Topic: @Admins: Merit not working as configured, trolls just don't care (no surprise) - page 2. (Read 1271 times)

Shills would pay $5 per post if they have to. I thought OP is talking about garbage spammers. I even merited some of the Bcash shills when merit was new. Not because I liked their posts or agreed with their posts, because I was looking at them without judging their behaviour. I stopped giving merits to posts outside of meta. let other sources do that.

@OP, if you think charging a fee to post could stop trolls and shills, you are wrong. they have enough money to pay any amount. their posts are not simply to troll, they have purpose and have a leader telling them what to do.

About a solution to seriously fight account farmers and their spams, I guess the best solution is to charge a fee per post to receive merits and rank up and have your post count up every time you post. free posts should not add to your activity and post count.

Sorry for repeating myself again.

I think he probably means accounts like freightjoe and Anti-Cen who spend a lot of time posting about how much they hate Bitcoin and why it's doomed to failure.

I think he is referring to those people who disagree/have valid issues with his idea...  .

Who are these trolls that this thread is talking about? I would say that trolls are less of an issue than spam that originates from signature campaigns.

And there would be a way to suppress those: by removing signatures entirely. Another way to decrease the popularity of them would probably be with removing hyperlinks/styled text and bbcode visual options in signatures.

Paying to post would destroy a lot of trolling and spam, yes. But it would also close off the community to (what I would assume is) a tiny group, who are probably going to just talk on IRC or some other media.

How about paying a fee per post in order to have your posts counting up and if you are not going to pay a fee, then no matter how many times you'd post, You wouldn't have any post counter. if you have 100 posts, the next post would still count and show 100. unless you are paying a fee like $0.3 per post?

No post count, no activity, no ranking up. posting without paying a fee should also disable you from receiving merits. it wouldn't stop innocent people from asking their questions.

People giving out merits may behave differently, if everybody had started on zero merits. Right now, they tend to focus on lower ranking people who may require merits to rank up. You can imagine what will happen if the merit sources also started worrying about how they are going to get merits.

The proposal to charge for posts would clean up the spam, but reduce traffic to the site. I don't think that is the desired end-result. Personally, I wouldn't mind paying a small amount. People with paid signatures should typically be charged higher (or should pay a one-time fee to get their signature spaces activated).

I don't think most of us are missing the point; we're just saying that this won't work nor will theymos implement it any way. I know paying a price would be a very effective mechanism against people to minimise the spam and is why I've suggested people have to pay for signatures before because at least that doesn't effect people who just want to come here to talk about bitcoin or get a question asked, but let's say we go with your suggestion. At what price would it cost to make a post here? Fractions of a cent? A Cent? Fiddy cents? A dollar? Five dollars? Sure, if it was a fraction of a cent I'd likely pay it but so would many others including trolls and spammers. A cent, probably the same? Fifty cents? Maybe, maybe not. A very determined troll would also likely have no issue in paying a fee no matter what the amount. What then? The "bitcoin is a ponzi" NLC troll has been trolling this forum for years with literally thousands of bot accounts and he must have spent quite a bit of time, energy and money paying the evil fees over and over again but he still pops up every now and again (usually when the price tanks) to troll once again.


A lot of us feel your frustrations about the decline in quality here and many of us including myself have put forward numerous suggestions to try curb spam, but trolls are a part of any forum these days and this one is just a huge victim of bitcoin's success. As long as bitcoin is worth something or has huge potential as an investment then people are going to flock here in droves to try earn it for free and I don't think paying a 0.0000001 fee every time they want to make a post here is going to change that. All it will do is put off innocent people who just wanted to come here to get a quick answer to a question whilst the ones that will benefit are the people who are prepared to pay it. If you're looking or hoping for the good old days where it was just satoshi and few cypherpunks having an intelligent discussion about a technology that could change the world then I'm afraid that time period has gone and probably isn't ever going to come back no matter how much it costs to post here.

My issue with charging to post (in whatever form it takes - sign up fee, fee per post, etc) is that I don't believe it will end spam. Signature campaigns already pay people to spam. What is to stop them paying people slightly less to spam (and we all know there is no shortage of people willing to spam the forum for pennies) and using the money saved to cover the fees the forum will charge?

That's interesting, and I hadn't of the Pareto principle. I suspect that it is true, but with a slight variation. I think there could be two basic models. The forum members who are here for discussion and information exchange, and post quality may apply there. The other model is in the world of the bounty hunters, and 80/20 may still apply, but priority may be given to rank upgrades for alts and bounty promoting members, rather than post quality.

what you're talking about is moderation, which is objective. admins establish rules and moderators enforce them. i support hiring more moderators (seems like a no-brainer) and additional forum rules that discourage spam. these things are objective---we (the regular plebs) can observe that.

but merit is unmoderated. it's subjective. there's certainly no requirement that thoughtful or high-quality posts receive merit. there's certainly nothing preventing people from passing merit among friends or those they agree with rather than awarding quality. * so, solely using merit to decide forum privileges means trading objective standards for unchecked power. that's the distinction.

* wild speculation: i'd guess from observation that merit distribution follows the pareto principle, with post quality being the underlying motive the vast minority of the time.

That would only work if it was combined with resetting the ranks by removing the initial distribution Merit. I'm mainly counting that option out based on what theymos has said.


Based on the numbers from yesterday it would make theymos the only Legendary member, Lutpin and Lauda the only Heros (satoshi, and nullius don't have enough activity) and only 24 Sr. Members. That would be fine for me as I'm one of the 24 but I can't imagine how much uproar there would be from the thousands that would lose out.

So if that doesn't happen then all the sig spammers can afford to pay the tax.


That's a very different issue to spam and I really don't know how well funded or what motivates each individual troll.


I think most of us replying in this thread share the same objective but just disagree about this being a workable solution. When I think back to when I first started reading this forum in 2012 and then joined in 2013 only because I wanted to buy mining equipment. If it had been pay to post at the time I would have just done the deal by PM and probably remained a lurker. I'm glad that didn't happen and I got involved in talking to people here and became part of this.
Pay to post would put off anyone new to but genuinely interested in Bitcoin, but would just be seen as a tax to be paid by the signature spammers.

There's a number of other solutions to the spam problem from the extreme of banning signatures altogether or what I would prefer, getting tough on signature campaigns that pay for spam. Set some strong rules for campaigns and then appoint one of the moderators to monitor them. Give that moderator the ability to ban those signatures from the forum. Extend the advertising ban on ICOs from the forum banner ads to the entire forum. Trash the altcoin bounties board.

OK - I'll make the statement. I won't pay anything to post on a forum. I never have, and I doubt if I ever will.

In fact I don't post in any forum if I don't receive some benefit from it. I've been a member of paid to post forums, and the quality of posting is often pretty low. Technical advice forums such as Audacity, are great for solving problems and discussiong projects, but I tend to be an infrequent poster if I don't have a problem. I guess that's a bit selfish, but I feel that with low to intermediate knowledge, I may not be giving the best advice, so I tend to be a bit cautious. Allowing the responsible use of a signature is one way to reward posters, but it needs to be monitored to ensure that signature posting is not the member's primary motivation.

Social netyworking is another great advantage of a forum like Bitcoin Talk. Paid forum or boards are really only useful for financial deals between members, and where reputation and integrity is important. However, the deals need to be at a reasonable level. For example, it isn't worth having a closed board for $10 domain name sales. If the sales are for names in excess of $1,000 ( say ), then it may be worth it.

But that’s the way every forum works. Someone (a single person or some kind of multi-member organ) is in charge and can delegate power to others. People don’t have to have identical opinions about everything to make it as members, but they need to have enough in common to hold the community together. I don’t think it’s realistic to strive for some kind of utopian Bitcointalk where everyone, including people who have no interest in the Bitcoin project except getting rich quick posting random garbage, would be happy.

I say continue with the concept of ‘authority-driven mechanisms’, rely on admins to fix any gross excesses, and accept the fact that a lot of people will find their happiness elsewhere (which, in fact, should result in *less* conflicts here on Bitcointalk).

will it clean the forum up? and if so, at what cost? those are some questions i raised.

if i expected to pay more than ~0.002 BTC across the life of my account (something like copper membership), it's probably too much. more importantly, i don't want the inconvenience of paying per post. for someone like me, the idea of requiring an LN node just to post on a forum is absurd. just, over-complicated.


you're viewing things in a vacuum. i've been here for like five years; i know the forum has gone downhill. i just see no valid solution for how to fairly determine rank (if we're going to retain any signature/rank system). merit seems like a shitty/centralized extension of the shitty/centralized default trust system. you give all the power to a centralized few and then people pass around merit within social groups. the more emphasis you put on these centralized, authority-driven mechanisms to determine privileges, the more you can expect conflicts of interest and abuse. that's discouraging to genuine forum members and i think the extent to which that's true escapes people---particularly those people that benefit from the merit system.

Despite some thoughtful replies, I still feel everyone is missing the point.


Price is a very effective mechanism. Most people are saying "I won't pay", but they won't specify how much. We can do micro-transactions now, very effectively. We can pay the equivalent of a tiny fraction of 1 cent to make a post, like 0.0000001. Is that too much, if it cleans the forum up?

Why not tell us how much is too much, then we might start to get somewhere

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Maybe I've got too much of a bias to 2012 and 2011 when I started to read the forum: it was much better. This place was full of computer science types, sound money enthusiasts, math people, electronics people, old luminaries of the cypherpunk era, and totally anonymous people like today as well of course. I'm not saying everyone has to be some kind of polymath, but the conversations in the thread were usually motivated by earnest and genuine enquiry, people discussed all sorts of stuff. 2013 onwards, this forum just slowly filled up with sig spammers and trolls. Lots of the old crowd don't even come here anymore, the orgy cesspit of mindlessness that the Discussion board turned into pretty much killed the previous atmosphere. It seems like alot of people want to fight for keeping this place how it became after it went downhill, not for how high the quality here used to be.

what's the metric for ranking---same as now, but only accounting for merit? wouldn't that make you a full member with your 141 earned merit?

in theory, i agree with what you're saying. in practice, it seems problematic, subjective, if we're basing it on the merit system alone. especially because doing so would erase all past activity prior to this year. there definitely are/were ways to game the merit system (particularly by exploiting social dynamics), and it seems kinda bullshit to ignore any and all contributions over many years in favor of some centralized gatekeeping system that began in late january.

like i said earlier, if you don't completely fuck me on a one-time fee where i can pay and have my account debited per post (at low cost), maybe it could work. i shouldn't have to bother with lightning at a low enough cost. but you're definitely flirting with the idea of encouraging a lot (perhaps most) genuine posters leaving the forum. turning a free forum into a paid/closed model would be a dealbreaker for a lot of people---for good reason even if we ignore the spammers.


yeah, the whole posting quota thing is over the top. it's like an implicit agreement between campaign managers and advertisers to mutually profit at the expense of the forum: unpaid overages and unpaid under-quota = free advertising. it's one thing to pay people for shit they're already doing---it seems like quite another to turn it into a job with a contracted quota.

Carlton Banks, your idea may seem okay, but it has many disadvantages more than advantages. Before ideas like this are implemented, one has to weigh the  difference between the advantage & and the disadvantages.

The payment and return rate you stated may seem okay to you, but have you concerned that there will be tendencies where people will accuse the admin of not being fair with their return rate payment. Now this will be another matter arising for the admin to solve instead of the normal forum issues. It's just in people's nature to complain.

There are some newbie whom just open account in this forum to ask for technical help and have gotten some positive feedbacks.  And this is part of what made this forum the top of all cryptocurrency forums. Asking them to pay to ask for help is just odd. If another crypto forum can provide this help without asking for any payment why should they care about this forum? This will just drag this forum to zero.

You personally,  might want to pay to post, but do you think others verten users will do this? Or else if you want this forum to be a participation of some selected users.

I believe the admin has a better plan of stopping the spammers which he is yet to unveil.

Is there a price scale that's too high for low-ranked spammers, but also low enough for high-ranked genuine posters?

Say,

• Newbies - 100 satoshi per post
• Juniors - 5 satoshi per post, + 1% returned
• Members - 2 satoshi per post, + 2% returned
• Full Members - 1 satoshi per post, + 4% returned
• Seniors - 0.1 satoshi per post, + 8% returned
• Heroes - 0.001 satoshi per post, + 16% returned
• Legendaries - 0.0001 satoshi per post, + 39% returned

(keep in mind I become a Member under this proposal)

I'm pretty sure that the 80 page shit-post spam fests, titled "can my Freindz still makes monies of Bitcoinz in thhis days?" would all just disappear completely. Instantly.

Could trolls afford it? Most couldn't. And those that could would end up paying for the Seniors (and above) to post.


I don't see the problem. I'm not afraid to rank up, or to pay, under that kind of system.

I now think it won't really resolve the problem but rather create new ones. And it will be worst. I can imagine another type of "campaigns" coming from behind the scene of the forum, and you can imagine the result here...

@Carlston Bank

Yes, I have a signature but as I posted, even if I didn't, my opinion would be the same.
When you're in a community you have to think about others, it's how a community works. You surely forgot my question, but what about if your friends are now asking you some money to talk with. (I know you can say, Bitcointalk users are not your friends but you get my point)

How can it be good to ask people money to share their opinions with others, or someone trying to learn, etc? Bitcoin is not a private club and the forum either...

Your solution is rude and not really friendly. This said I would pay if I have no choice but would consider the forum as not so friendly and a kind of "private club" which isn't what I am looking for.

Paying a membership to be allowed to have a signature is something I would have no problem with. I used to pay xxx$ per year in some forums to have access to either some sections or to be allowed to open some topics related to sales.

Theymos is apparently thinking it isn't a good idea, but believe it or not, there are a lot of people who will have no problem to pay for something like this.  

I aslo wonder what do you think would be the criteria to estimate the price to post here

No, providing an alternate solution isn't a requirement - and I didn't say it was - but if you do provide one (and, even better, the reasoning behind such) it certainly makes me pay more attention to what you have to say.

As of now your argument is merely that members with lots of alts could "take down their enemies" by reporting posts maliciously, and that relying on admins to police this abuse would add to their workload. I agree that both are possible, I just don't think that this kind of abuse would happen often enough.

But I'll allow that I might be putting too much faith in my fellow man to act responsibly.