The leaderboard has led to the same predictable discussion for as long as the AoC has existed. Recurring themes:

- The puzzles get published in the middle of the night for most of Europe, can't we have a better system like scoring on <arbitrary other metric the poster likes better>.

- It's weird that many of the pages say "just have fun, it's not a race" and then also there's a prominent leaderboard page to show who's currently ahead in the race.

- There's been people taking the whole thing way too seriously from basically year 1, trying to load their puzzle input as fast as possible by polling every 10 ms and putting too much load on the servers.

- Whether AI is allowed is always a super toxic discussion with no real outcome because you can't enforce it.