The other possibility is that, we might not be talking & complaining about 'trolls' & 'shitposts' as much as we used to.
We just report the post and / or put them on ignore and move on.
Probably a bunch of things all together brought the drop in crap posts / posters.
Exactly what I tried to touch upon above. It takes a certain type of user to complain about trolls publicly, these are usually either; users looking to improve the forum, users that are tired of the trolling, users that feel they are personally being targeted by a troll, and trolls themselves trying to stir up the pot. The legitimate users that complain publicly, probably aren't going to continue to create threads complaining about it. They'll likely just complain once or perhaps twice, and then move on in fear of
beating a dead horse. Whatever the reasons there isn't likely going to be a way we can accurately measure the causes, and all we can do is speculate.
Though, it is likely a combination of all the above, rather than it being because of a specific reason. Hence why I said I don't believe the merit system impacted trolls much, spammers definitely, but trolls aren't always spammers.
From my observations (bare in my I don't actually see most reports made) reporting users for trolling is rare. Probably due to the more evident subjectivity of it, and users fearing that they'll get a bad report. I wish that wasn't a factor when users are considering reporting a post, but I suspect it is.
- In 2017 the word "shitposter" has been mentioned 236 on the meta board.
- In 2018 the word "shitposter" has been mentioned 1674 on the meta board.
- In 2019 the word "shitposter" has been mentioned 499 on the meta board.
- In 2020 the word "shitposter" has been mentioned 342 on the meta board.
- In 2021 the word "shitposter" has been mentioned 135 on the meta board.
Nice guess its on a steady decrease since 2019
Either we're slowly, but surely eradicating
shitposters or the shitposters themselves have taken over, and eradicated the patience of the more constructive users. By the way, that's suppose to be as tongue in cheek as possible, because there's an absolute problem with shitposters still to this day. Whether or not there's been a decrease from before merit was introduced? Hard to say, since a lot of the spam goes on in the Altcoin sections, and with the bump changes that were implemented a while ago, a lot of users don't actually see the vast majority of the spam anymore, giving the illusion that there's less spam going on, than there actually is. In fact, I'm pretty sure we're looking at farm accounts exceeding the thousands, because they bump the same way every day on various threads.