As I mentioned in the announcement thread for the new sections, the "Ivory Tower" name (and in part the board itself) feels like something that'd be joke in a Meta thread about declining post quality forum-wide, not an actual board. While giving a space for coherent discussion is great, this really does seem like an attempt of dodging the problem. I wouldn't say I'm embarrassed, moreso a bit baffled - it just feels kind of surreal when we start dividing the forum into neighborhoods, as if it's a social experiment and not an actual place where discussion and business happens. "Here's where the rich and cool people hang out, this other district is for the middle class and the rest of the city is slums".
I dunno, the entire thing just seems to leave a bad taste in my mouth.
Sadly the forum has essentially become a joke really. These new boards are silly if you really think about it but are essentially a necessity now and are just a sad symptom of signature campaigns and how they've been left to degenerate into what they have become and the issue with paying people to post is so bad that there needs to be some sort of quarantine free from disease. The fact that this site is a bitcoin discussion forum is pretty much an afterthought now as the vast majority of people signing up here don't care about that at all but just the fact that they heard you can earn money here (and most of it isn't even paid out in bitcoin but alt coins or tokens etc). When you don't actually care or know anything about bitcoin and can barely speak English and on top of that are forcing yourself to make posts to hit your quota what is going to happen? Add to that that most people create numerous accounts to maximise profit then there's just wall to wall spam and abuse. If we had actually cracked down on what campaigns can get away with then this problem wouldn't be here today but because we've had a laissez faire attitude and let campaigns do whatever they want it has just led to laziness both on the campaigns themselves and their actual participants. When we let people have an unlimited amount of accounts and let campaigns pay people for whatever drivel they can be bothered to make what do we expect to happen? Pure abuse on both sides. Why would campaigns waste time policing their campaigns when that costs time and effort and why would users bother to write more than a sentence when they don't need to? If we made it so this behaviour/attitude was unacceptable and punished those who were causing the problem then things would have turned out a lot different. I've always said that signature campaigns could actually help improve the quality of discussion here but that's only if people who run them do a good job and only accept and pay for quality posters and there's punishments for those that don't. At the moment there are campaigns that will accept an unlimited amount of newbies and pay for them to make any old crap so of course it's going to be abused. This behaviour can't be acceptable but if it is allowed to continue then the forum is just going to get even worse than it is now.
I don't think that the intention was to create an elite Bitcoin class. If that were so, then I don't think that I would be included. I understood it to be an attempt to escape threads with topics like "Will Bitcoin cause Theresa May to wear longer skirts?" Would it be more popular if it was called " The frog pond", or just simply the lounge?
The intent is simple: People shitpost to lazily rank up their accounts and get paid from signature campaigns. If there's boards that won't further them in their goal of achieving activity and postcount then those shitposters won't waste their time posting in there as it's counter-productive and hopefully the only people who will post in there are those that actually want to contribute to decent discussion.