lomienyeet's blog

By lomienyeet, history, 2 years ago, In English

TL;DR: more and more troll blogs, attention seeking rewarded with downvotes, vicious cycle?

Dear Codeforces friends,

Recently there are a lot more joke/troll blogs on the Codeforces platform. Obviously, some amount of jokes to lighten up the mood and create a more relaxing atmosphere is a great idea (for example sus has funny trousers prizes jokes), but the situation of trolls appears to be have worsened significantly throughout the past weeks. More and more repetitive content pops up every day, and useful tutorials are often overshadowed by people saying "hurr durr downvote me pls ! ! ! !! here is a funny amogus pic hahahhahhahahaha".

The content posted by trolls varies, but usually falls under a few categories as follows:

1) Random spam / jokes (Polygons)

2) Deliberate hate speech (Bloodless_Castrator before they got banned)

3) Content that makes people uncomfortable (zucyo05)

The main issue here, is that there are many users who are obviously attention-seeking whores wishing to be downvoted. Generally, they post horrible blogs which have absolutely no meaning / offensive meanings, resulting in downvotes from some members of the community, then incentivising them to post similar things again. And considering the frequency at which these users post their blogs, an actually useful blog could be washed away from "Recent Actions" and the attention of the community within mere minutes.

Annoyance is further added to these shitposts by the repetitive content. Since these attention-seeking whores also have absolutely zero originality, they often copy and paste existing blogs in a sarcastic manner to farm downvotes. For example, here is Sparky_Master_WCH1226 making a joke by posting a fake April Fools Contest blog here. And within a few hours, here is Sparky_WCH_Master1226 using the exact same format in this blog. The community sees repetition, downvotes ensue, cycle continues, whatever.

Disclaimer: I understand that I am a pupil, and my opinion is probably unimportant in the eyes of some. In fact, some of you would probably say "You are just a pupil, go back to learning binary search and stop complaining about blogs! All the trolls have higher rating than you, just don't read them if you don't like their blogs!" And indeed, I could shut up and just ignore all troll blogs. Catalog exists for a reason.

However, I would still like you to consider the effects of this worsening problem.

Do we really want to see a day, where Codeforces blogs are nothing but shitposting and no one actually does discussions / useful tutorials related to competitive programming?

Do we really want to see a day, where Catalog exists as a relic of the better past when people used to be helpful?

In the (un?)wise words of SecondThread, "Can we please get back to programming?"

Sincerely, an insignificant pupil

P.S.: Sorry for the immense amount of user tags and long rant. Feel free to upvote or downvote this blog, and comment what you think about the current blogging situation.

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By lomienyeet, history, 3 years ago, In English

Recently, codeforces.com has a new background that you can see right now: a christmas themed background with snowflakes, adding more feelings of a holiday spirit onto codeforces. Seeing this, I had a random idea. What if we made this a monthly thing?

I'm sure that the white theme would be quite boring to look at after a while. Maybe, we could have some art on the background to look at while solving problems, to get more motivated? Or maybe we could have a dark mode themed codeforces, as many coders like to use dark mode for coding? Every month, art submissions could be submitted to codeforces, and there could be a system like the current contest proposal system but for artistic backgrounds. Just like the contest making system, we could add a cash reward for good artists who create an amazing art background for codeforces.

I think this would be a great idea, what do you guys think?

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