Topic: Bitcoin Pizza Day - Why old members are no longer active here - page 2. (Read 943 times)

Who has a lot of money, why should he sit on this forum? Who has the high-level knowledge, is engaged in business, and not posting unnecessary messages.

Facebook is now too much with monetizing data that's where it is going wrong IMO.
I am not sure if everyone is facing this problem or not... it takes longer time to load the contents on FB now a days especially when I use it from my computer.

Anyway my point was adding some features like: receive notification when someone mentioning your username, a follow button or something that will enable your to receive notifications when your favorite user create a topic or post a comment etc. Some new features for better user experience.

Yes, I do like the merit feature and I am sure there are a lot of people like me who finds extra energy to do more because their work gets recognized.

Has Gmaxwell actually left, he was logged on fairly recently?

We still have users from quite a long time ago still however, like ThomasV.
And Theymos is obviously still here.


That's true, with every facebook and messenger update I always sit wondering what they could possible have done to make it any different from how it was that would benefit the user (I think a lot of stuff they do now is for maximising profit). I don't think your data had as much value in 2010 (there's also the google incident and how they've changed what was a perfectly good logo). ?

---

He waited four days for a pizza, maybe that's why he left!
$43 back then was enough for at least 2 pizzas and no one took him up on it for four days (that being said, I hadn't even heard of bitcoin back then but I was very young so that's my excuse)...

Bad example: I liked Facebook more back then, before they forced a timeline and started deciding for me what I want to see (because they earn from it).
I've seen several forums "innovate", and in all cases I liked the old version better. For me, a forum doesn't have to change it's looks and behaviour once it works well and I know where to find stuff. A forum upgrade would also mean existing scrapers won't work anymore.
I do like the added Merit though, and I'd love to see more upgrades like it.

So after reading all these comments, I think we can easily label spam and the resultant difficulty to do serious discussions as one of the major cause of old timers leaving. It can be compared to mining difficulty also. More miners or hashpower, greater difficulty in finding the block vs. more spam means greater difficulty in coming up with good ideas, serious discussions!!

@shahzadafzal comments are also worth noting. And they could also be some reasons why legends left. But it is indeed surprising that you came up with these points despite being new. Could it be that you are an alt of an oldie!

@Pharmacist point about Mt.Gox burn also sounds like a valid reason for them leaving. Afterall, how many people would want to get near fire after getting their hands burnt.

@audaciousbeing comment about oldies being involved in other crypto projects or other businesses and hence less time to be on forum sounds like a fair deal. After all, these oldies were the best candidates to start new crypto projects as they had detailed knowledge about this stuff. Not like many of us (including me), who don't even understand the technical terms associated, forget the tech behind a cryptocurrency.
Also the idea of seeing repeated discussions over and over might have led them to not participate is a good possibility.

@angel and @Tszunami98 comment about oldies leaving due to them becoming rich is a possibility but very minor. They didn't adopt Bitcoin for money but because of the idea, tech and power behind it. It is highly unlikely that they would abandon the idea part just because they made money with it.

I am also seeing comments about people leaving Bitcointalk because of lack of new features. Again, I feel this is a minor possibility. You can still discuss whatever you want, new features might complement it, but aren't really that necessary.

@vit05 I see you are quite an oldie. But your level is just Full Member. That means you didn't post much like many of the oldies, but you still say that the main reason of them leaving is not spam. That gives a whole new twist to this discussion. You say that they left because they started supporting other projects or because of some questions related to the forum or Bitcoin.

So all in all I see that the major reasons for them leaving is spam, involvement in other projects and maybe burns.

So with this a new question pops up. Why some oldies are still using the platform despite many issues. Theymos is probably the oldest active member here. If you are reading this, I want to know from you. Why do you still use Bitcointalk? Is it because you got the opportunity to become the admin here and the resultant status and weight in the Bitcoin community or because you really think that Bitcointalk is still the best place for Bitcoin discussions? Same questions for all other active oldies.

Please feel free to answer or ignore these questions. But I am indeed very curious. You might ask why. The reason is that for some unknown reason I am feeling a bit sad because of the fact that many (maybe most) oldies left the platform. So, I just want to dig deeper.

None of them left because of spam or signature campaigns. They left for disagreeing with some questions related to the forum or the Bitcoin project and start to support other forks. Sirius got tired, SmokeTooMuch, Mike Hearn and Gavin Andresen began to support other projects. Vitalik seems to find a greater refuge using Twitter and Reddit.

gmaxwell still uses the forum.

I'm not disagreeing with the premise. I think a lot of others left because of spam. I just put that in these specific cases, they never said this was the biggest reason.

I usually don't quote such long contents but here I am quoting it for the first time. Don't know why but I liked it and I want the admin notice it. You said it mate! These are some solid dissections. Like the rest, I always thought, it's the spamming but this should be an eye opener for the admin.

Lack of innovation is the one I guess killing the forum. In addition with you example:
Consider Facebook in 2010/11 and now. Back in those days Facebook used to look like a simple php driven website and now it a massive application with enormous features.

Think of 2010 versions of windows, mac, apple, android. You don't want an iPhone 1 to have now, do you?

Old members have a lot of bitcoins and are now spending their gains on women and cocaine!

Why would anyone in their right mind approach spammers? Spammers aren't the only reason why old members left this place:

---

This place is more than an online forum for some people. Of course,marinecoin shills like you wouldn't be knowing that.

Most people that are rich will not waste their time on an online forum.  I'm sure there are some outliers but they could be traveling the world doing funner things.

In addition to the spammers which is something everybody have agreed to, I think its also have to do with achieving some level of satisfaction and when that is achieved there is no longer a motivation. One of the motivating factor to come to the forum is ranking up which lots of them have gotten to the peak of it.

Again, a lot of them have become entrepreneurs that have created apps, set up businesses, create coins that what they focus their time on now is nurturing their business to a bigger platform. While others have moved beyond the youthful age to a more mature level that gave less time to be dedicated to the forum.

We still have a lot of old people around though but the ones that have left prepare the ground for what others are meeting today. Most of the topic, that a new entrant would discuss would be something they have seen over and over again.

Is this the one you were talking about or something older than this? Then there came an idea for a guy and most probably he may be the first Campaign Manager from 2011. Here are some of the old signature campaigns and how about this one

This was one of sole reason for old members leaving the forum.

Some reputed members who left the forum:

sirius
SmokeTooMuch
Gavin Andresen
Mike Hearn
gmaxwell
Vitalik Buterin

and a lot more....

Magic! Nah, I've read that thread multiple times before, and like you find myself looking back at the old threads in all kinds of different sections from time to time. It just so happens I remembered the name of that thread pretty well, and knew it was pretty early on in the forum.
I would agree. Even though this forum is plastered in spam right now I still think it's got a pretty good moderation policy, and only interferes when needed. I used to disagree with a few things, but soon came to realize that it's probably the best way to go about it.

It's a pity I don't see him around anymore as some of his posts were an interesting read.

How the HELL did you locate a thread like that so quickly?  I'm impressed.  And this post was extremely interesting to me:

This is basically what I was saying, except I attributed the "diverse cultures" part of it to signature campaigns, and SgtSpike here obviously did not mean that the influx of those cultures was due to campaigns--they didn't exist then, or at least not in the same way they do now.

The good thing I see is that the posts he called out (facepalming and the like) aren't tolerated here.  You can't just post an emoticon or "+1" or whatever, because those will get deleted.  That kind of crap is tolerated to no end on other forums, and usually people who write those replies also quote a huge block of text.

I'm so tempted to give SgtSpike a merit....but I won't.

It really depends though. Often times people like to look back on things, and think how good it was back then. Especially, when it's new content to them. Old posts which have been unread are always the most interesting, especially when relating to the history of the forum, and Bitcoin itself.

In reality there was complaints back in 2011, 2012, and so on about the decline of quality posts on the forum. Thus, you would think that this is because, of the wider adoption of Bitcoin bringing in all kinds of different people, cultures, and ideas. This would of been seen as a good thing a few years ago, but unfortunately with widespread adoption/awareness comes the cons of people not being able/willing to speak good English or learn about Bitcoin, and it's related technologies.

Here's a post back in 2011 which has a small, but interesting discussion about the progression of the forum, and the cons of it: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/decline-in-the-signal-to-noise-ratio-in-the-forum-9147

Like that Johnthedong guy?

This is the very first thing I think of when I consider why old-timers left--and I've thought about this before.  Some of the most interesting threads are from around 2010-2011, and last month I stumbled across what had to be the beginning of signature campaigns.  Somebody came up with the idea of renting out his signature space, and people were all saying it was a novel idea.  I don't know why I didn't bookmark that thread, but I didn't.

The other reason is that some of these people might have gotten really burned with Mt. Gox and gotten out completely.  It's not just legendaries who don't post here anymore.  There are tons of abandoned accounts that are low-ranked, who left well before I got here in March of 2015.  Mt. Gox was huge, and I can see how it could leave an extremely bitter taste in one's mouth if MG ran off with all your money.  That's my theory anyway.

One very interesting thing is how well people wrote in the early days of bitcointalk.  Comparing post quality in 2010 to today is astounding.  As clever a moneymaking mechanism as the signature campaign is, it was definitely a quality-killer for posts here once it sucked in the poor, non-English speaking folks (sorry, but it's true).  Anyway, for people who really like bitcointalk, reading posts from way back when is almost addicting.  It was like a different world.

I'd say a lot of the old members are still around, but probably are busy with their day to day lives.

I do believe that they have left the forum due to personal reasons and we can't speak for themselves as to why they have left. And even if we want to know, we can't, as tracking them down and asking them one by one seems to be impossible not to mention they went cold for a couple of years now. We don't know if they became bitter of the forum because they didn't hold BTC to this present date or if they just quite being active as they became millionaires because of holding Bitcoin, most importantly we can't blame the forum for their inactivity.

This man has a point...when bounty campaign for bitcoin pizza day?

Not quite true.

Well, you can always start a self moderated thread and if the thread in it's appropriate board, it never gets moved by the mods.(I have never experienced at least).The thread falling off the first index is very true and you can't help it.