than having the remaining places populated by some older actions in distinct blogs). So it is possible (and has been the case multiple times) that the recent actions section ends up becoming a stub that has only about 10 blogs.
There is definitely some moderation now too: to me, it seems like moderation is instead very, very lenient. Comments of rotavirus were regularly removed, just not as often as we'd like. And he did get banned, although much later than I would have preferred to.
Yeah, it exists, but it cannot be done by the same people who are busy maintaining the system simply because this is too much work for one person.
About this:
"For example, if participants choose to downvote the announcement for a contest."
Maybe, it is a good idea to create a special rating for problemsetter, which will show, how contestants are satisfied with his round. Then they will downvote this rating instead.
ohh that's why i havent been muted at least once since my registration
A select few having the ability to censor what they don't like? Sounds a bit too familiar.
Breaking news, this group of select few already exists. The problem is that these select few have almost no time to check the blogs.
Firstly I think we can split the recent actions into what is considered educational and what is not.
Secondly I think that posts should be removed if and only if the tone or the implications the post has are clearly racist, sexist or discriminatory in any other way. I doubt deleting everything someone doesn't like will be the solution either.
Lastly I think that a moderation team can be an useful idea as long as there will be consensus and accountability of their actions, in order to prevent abuse.
Splitting the Recent Actions so that there exists a separate section for trash posts is a good idea, but I don't see an easy way to force all useless blogs there.
Maybe a system which splits the posts based on the views of the moderating team. It can even be split in multiple categories, such as questions, tutorials, announcements and shitpost among others. I think having a category system would be beneficial.
It's 2023 and people are rediscovering a beautiful, but forgotten concept of an online forum :P
or we can have a feature to personally block a specific user from seeing their blog posts/comments (1 directional blocking).
Choosing not to see the problem is not resolving it.
There are often some shitposts even in the "Top" section. I reckon it would be better to introduce some post categories -- educational, invitations, questions, pure bullshit -- instead of limitting the free speech with some more moderators than there already are.
It would be even better if we had tree hierarchy for educational blogs. Like, I don't want to go through all of them at once or through tags to find something I'm interested in. At least basic structure like on e-maxx would be a great improvement.
Have you heard of Catalog
Thanks! Haven't seen it before, but that's exactly what I had in mind, much appreciated.
Hey man, as someone who has written blogs that have been both recieved well and not so well, as well as someone who doesn't care about the quality of the blog but just want to help ppl, I find the alienation of ppl who write so called "useless blogs" really disgusting. I find it similar to the situation in stack overflow. If you aren't aware of this, check out this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7v0yvdkIHg
Just to explain, codeforces is a website that is meant for all skill levels and ratings. (obviously evidenced by the various divisions of contests), and yet, you all just seem to ignore that. You guys just live inside your own bubble and think that everyone has/should have the same CP ability, english proficiency, and blog writing skills that you guys have, but its obviously not true. Moderating their blogs seems to me like you think codeforces should only be a platform for ppl who are proficient at the aforementioned criteria.
There are often people asking how to improve, what algorithms to learn, or how to solve a problem. And i agree, these are very often bad blogs and get rightfully downvoted. But saying that these blogs should not be written and removed if they are really creates quite an elitist (and quite toxic may i add) environment, which is exactly what codeforces is meant to not be.
Instead, when you see a blog which you think is bad, you really should just consider telling the writer why his blog is bad. Not being toxic is surprisingly easy once u put the slightest bit of effort and you have no idea how much it can mean to the person on the other side of the screen.
At the end of the day, codeforces is a place for us to all learn and grow. And if you censor the bottom end of the ladder, then won't it become quite the opposite? You never know who someone is, what their ambitions are, or what they want from codeforces. Just think, if you were in their position, how would u want ppl to respond to your blogs?
I hope you guys see where I'm coming from. Thanks for reading.
Also another thing to add. Nowadays I have seen a lot of blogs appealing for their code to not be marked as plagiarised in a contest. And these blogs can heavily downvoted as well as completely ignored. I find this as one of the most disgusting, elitist, and toxic things that you can do. This is because the announcement u receive when ur code gets marked as plagiarised literally tells u to write a blog to appeal the decision if its not true. And sure, these blogs are written quite awfully, but they are blogs that are necessary nonetheless. How would u feel if one of ur submissions is skipped and when u write a blog about it no one cares?
I also think that this environment that we have created of toxicity and elitism could be a source of cheating. Because ppl always ask, "why cheat? What's the point? You gain nothing from it.". But with this environment, you do gain something. Its respect. When you have an environment which overly emphasizes ur rating, coloured handles for example, (not saying these are bad necessarily), simply increasing ur rating can tremendously increase the respect ppl have for u, so ppl might cheat. Again, not saying that this is a substantial reason for cheating, but its just something to consider.
Have you read the blog, actually? If you had read it, you would have noticed that I am not talking about people who ask genuine questions. I do think that asking a question is perfectly fine (I discarded one of the possible solutions — setting a rating limit — because it will take away the opportunity to ask questions).
Just to be clear. "Trash" and "useless" blogs are this, this, or that blog about finding bitches that was taken down (most probably by its author). One can easily see that these posts don't make sense at all. Taking down posts which don't make sense doesn't limit the possibility to learn and grow.
Sorry bro, wasn't really clear. Mostly because the blogs that I was talking about recieve basically the same judgement as the ones that you are talking about.
Completely agree with this blog, nothing more to say.
Something to add: maybe we should have even pre-moderation, that means no blog can be made public before the approval of moderators. Example: https://codeforces.me/blog/entry/112544
Such blogs will appear, because one can make many accounts and simply spam with such rude and nonsense blogs.
Honestly, I don't think pre-moderation is a good thing.
Firstly, pre-moderation will affect normal CF users too much. I would like a solution that doesn't affect users by making them wait until one or multiple moderators read their blog and approve it.
Secondly, this will likely cause too much work for the moderators. I think that moderators shouldn't have to read all the blogs which are being posted on CF. Instead, their work should be limited to monitoring Recent Actions and maybe blogs which look numerically suspicious. By "numerically suspicious" I mean something which can be estimated with a program and can also correlate with the blog being trash, like upvote/downvote ratio. The idea of this "numerically suspicious" category is not to automatically ban blogs which meet these conditions, but help moderators search for blogs which are probably breaking the rules.
Maybe it would be enough to introduce somewhat intelligent ordering of "Recent actions". AFAIU, right now it is just sorted by the most recent comment. Maybe it would be better to include other factors such as date of the post, number of likes and dislikes etc.
Probably it is not going to resolve the problem completely but I feel like it can be improved a lot without too much effort.
Why do you liberals loooovvee moderation and censorship?
Because complete, unconditional "free speech" is very rarely a good thing. If removing troll blogs is really censorship, then removing NSFW images (yes, I've seen some here) on Codeforces may as well be called "censorship". Some "censorship" is required to prevent Codeforces from becoming a mess.
Codeforces needs a forum with offtopic threads separated from problem-solving. Let people discuss whatever they want. Why censor?
Are you sure the word "discuss" is applicable to what I want to get rid of?
It's not offtopic; offtopic threads do make some sense. Those blogs I am talking about don't make any. What's there to discuss if the blog is completely meaningless?
this is a coding website. a sizeable proportion of us are probably machine learning enthusiasts. we could probably easily implement some algorithm that does a rough job at segregating trash from actual stuff!
Recent blog like this makes it necessary.
Some accounts like Pakgamer2022 just regularly shit post to farm negative contributions. They should get banned.
I do not believe moderation is the solution.
First of all I do not even think moderation can solve any problems you mentioned, unless taken to an extreme by hard defining what 'low-quality' is. However, it would be very hard to even get a community consensus of what 'low-quality' is. For instance I specifically do not think the account (and the blog post) is low-quality, and I think you are trying to shame an innocent Chinese student for trying to use the blog system to make an artistic expression by using his post here (and thus you are doing an abusive post imo). Of course that is only me who prefers freedom of expression more and has a Chinese background and thus may appreciate the so-called OI-culture. But I hope you do get the idea of how difficult it is to establish consensus, and how I worry that any mod effort to reduce low-quality post may devolve into the moderation's idea of what is low-quality.
I am also worried about the negative chilling effect any moderation can have on blogging. Community moderators such as Reddit are notorious for enforcing their own view on 'political correctness', and those who object can only leave for another subreddit. I think CF's blog is superior in this aspect as everyone has a prerogative to express, subject to minimal rules. Thus I can say what I want to say without worrying about how it may be perceived by a certain mod. I think enacting modding inevitably takes away the freedom, and thus reduces the activity of blogging. High quality posts do not appear out of nowhere, and robust discussion, be it high or low quality, would be necessary for good posts to appear.
I think the effort of trying to improve the atmosphere is good, but I think this cannot be done in a hard way such as modding. I would rather see that we organize and have some high-quality content posted regularly; then I believe that the discussion and the inspiration will improve the atmosphere by itself.
I agree, moderation on online forums always begs the question of "Who watches the watchers".
Reddit is a particularly good example of why moderation is not the answer. This is anecdotal but almost all subreddits I have been a part of eventually have a complete shift in the kind of posts and comments considered desirable, due to the personal biases of moderators, and not the community. Also, for whatever reason most moderators on reddit/other forums are terminally online no-lifers who have frequent power trips in which they ban anyone they disagree with.
I think the simplest solution would be to split "recent actions" into two sections, one with blogs by >= X rated people (I think X~2100 would be optimal), and another for the rest. Call me ratist but almost all useful blogs are posted by the first group of people (exclude round announcement blogs).