Diamantis's blog

By Diamantis, history, 14 months ago, In English

I think It'd be valuable to change the contribution system in codeforces. Unlike other platforms like leetcode, codeforces doesn't motivate its users to tip towards positivity. We could do this in at least two ways.

One way would be to demotivate users that love downvoting everything with public titles that highlight their passion for putting others down. This could either be a threshold in their $$$\frac{\text{downvotes}}{\text{total votes}}$$$ ratio or something more complex. Of course we can have a similar feature for upvoters that like to spread love and only use the downvote button when they find something particularly bad.

Another way would be what leetcode does. That is to have a minor penalty for downvoting too much and no penalty for upvoting so that members of the community use their downvoting ability more wisely and selectively.

I think that features like this, along with monitoring upvote/downvote statistics more closely, will help us move towards a better contribution system, which admittedly has room for improvement.

What do you guys think?

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By Diamantis, history, 14 months ago, In English

I was wondering if the idea of re-arranging the ranks below 1600 or 1900 has been brought to the table before. According to this bot that I found to figure out my percentile, it seems that there are 5 ranks that serve the purpose of distinguishing the best, from the best of the best! That is, master, international master, grandmaster, international grandmaster, legendary grandmaster all belong in the 99th percentile. To present that, I found a random user that is a master and found his percentile in the percentile plot, using the bot I mentioned. I personally cannot speak about these ranks since I'm a mere mortal. However, I think it might be good for the codeforces community if there were more ranks to better describe people that fall below the 99th percentile. It doesn't seem fair to give 1% of the community 5 ranks and 99% of the community also 5 ranks. I personally think that there is a great level gap from rating 600 to 900, and then from 900 to 1200, however they are represented by the same rank. I think this would discourage new users to use this platform. Unless we want to deliberately keep the amount of codeforces enthusiasts relatively small for whatever reason, I think we should consider describing those level gaps I mentioned with new ranks. Also the expert is 300 points, so we could also add another rank there, keep 200 points for expert and completely restructure anything below 1900.

For example, something like this:

  • 0-900: Newbie
  • 900-1100: Pupil
  • 1100-1300: Apprentice (I found out this existed in the past)
  • 1300-1500: Advanced
  • 1500-1700: Specialist
  • 1700-1900: Expert

What do you guys think?

Percentile Plot

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