Hello friends!

I hope a few of you might still remember me. This old dinosaur participated in very early rounds of Codeforces, and before that did Topcoder for a number of years. I've been away from competitive programming for several years now, but the recently started Advent of Code rekindled the spark, and I proceeded to open Topcoder arena and participate in the recent SRM.

To my utter befuddlement, there were less than 100 participants in Div 1 in this SRM — and looking through recent match history, it seems to be a fairly standard participation rate for a while now. For comparison, back in the good days Topcoder Div 1 routinely had several hundreds of coders.

I've got to admit that seeing this saddened me considerably — I have a ton of fond memories of competing at Topcoder, like rushing those 250-pointers, taking perpetually unsuccessful stabs at 1000-pointers, the violent heartbeat as I pressed the "Challenge" button every time, the nervous fidgeting in anticipation of System Tests that would reveal who stood tall, and who was bound to fall. I have a lot of nostalgia for those days..

So, I wanted to ask y'all — what happened to Topcoder? Did most old-timers stop competing, and the new generation just does not know about it? Did the website redesign hide the Arena applet so deep that you can't find it? Is the Arena just not user friendly enough, so everyone ran towards shinier platforms (wink wink)? Are the problems not as fun anymore?

Share your story — why did YOU stop competing? :)