Is it just me or has discussion on Codeforces become a lot less lively?

Revision en1, by -is-this-fft-, 2024-09-16 15:36:03

A few months ago, I was pretty disheartened. I wrote a blog that I put thought and effort into, and it got only +163 votes and basically no discussion. Meanwhile, a dumb parody I had published just 5 days earlier got +959 votes. Ok, but let's say that this is a bad example, maybe my explanation was bad or uninteresting or people just don't care about residual graphs that much. That's fair.

But I suspect this is a bigger trend. I don't know if my memory deceives me here, but I feel like some years ago there were more high-quality, educational blogs with active discussion. WeakestTopology posted a math blog recently and there are no comments, the blog might just slide out of Recent Actions pretty soon. This seems to happen a lot with such blogs, especially on "advanced" topics.

What I see a lot instead is poor quality content. Lots of blogs like "please debug my code" and "how can I improve" just overwhelm all other content. A lot of comments have extremely bad quality. They are poorly formatted (please tell me — how is it possible that an adult who goes to university doesn't know that there is no space before a period?), often incoherent and disorganized, start with "bro really thought", show a complete lack of reading comprehension or are just plain wrong. It's funny and sad at the same time how often I see greys teaching cyans how to become purple. It seems that too many people have given up on even simply downvoting, let alone debunking low quality content.

Especially blogs about cheaters. Fighting cheating is a noble cause, but can you please at least format your blog well? Use paragraphs, organize your writing, link to submissions. Preferably don't bother with screenshots or links to someone bragging about their rank 2632 on LinkedIn. And familiarize yourself with the system.

Years ago, I used to look at the Codechef discussion board and laugh at what a mess it was. I was happy that Codeforces was much better. Today, I feel like Codeforces blogs are exactly like the Codechef board I used to laugh at.

Here's a poll. If your account is at least 5 years old, please vote.

  • Yes, you are right, things have gone downhill
  • No, you're gotten old/crazy, it was always bad
  • I joined less than 5 years ago

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en1 English -is-this-fft- 2024-09-16 15:36:03 2503 Initial revision (published)