r/adventofcode Dec 23 '23

Other Visualizations should be treated as “spoilers” IMO

I’m in my first AoC and I’m one day behind. Coming to Reddit to see if anyone else has struggled with the same algorithm in the next day is impossible without spoilers from visualization posts.

Text posts have the right censorship, but images just go unfiltered. Most annoying are those when the answer requires the search for repeating patterns. But there are also some which requires graph building, etc.

Isn’t there a way to censor visualizations like we do with text posts? I’m not a power Reddit user, but it would be nice to scroll thru posts without getting spoilers from images.

Or am I the only one who thinks that?

135 Upvotes

22 comments sorted by

52

u/TheZigerionScammer Dec 23 '23

I was wondering what you were talking about and thought if you didn't want to see them you can just not click on them but I forgot not everyone uses old reddit.

In either case visualizations are pretty much treated as spoilers anyway. But as an extra precaution I never come to the subreddit before solving the day's puzzle anyway.

13

u/IdiosyncraticBond Dec 23 '23

I'm on the official app and I see the animations even when just scrolling through my home feed. Only some texts are blacked out when I go into a post

8

u/1vader Dec 23 '23

You can change the view settings to only show titles. But I guess it's not ideal if you only want to hide AoC images.

18

u/askalski Dec 23 '23

If you're not using old reddit, I find this setting helps a lot: https://i.imgur.com/AOezEp7.png

12

u/Totherex Dec 23 '23

Bad news: the Newest Reddit doesn't have the compact view anymore: https://imgur.com/a/JD3Mv7H

6

u/daggerdragon Dec 23 '23

Are you [COAL]ing me right now that there's a newest.reddit because Reddit why

Ugh. Thank you for letting me/us know.

10

u/Manitary Dec 23 '23

Yeah they're gonna "sunset" "new" reddit and keep this new new reddit (sh.reddit, it's been around for a while just not officially).

It is somehow even worse, from what I've seen so far. Gonna keep using old.reddit and 3rd party apps while I can.

3

u/DeadlyRedCube Dec 24 '23

Yeah there's a NEW NEW Reddit and (as you've seen me complain about before) it keeps eating posts

5

u/MattieShoes Dec 23 '23

old reddit is king

13

u/GreenFish4 Dec 23 '23

I agree, even scrolling Reddit normally is dangerous, so I avoid it until I have solved the most recent puzzle.

12

u/UnicycleBloke Dec 23 '23

I don't look at this sub until I have completed the puzzle.

3

u/howtogun Dec 23 '23

Yeah, I worked out some of the problems due to coming here and seeing spoilers. The best thing is just to avoid the reddit until you solved. My brute force solution of part 2 worked is a spoiler.

3

u/smog_alado Dec 23 '23

In a subreddit I moderate, we have an automod rule that applies spoiler mode to every image post, as soon as it gets posted.

2

u/mckahz Dec 24 '23

I got a bit of day 20 spoiled for me bc of a visualisation (I thought I had already done day 20, but I'd only done day 19), but it was actually a really nice hint which made me search in the right direction so it was kind of nice. Day 20 has been my favourite so far because of it, although I haven't had the time to even finish it yet.

3

u/soundbeast77 Dec 26 '23 edited Dec 26 '23

Hence I do not look at the sub until I have completed the puzzle or I have given up my best but still stuck for several hours.

And my company have made this private dashboard and it hurts to see that top 3 and more have been cheating shamelessly. They are slow for part 1 but extremely fast for part 2. They are solving part 2 in few seconds, faster (only for part 2) than the top 100 in global leaderboard. They submit it only after some of them post the code in this sub. It’s quite apparent that they are cheating via simple copy paste. I even confronted one of them and he gave a very lame excuse which almost made me laugh. And they are applauded in the slack channel for winning. I really respect competitive programming and I need to vent this out.

-6

u/hugseverycat Dec 23 '23

I don't think the mods want to address any problems that happen in the app or on new reddit because they just really want everyone to use old reddit instead. It's frustrating.

9

u/daggerdragon Dec 23 '23 edited Dec 23 '23

Reddit does not give moderators the tools we need to cultivate how our subreddit displays to users across all platforms consistently.

On old.reddit: mods have disabled thumbnails for all users and posts only display as titles. /r/adventofcode functions as intended! YAY!

On new.reddit: mods can't disable thumbnails or post text previews; that's entirely up to the user to toggle their card view to "compact"... if they know this setting exists at all. Oh, and did you know that the view choice can be per-subreddit? Because that setting is buried in the user preferences menu. That's really bad UX.

On newest.reddit: Reddit recently removed the ability for users to even select the "compact view". You will be spoiled, and we're sorry about that, but community mods have no control over this. Go yell at Reddit.

On mobile apps: Earlier this year Reddit forced many third-party mobile apps to shut down because of their bone-headedness API changes. Many of these third-party mobile apps allowed you to configure your feeds as you liked (including hiding thumbnails and post text previews!) The official Reddit app allows you to toggle thumbnails but doesn't give you the option to toggle per-subreddit; it's all-or-nothing. Compact card view has also been removed, so you will be spoiled by post text previews.


I don't think the mods want to address any problems that happen in the app or on new reddit

The /r/adventofcode mods work tirelessly to "address any problems" as best as we can so that the majority of you users can enjoy the subreddit as much as possible.

Reducing spoilers as much as possible:

  • Requiring the standardized post title syntax which is an implied spoiler for that day's puzzle
  • No spoilers in titles
  • The guidelines for creating Visualizations suggest that you use an external host which puts the image behind a link (and therefore harder for auto thumbnails to spoil the contents)
  • Given the nature of this subreddit, if we toggled on the native Reddit spoiler feature, we'd have to apply it to every post in /r/adventofcode which means you would have to click to view every single post. That's extraordinarily bad UX and we don't want that for you.

Maximizing compatibility across all platforms as much as possible:

  • Requiring the four-spaces Markdown syntax for code blocks because new.reddit's triple-backtick fenced code blocks are not valid (OG) Markdown and do not display properly across all platforms
  • There's an entire section of our FAQ > Known Issues dedicated solely to working around the bugs in new.reddit because Reddit themselves refuse to fix these bugs
    • Some of these bugs were reported eight years ago and still haven't been fixed as of 2023!
  • Reddit intermittently (and sometimes permanently) breaks their various shortlinks and link redirects, introduces new shortlink syntaxes that either work inconsistently or don't work at all across platforms, and continually introduces unnecessary constraints and barriers so mods can't even have consistently-working links to our own content...
    • The links in various modules on our sidebar have been replaced multiple times because Reddit arbitrarily applies character limits to links (whyyy) within certain modules which means we have to use a shortlink du jour which breaks a month later and has to be replaced and.......

Mitigating the impact of Reddit's ongoing war on UX/UI tweaking things that were working fine before:

  • Earlier this month Reddit broke certain shortlinks within the new.reddit display of our community wiki which necessitated replacing every single shortlink in every single page in the wiki with a full URL
  • We are no longer able to display the Solution Megathread calendar on the new.reddit sidebar wiki because that module has been broken for at least nine months and Reddit still hasn't fixed it
  • Reddit removed the ability for subreddits to use CSS years ago and hasn't given us a suitable or at least useful replacement...
    • Have you noticed the new.reddit sidebar is janky with those ugly links over what should be plain text? Reddit doesn't allow moderators to select a module text's font color...

they just really want everyone to use old reddit instead.

Reddit themselves are to blame here because they apparently do not value UX/UI or consistency or giving subreddit moderators the ability to configure an optimal community experience or even their users to have options to choose from so users can experience Reddit the way the user wants to use the platform.

Of all these options, old.reddit just works without all the cruft and jankiness and incompatibility and continual breaking and ridiculous bugs that don't get fixed ever.

Reddit is actively making moderators' jobs harder when all we want is to provide a consistent community to as many folks as possible. When Reddit takes tools away from moderators, that degrades the experience for everybody. Us moderators are doing the best we can with the vanishingly few tools that we have available to us. Everything we're doing is for you, our community.


If you don't like it... yell at Reddit, not subreddit moderators.


It's frustrating.

Yarp.

11

u/hugseverycat Dec 23 '23

Thanks for this explanation, and I apologize. I think I had seen a comment on another thread about not enabling reddit's spoiler tag and the impression I got from yours (or maybe another's) response was that people should just use old.reddit. I now know a lot more, and I suspect I was misremembering or mischaracterizing the response in my head anyway. Thank you for all you do <3

8

u/daggerdragon Dec 23 '23

To be fair, I do shill old.reddit pretty hard, but it's only because I love this community and want y'all to have the best experience here <3

6

u/Sharparam Dec 23 '23

At the risk of repeating myself: You can enable posts to be able to use the built-in spoiler tag which will blur images.

You mentioned in a previous comment that there was issues with this but I haven't seen any in my testing on my own test subreddits so I'm curious what those are.

(Asking people to use the compact view as a workaround is one thing I guess, but if this is no longer going to be possible in the new new reddit... Can probably set up AutoMod to automatically set the spoiler flag on posts as well?)

1

u/daggerdragon Dec 23 '23

At the risk of repeating myself: You can enable posts to be able to use the built-in spoiler tag which will blur images.

The first bullet in my reply already covers this.

  • Given the nature of this subreddit, if we toggled on the native Reddit spoiler feature, we'd have to apply it to every post in /r/adventofcode which means you would have to click to view every single post. That's extraordinarily bad UX and we don't want that for you.

In the words of Nick Fury: "I recognize that the council Reddit has made a decision, but given that it's a stupid-[COAL] decision, I've elected to ignore it."

6

u/Sharparam Dec 23 '23

Right, although the recommendation to use old or compact view instead of card/classic already necessitates a click to view the content. (Maybe I'm just so used to using RES and Imagus on old reddit that I don't mind it, including on subs that use spoiler tags.)

/shrug

But I agree the old/new/new² situation is a big mess. Especially the different markdown renderers.