I've noticed that throughout Codeforces, many people are downvoted my many people because of no apparent reason. I would like to know the justifications of these downvotes.
Ex 1. In a post by a user asking for a push in the right direction regarding improving and getting started, I noticed that people started downvoting it. I personally think that asking that was a perfectly valid question, though the rest of Codeforces might not agree.
Ex 2. In a recent post by me, that I deleted, I simply wanted to share my thought process of how I solve the latest codeforces round problems A + B. I know that my solutions weren't the best, but I don't believe that they deserve a downvote.
Now, to get to the main point of this post. What causes you guys to downvote and why? I would like to know for the reference of me and other users because I still don't understand why posts get downvoted all the time, even though I can see the effort that the user put in to contribute to this community. Personally, I believe that all of these downvotes are completely un-warranted. Some people just want to share their ideas, or ask questions. Isn't that what this whole platform is all about?
It is answer is very simple. People don't respect newbies. If you are grandmaster then you have to do only one thing to gain a contribution. Just type a some comment!! People mostly don't understand what they are talking about, but people are upvoting them.
If you want contribution then you have to increase your rating first!!!
While this is very much true, it's by no means the only reason a comment will be upvoted or downvoted. Ironically, a good example of this is comments complaining about ratism — those usually have a positive number of upvotes because people agree with that comment.
The reason that most "How can I get better" posts are heavily downvoted is because there are a ridiculously large amount of them, and most CF users probably feel that you can simply look up some resources instead of having the community hand them to you.
For your second example about providing your own solutions for a recent A and B, I can't really speak on that since I never read that post. But I think that unless your shared solution is novel in some way (as in significantly different from the editorial), then people will feel it's rather useless since there's already an official resource they can use.
In general a lot of blogs or comments also get downvoted because some people don't use code formatting or spoiler tags to hide their code. While you can't really fault these people since nobody's explicitly told them that those features exist, it's not that hard to take a look at some other comments which do use these features. These blogs and comments tend to be skewed towards lower rated users. I think that can be mainly attributed to the large amount of grays/greens compared to the amount of oranges/reds. You could also make an argument that low rated users are more likely to ask for help, and also more likely to have poor English since having good English (or Russian) is important to comprehending problem statements.
I personally try not to downvote or upvote anything unless it is very good or very bad, but this is what I've observed in my time in the CF community.
Or just some memes you need.
Some blogs are absolutely useless.
You can google stuff and find an answer in a few seconds (for example the HoW tO gEt BeTtEr blogs). Search
how to get better in codeforces blogand you will find this blog.As for your recent post, it's not very useful since there are many ways to get that info (i.e. editorial) and pretty much everyone solves the first two problems. On the other hand, you could have said that you would add more solutions after upsolving the harder problems. This would have probably have stopped you from being downvoted.
Of course, not adding the solutions to the harder problems (at least after a day or 2) would get you downvoted.
I think the most downvotes for blogs come from some few reasons:
For comments, it's not exactly the same, but similar.
People downvote stuff when they find it unnecessary or the question has been asked before which is just a google away.
Also some people just tend to dislike whatever comes to them. I happened to have a comment on a div 3 announcement which is still getting downvotes even 2 days after the contest was over. (I don't consider such people having any fun in their life. )
If they see you are grey , green or cyan , Most (Not all) People downvote for no reason....
See my blog , it had 14 downvotes at one point and were still decreasing , A master posted almost exactly the same blog after 32 minutes and 71 upvotes in 3 hrs
However another master called out on this behaviour and commented on my blog and made a separate one addressing this issue ..
Then people started upvoting it ... got me thinking ... Do they really need a high rated user to tell them what's right and what's wrong , Don't they have a free will of their own , cuz if they don't then they have much bigger issues to worry about ....