Oh my god, I haven't thought about cryptotalk in quite a while--and I do remember writing some posts about it back when they had that campaign running that OP referenced. They did pay for posts for a while, but the messed up thing was that the payment got credited to a Yobit account that you had to create IIRC, so you had to become associated with that shitty exchange. My guess is that they were hoping people would blow their earnings gambling on shitcoins and ghostcoins (fictitious "coins" that only exist on Yobit and don't have a blockchain). No doubt a good number of them did just that.
Man you brought back some blast from the past for me -- Yobit! I was like any other fool in 2016, holding bags of silly alts that couldn't be traded anywhere else (and though Cryptopia died a couple of years later or so, it was already problematic before then)... and Yobit "saved" me. Cryptotalk spammers I remember a lot too, didn't know they paid to Yobit.
I think the only other forum ever worth going to back then was Bitcoin Garden -- wasn't like there was anything Bitcoin useful there but a lot of altcoin devs hanged out there -- and back then, at least not everyone was an ICO-mongering turd.
Even when bitcoin.com had the money and the people, they couldn't turn their forum into a viable competitor.