Winter persists, but Winter Bash 2019 has drawn to a close!
We had a ton of people participate in Winter Bash this year with 266,000 hats awarded throughout the network. Thank you, everyone! We couldn’t have done it without you.
There were 31 hats available this year (well, 32, but one had two versions so we’re saying 31) and no one collected ‘em all. The two users with the most hats across the network collected 30 each. You can check the leaderboard for a full site by site rundown or this round-up for the whole network.
You all shared some amazing pictures on the 2019 meta thread, and here are a few that brought us a smile.
Amy gave us some warm fuzzies with this:


Here’s Ankit Sharma showing off a hat that shouldn’t have been awarded at that time! I guess we have seen stranger things, right?

Kyla, the Mother of Unicorns:

Hat with the Wild West look:


We also saw some breathtaking knitting designs that are worthy of a special mention, like this:

by Eleeza the Character Wizard and this:

by Hitodama (among many others)!
Finally, here are a few more hat stats: the first hat awarded was Amazing Grace, and the most awarded hat was Amazing Grace which was awarded 85,423 times to 80,080 distinct users and the least awarded hat was Living in the Future, awarded only 19 times to 19 distinct users. Every hat was awarded at least once!
Thank you all for participating! Until next year!
4 Comments
Come on Stack Overflow it’s the middle of summer here.
I’m not really sure if SE understands how Americanized their operation of their “international” platforms are. This is reflected in several of their Meta posts, like these:
– https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/297816/net-neutrality-and-stack-overflow-stack-exchange (yes, I understand its importance)
– https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/342440/time-to-take-a-stand (no matter how much I’m disgusted by DT, this is completely irrelevant to SO)
May I also mention that for American users’ profile pages, their locations are spelled with 2-letter codes for the states they live in, within America, as if they expect all humans to know these codes? Non-Americans probably haven’t been taught those in schools.
What also baffles me, is how much investment SE is putting into identity politics, and use of pronouns, especially neopronouns, that I’ve personally never heard of in anything other than an American context. Coming from Norway, a country that beats USA on a number of statistics (including gender equality, etc) I’m baffled by SE’s “solutions” to the problems of discrimination.
It’s as if SE lacks the ability to view themselves from outside of their bubble, and just expect everybody to follow their distinct worldview. This seems to have made them forget simple facts like that 50% of our planet is at its warmest when we (northern inhabitants) celebrate the colder temperatures of the winter.
The problem now, is that they’re pushing out Meta, where the aspects of different worldviews come into play, leaving them with only the reflections of themselves, as in an echo chamber. Yes, I understand that SE is an American company, but it makes me feel sidelined whenever they enforce their American worldview, instead of just keeping it neutral (to the extent possible).
Perhaps I’ve just overreacted to the fact they forgot half the planet currently isn’t in the winter season, but it seems like a symptom of a bigger problem.
This must feel so alienating for anyone in Australia right now…
Don’t you usually explain what all the secret hats were about? Did I miss that somewhere?