The title of my blog also happens to be the title of my thesis which I have submitted for my PhD dissertation, where I was asked to work on a common ground between Politics and Programming and I happened to find this platform the best source for observing people and gathering data (by the way I am pursuing my PhD in Political Science but was pretty active here during my BTech days). I just thought of sharing some of my findings on this platform — for those who might be interested in Political Science and for those who might want to know how politics effects the people around them.
The Global Rise of Right Wing Politics
To give people who don't have a background in political science a context and some background information, since the past two decades, the world started to shift more towards the right. This refers the increase in the likelihood of people falling more for the right wing propaganda than the left wing one, which happened to be the case 2 decades back. This is reflected Right Wing governments coming to power all around the world — be it far right parities gaining power in Europe for the first time since World War 2, USA electing leaders like Trump who has America First policies, the BJP getting ground in India and even the politics of Africa and other Asian nations moving right. As the right wing parties come to power, they promote even more right wing ideologies such as being unapologetic for your country or thinking about your country/religion/any identity before any thing else — even if it harms rest of the world. A lot of us today won't see anything wrong with nuking a country's capital if their government did it to their country first and the loss of innocent lives in the process will be largely ignored. This is a perfect recipe for Wars because as every country adopts "nation first" policies, they automatically become a threat to the other country who also follow "nation first" policy and that leads to an endless loop of war as we can see in the world around us at present. And this whole process, since the governments promotes more right wing inclined content, it rewires the human brains consuming it and reshapes their morals which has led to a politicization of Codeforces in the recent days.
How Codeforces is seeing a Right Shift
Since the 5 years, the world has is starting to shift from right to far right and it's impact can be seen on the people active on this platform. Since politics and society shape their morals, the morals of the people here is becoming more right oriented. An evidence of the same, as I have put forward in my thesis, is the rise of otherism, in proper terms, the in-group/out-group bias. This is evident from the recent actions in this website. When I was active here, the recent actions was flooded with informative content. There was cheating back then too and possibly the percentage of cheaters on this platform has always remained constant with minor fluctuations. I don't deny the rise of cheating in past year or two but the number of people giving contests has seen an equivalent rise. So the overall percentage of cheaters only has some minor fluctuations if any. However the blogs at present seem to be purely cheater-oriented and blogs exposing cheaters usually get more upvotes and user engagement than blogs about algorithms and people asking doubts.
All this can be boiled down to one new trait — the people's newer sense of moral that make them feel it's their obligation to expose and catch cheaters and prove their loyalty to this platform by making it better doing so. This is something which was missing in the audience 5 years back. You make a cheater blog and they tell you to spend time practicing and improving yourself rather than "wasting" time doing so. Back then we didn't really have users with that degree of loyalty and love for the platform that they would make time cleaning it. Nor did they have the intentions or "morals" of doing so purely because they were more interested in self growth and chilling out with their real friends after doing so. Back then Codeforces used to be more like an OJ but not it seems more of a social media platform where people are vocal about anything in general with majority of the blogs (including this one) having nothing to do with algorithms or competitive programming.
Back then, when a new user opened it, he would probably just solve problems, ask a few doubts, read about some technique and go away. Now when a user comes there is enough spice for them to get distracted just like they do on social media and if you think about it a bit, you might be spending 90% of your time on Codeforces without actually coding or having anything to do with problems or expanding your knowledge in general. The culprit — love and morals.
The rest of my thesis includes various other topics describing in detail how people's minds are changing, how both love and hate are strangling the platform's neck, how it is changing from a CP platform to something like twitter, how a new form of outgrouping has emerged (called cheaters) and how it is influenced by right wing ideologies, and also some dark ones like how to convince/control a majority of this platform user's psyche/perception using the fundamentals of right wing control by just tuning it over to the model currently being followed by the codeforces community but that would be too much for this blog (and not to mention more prone to being misused). I hope this one was of some value to you guys. If yes wish me best for my doctoral defense :) Would be answering counter questions in this blog as I might be asked similar ones in my doctoral defense.
