Hey guys! I am writing this blog because I am pissed on Codeforces Community.
Though platform is one of the best and popular online judge platforms. The contests held are really amazing. The quality of problems, the response time of site during contest are great. The editorials are super fast, short and precise.
But when it comes to asking doubts and problems I don't understand why people like to downvote others. Have no/low rating done something wrong? Many top rated coders get upvotes on shitty posts(I am not saying they never get downvotes). I think community just thinks that every low rated coders doubts are bullshit and can always be found on google.
But hey I try to spend 2/3 days to understand something. Try to read blogs and papers about it. When I couldn't understand something I try to ask it in a blog form so that the doubt and its answers will be available on internet for others who faces problems like me. I could have always asked anyone personally but I believe its worth sharing doubt because others might have same doubt too.
I think that's why coders create fake IDs just to comment or ask doubts so that they don't get downvotes. I know it wouldn't really affect there coding or rating if they get downvotes.
No offence to top rated coders. Your blogs are really helpful.
If you agree you comment down for upvotes.
PS: I am fond of writing blogs and editorials. So if I get enough votes I will try to write blogs from this ID.
(Downvote this blog if you like)
Codeforces should not allow to comment to users who haven't given atleast one contest from that ID and should not allow to write blogs who haven't given atleast 10 contests.
This reduces number of fake IDs. Can't do anything of smurf accounts :P
I'm eager to see epic battle between csacademy and snarknews.
Yeah, about as action-packed as correspondence chess.
>tfw csacademy doesn't post anymore
I would be not allowed to write blogs according this rule T__T
I think many people get "pissed" because some of the questions asked are very well-known and there is an apparent amount of low — effort shown in searching for the solution yourself before asking it (thus your blog being 'available' for such people is not really the bottleneck here), and thus spamming everyone (especially if a new blog is created for this). However, based on your blogs I think you've gotten satisfactory answers for the queries, so why even worry about upvotes/downvotes?
Of course sometimes there are undeserved downvotes as well as undeserved upvotes, but I think that the main reason most people get downvotes is that their question is simply badly written. For example:
I personally enjoy trying to help when people ask, but the majority of the blogs asking for help are just horrible. As I said, sometimes there are undeserved downvotes, but I do not believe that's the majority of the cases.
Let's look at the current "Recent actions" in Codeforces as of writing this comment.
Topmost asking-for-help blog is this. What do we see? Link to a problem, link to code — "do the work for me, please". I know the guy doesn't mean bad, but that's a terrible blog. There should be a large text explaining exactly what his idea is, explaining what he's tried and ideally the code should be commented. Why should someone spend half an hour of his day to dive in nearly 200 lines of code when the guy who is asking for help spent no more than 10 seconds on that blog?
Upvotes/Downvotes on that blog are -7 (as of writing this comment). Not surprising and not related to the guy's rating.
Next blog that is asking a question is this. The question is well-phrased and the author has clearly put some effort into research, giving multiple links and quotes. Has upvotes.
Next one is this. I might be picky but looking at that double "??" makes me feel like downvoting straight from the title. The text is rambly and does not really give any details of what problem he has with Codeblocks at all. Downvotes.
Next up is your blog which I suppose is the reason for this blog here. I personally wouldn't downvote your NIM game blog, but it's not ideal. The text is posted in pictures that feel a bit out of context. What is described as the "traditional Nim-game" is definitely not what people normally mean by Nim. The random cheatsheet and fixed 1,3,5,7 feel random as well.
Next one is this one. I don't even think I need to comment on this. There is no clear goal of the blogpost, I am not sure what kind of help is expected at all. It's downvoted.
Final one is this. It's not great but it's straight-forward. The guy is asking for an idea, the problem is linked and not badly explained, the English is good and the guy is polite. It's upvoted. (Though with that pushy attitude in the bump comment, might not be for long).
I am aware that it's easy to nitpick posts, but my point is that the majority of posts asking for help are just really, really bad, which makes a false impression that the reason they're downvoted is that the authors are lower-rated. At the end of the day you should respect anyone who tries to help you and you should be the one doing the majority of the work if you need help. I won't forget one time when I spent over an hour to write a long comment with diagrams for an atrociously written blogpost asking for help, only to have the author proceed to delete the whole blogpost along with my comment half an hour later. Many blogs deserve their downvotes.
Don't forget, people will downvote you even if you fulfill everything written here.
Out of all the asking for help blogs I've written, only one ever had positive score. And honestly, those blogs were the ones I put the most time into writing.
(Luckily, people will still help you out. Those guys are the real top contributors of Codeforces.)
While you might get downvoted even if you fulfill everything, I do believe that would be very rare. What I wanted to emphasize is that there are very few posts that are actually well-written and polite. Of course, that is all just my opinion as a person who helps in such blog posts from time to time.
Can you please explain, why is this blog downvoted?
It is quite simple, I think. There are definitely no reasones to upvote this post, because it's most likely interesting only to you. And in whole Codeforces community surely there are some people who, for example, do not like the last phrase (such expressive statements look a bit weird), so they downvote.
I think this post is just not well written (I would pass it in 90% of cases), but
"because it's most likely interesting only to you."
is imho false. It's weird unusual bug and as helpful for begginers to learn this type of mistakes as fun for some people (like me) to dig in this programs.
Well structured and laconic explanations what's happening, why it's weird and a little research or something and that would be a nice blog.
I think we are here to code, not to get contribution, for me it's just like a side mission, with these many downvotes, if you care about your contribution so much, you may lose the main goal(coding!!).
Please don't downvote me (T_T) beacause of my poor rating..,