Suggestions for Winter Bash 2023

Which hats should be retired?

I believe the K-Pop Light Stick hat should be removed. Users with high rep who don't even log in to Stack Exchange sites during Winter Bash can get it. It's also hard for some sites to have this many upvotes in one answer. Newer Stack Exchange users would also have a rougher time to get this hat.

I believe this hat should be replaced with some hat about something like posting an answer during Winter Bash that gets 3+ score. Or, something like 10 answers each with 1+ score.

Keep in mind the Giant Robot of Offense framework when planning for the new triggers.

The Giant Robot of Offense is a framework for creating content which won’t harm people. I use it for role-playing games, but it applies to any media which generate participatory elements (including cosplay and fanfiction).

The framework is founded on three principles:

• the Legs: Good Intentions
• Arms and Body: I Didn’t Use This to Hurt People
• the Head: No One Else Can Use This to Hurt People

Almost every year we have some triggers that fail at the third step.

When user-to-user interaction can prevent someone from fulfilling a trigger, you can be sure that someone will go a long length to harass other users and ruin their fun.

Four Ayes
Have a specific post upvoted at least once per day for four days with no downvotes in between

While it is clear that the "no downvote" requirement was made in order to enforce a minimum quality, the end result is that some users actively downvoted posts to prevent others from getting the hat. This was referenced multiple times in the Winter Bash 2022 chat rooms, with many users getting serial downvotes on their questions just when they were close to reach the goal.

Please, do something to avoid these annoying situations that keep happening every year. When developing a new trigger, ask yourself:

Can the Grinch harass people by exploiting our requirements in order to make users lose their chance at getting the hat?

Which hats should be kept?

Continue including at least one hat that's a plain pair of sunglasses with a cool title. I liked the hat 2cool4school so much I can hardly get myself to wear a different hat, there weren't any plain sunglasses in 2021 nor in 2020 nor in 2019 so I found this hat to be very satisfying.

We really like frustrating the completionists. :P
－ Catija, Dec 20th 2022

An hat that is different for every user.

Spinda, a Pokemon added in the third generation Pokemon games has an unique characteristic. Every Spinda in the game has a different appearance based on their unique personality value, hidden from the player. Because of this, there are actually 4,294,967,295 (2^32 - 1) possible variations.

example, courtesy of Bulbapedia

It should be pretty easy to create some hat that actually has a different color pattern based on the user id, so that everyone gets a sightly different variant.

[And if you really want to be evil also assign the hat a different name from a random word list, so that users will actually believe these are different hats they could get...]

Please can we avoid incentivising bad behaviors by rewarding them with hats? For example, one of the top users on the overall leaderboard got their reviewing hats by submitting loads of bad reviews and ended up getting review banned. I also saw plenty begging for upvotes to get the hat for a 100-scored answer or even just well-received answers (+1).

It's really frustrating especially as someone who joined stack exchange this year and found it hard to learn the unwritten rules (don't ask for upvotes etc) to then see that spammy behavior rewarded when it's someone with loads of rep doing it. I guess imo the hats should just be a bit of fun that encourage positive behavior without it being a 'who has the most people that they can pester to upvote their posts' or 'who can autoclick through reviews fastest' competition. I guess that's a difficult balance to strike tho.

I'll risk sounding like a broken record, but I'd really like some memento from Winter Bash when its over. To quote the FAQ:

What happens after January 4th?
After January 4th, the sites return to normal and all hats disappear. This is meant to be a fun end-of-year celebration, not a permanent addition to the SE Network.

Having the hats be a temporary feature makes sense, but it would be neat to have some way to save them for personal use - e.g., an export option, or even just keeping the Winter Bash site up in read-only mode.

Bring back the Christmas hat. And why not make it more interesting by adding a Grinch counterpart hat?

So just like the sun and moon, you can either get a Santa face mask or a Grinch face mask hat, not both.

Based on action on Christmas day:

Reopen 3 questions successfully without mod power - Santa face mask hat

Close 3 questions successfully without mod power - Grinch face mask

Please add editing to the list of actions that get hats for participation on a specific day.

The current list: "Post a question, answer, vote, or comment"

Editing can be just as valuable to the system as any of the current actions in the list. And when going through items on the new questions page of SO, I personally find myself editing more frequently than I do doing anything else (commenting is a runner up to that position).

I liked the Flagging and Unflagging hats, I believe some variant of those should be kept as it encourages people to do some form of flagging (the name gives the hint) and that helps remove fluff and stuff from Stack Overflow.

I suggest a hat that is shaped like the Hat (the recently discovered aperiodic monotile):

Which hats should be kept?

I really think the Squared Away and Cubed Away hats should be kept. They are very challenging, plus they motivate users to ask and answer on multiple Stack Exchange sites. Cubed Away require users to ask questions on different Stack Exchange sites too, which is quite difficult to do.

Do we want more secret hats?

Secret hats are the greatest challenge and most fun in the game. So yes, the more the merrier (well saying that: the total hat count shouldn't go over 50, IMO). Mix easy hat triggers with intermediate and difficult ones.

Do we want more secret hats that don't get triggered until long after the start of Winter Bash?

I'm not opposed to this concept, but make it possible that during at least 70% of WB those triggers still can be activated

Bring back the "Defender of the Unicorn" game, last year it looked fun. I’d have never figured it out, but it looked fun.

Which hats should be retired?

Retire the Everything Everywhere All At Once hat. It doesn't encourage any useful behaviour and anyone can get it by upvoting some 10 random answers under one of these 72k+ questions on Stack Overflow.

Hat suggestion: "caption provider". Give N posts with images-with-no-alt-text alt-text for those images.

"Giving the alt-text" would be counted by any of the following:

• Post creation by the post owner, in which case the post is not counted if it gets deleted or closed (to prevent rewarding posts with images that should have used formatted text/tables instead of images)

• Editing a post by anyone, in which case the alt-text should not be the only change in the edit (to prevent rewarding floods of minor edits).

• Approving or edit-and-approving of such suggested edits by edit-queue reviewers. This would be to also incentivize reviews (to prevent system load imbalance due to imbalanced incentives).

Hat name idea: A fun / more mysterious name for the hat could be something with "Ally" in it (a pun on a11y ("accessibility")).

Hat picture idea: blindfold.

Related: What percentage of images on SE have a meaningful alt-text?

As expected, I will follow the tradition and repost this once again.

Five years ago animuson, a Stack Exchange employee pointed out how they were bored by the fact that, for 8 years, Winter Bash had been the same thing with different triggers.

As an aside, I would love to hear suggestions from people that have nothing to do with hats. This was the 8th year we've done the same thing with different triggers and to be honest, I turned them off this year because I've gotten kind of bored with the idea. There's got to be something else fun and interesting we can do at the end of the year that isn't just repeating the same thing over and over

They then proposed a radical change: instead of unlockable hats users would earn coins that could be used to buy (random?) hats.

Essentially, have a list of triggers (both public and secret) that award one Stack Exchange Unicoin each. Then have a collection of stuff they can redeem those coins for. Certain items can also be made only available during certain dates, as a way of rotating out what you can redeem for throughout the entire event.

You can read animuson's full proposal here, while my two side proposals can be found here and here.

I doubt Stack Exchange really wants to implement the "gacha" part of these proposal: seed based "generated" hats (think of those gravatar style avatar generation services) isn't a realistic option, and even a "crane game" is probably too much.

Yet the "earn coins, buy hats" suggestion has a lot of merits.

Currently, the Bash event is starting to show its defects:

• the novelty goes away after the first (few?) days. Most of the secret hats are discovered almost immediately, and the "free4all" date-based hats become just a delusional attempt at keeping the feel of "discovery" ongoing during the entire event
• many users will look at the hat list on the first day, find a few low-hanging apples that they can get... and call it a day.
• every single year Stack manages to fail the "GiantRobot of Offense" test: at least one trigger can be influenced by your local Grinch that revels in making users lose their chance at some hats (example: people using downvotes to prevent users from getting Four Ayes)
• hats are starting to feel like "already seen, already played" content and as a result often the side events get more love than the main one (see the Hat Dash game, the knitting game or even the Save Sparkles hunt).

Whilst detaching the "triggers" from the "hats" won't solve all the problems, it will give the devs more freedom for creativity (maybe we could finally get something for playing the secret chat Asteroid game?). If paired with basic seed-based generation (reminder: balpha is a staff member, he made Unicornify) you could have "infinite" hats, meaning that no one could see all the hats, meaning that there would be an incentive for all users to hunt for hats during all the event, not just the few two days

Which hats should be kept?

Please keep the pirate / X Marks the Spot hat! Arrr

How about a hat for chat? SE Chat is very much under the radar and the only ways to get there are one link in the hamburger menu, or if someone says [chat] in a comment only, not a post.

Some sites have absolute ghost towns for their chat, with The last message was posted 43 days ago being common.

I'd be sad if chat went the same way as the blogs, so how about a hat for using chat? ....a cHAT, if you will.

Which hats should be retired?

Gaining Four Ayes is tricky. It requires two separate things to go your way:

• No one down votes you on the 3rd day to block you gaining it on the 4th.
• Votes tend to come in rapid succession the first couple days and trail off.

If brought back, please modify it:

• Days with your total up votes + down votes are >0.
• Only 3 days non-consecutive days.

The K-Pop Light Stick hat also has an issue. It excludes a lot of smaller sites. So if brought back I'd suggest these changes:

• A lower threshold of 20 will allow all sites, not just Stackoverflow to gain the hat. I produced a table of the top site, middle site, and bottom site:

In the past any gold badge did give a gold hat, I would appreciate that to come back. (It is not that hard to visit a site for 100 days to get it, as long as you remember to start in September.) And it was a great hat to see as well.

New suggestions for hats and hat triggers (either regular or secret ones)

Make an AI generate a few. That'll show'em the new community spirit.

This was my first Winter Bash! I greatly enjoyed a number of hats.

I suggest keeping all of the following hat for Winter Bash 2023:

Over 9000!, Unflagging, This Is The Way, I'm Okay..., Miranda, Squared Away, and Cubed Away.

Both get my aware for challenging hats.

These were easy hats, but encourage good behavior. This is the way rewards people asking positive questions that get answers. I'm Okay... rewards trying for a bounty with a good answer but not being chosen.

One easy and one hard. Miranda is another positive hat, rewarding users for doing good deeds by editing posts. Squared Away was also an excellent hat. It has encouraged me to answer more questions on more sites that I have in the past. I've found it difficult to gain, as I have not yet managed to gain this hat.

The most difficult hat to obtain would be a nice challenge for 2023. It isn't complicated, but requires a great deal of mastery of several subjects.

Make it such that participation on a site brings in more hats and there are fewer hats you can win without participation, so people with zero activity on a particular site can not sit at the top of the leaderboard for that site. This is especially important on small sites where most people have only a few hats. (Or at least, make it multiple day exercises, not a visit one part of the site once to get a hat.) At least one hat should be for new users only (as cookies is this year) so that the people who have accounts on every site can not get all the hats.