It may be the eye of the beholder, but Winter Bash 2020 seems to be much more popular than years before. Some evidence for this can be found in SEDE; I've tried to display the progress of some values x days after Winter Bash started.
For example, the score of the Hat List question:
or the number of answers to the Show Off Your Hats topic:
or even the number of questions about Winter Bash:
I know during last year's Winter Bash many users were really fed up with the Code of Conduct changes and the company removing diamonds, which might explain the low score of the Hat List question, but 2019 wasn't a special year for the other two metrics, and they have grown enormously in 2020. But perhaps I'm looking at the wrong figures?
I'm not sure if the number of earned hats will tell us anything; that could be very much dependent on how easy they are to earn and my gut feeling says most hats are earned by users who don't even actively participate in Winter Bash and perhaps even ignore it altogether (just like most of the network's traffic is from anonymous users visiting the sites from a search engine).
So, what's the story behind the success of Winter Bash 2020? Is the pandemic causing everybody to stay at home, with more time on their hands to participate? Is this year's hat selection offered by the company much better than years before? Or is everybody enjoying Hat Dash or the other Unicorn challenge a lot?
/stats
page is up.:-(