relying on this forum as their primary source of income is a risky move. The flow of income may be unstable and the offers from various campaign signatures is mainly on a short-term basis.
My thoughts exactly. I have the Services section on ignore, but before I did there seemed to be a lot fewer new bitcoin-paying signature campaigns popping up, which makes me wonder how long they're going to exist. On the other hand, bounties seem to be going strong. If you take a look at any post made by a low-ranked member in sections like Bitcoin Discussion, chances are they're advertising some ICO or project in their signature space, avatar, and/or personal message space.
Bounties and campaigns might be a great way for people in impoverished areas to earn money, but if they're counting on it as their sole source of income, they're playing Russian roulette. What happens if, for whatever reason, you can no longer use bitcointalk to make money? All the time these people spent spamming wasn't used to grow marketable skills for a real-life job, so they'd be screwed.
And besides all that, bounty hunters are generally not good for the forum--they contribute mostly vapid, cookie-cutter statements with no thought, and they do this with as little effort as they can. Bitcoin Discussion should be the best section here, and yet it's hands-down one of the worst. Why? Because of all the people who come here just to make money. Such people don't necessarily care about bitcoin. They want to earn money, whatever form it happens to take. Thus, they tend to have very little to say about bitcoin except that 'it has a sunny future and continues to grow day by day' or some such shit.
So OP, I have a very dismal view of career bitcointalkers. This forum is great for them but they're lousy for the rest of us who actually like to read interesting stuff.
If they are trying their uttermost to provide valuable and useful content, then however meager their net output is, they must be encouraged.
Yeah. The problem is that they're not trying to provide anything to anyone else but themselves. There are exceptions to that, of course, but just take a look at some of the mega spam sections and you'll see what I'm talking about.