Topic: Forum Menbership- 3.5m registered only 56k members survived?..... Why? - page 4. (Read 1179 times)

To be honest, I never expected that there were 2.7 million lost Bitcointalk accounts out of the total 3.5 million. It's a huge number of accounts but I'm really curious about the statistics from the past few years. I wonder how many accounts were active in 2022 and 2021. Is the number decreasing?

IMO, I don't believe the forum will die but if that would continue to happen in the coming years perhaps we should consider promoting it to attract more traffic. In another way, we could make slight changes to the rules to minimize the number of people losing their accounts or getting banned. It seems like many members have given up once they lost their Bitcointalk account or faced a ban and that's just my opinion. I'm genuinely curious about how we can increase traffic and make this community larger and more active.

You can make your own conclusions but it doesn't mean everyone will make the same conclusions.


And you can nothing to do with that, except to show by example how to make a friendly discussion. You can't make a majority to change their habits. Of course it will be good if there will be more friendliness, it is good in any case, but it is not what we can demand.


Most cases I see are based on cheating and scamming. If you don't like how DT do in some exact case you can bring up the topic. DT is based on a consensus and consensus can be changed. No one in DT is forever so if anyone behaves bad you can exclude him from your trust list. If you see someone leaves good reviews and votes for flags correctly you can add him to your trust list. You can leave your own reviews, including green ones. I use that opportunity, do all those ones who don't like how DT works do the same?


As I said, I came here when merit system was just implemented. First merit I've got rather fast, but others were very rare and I wasn't sure I'll get even member rank. But even then I saw multiple low quality posts, there were too many of them. So merit system is good for forum in general.

If you see that there are many good posts from newbies are without merits you can apply for merit source and then share more merits with those ones who deserve it. It is good and right. And it can make merit system work better. That's what can do everyone who thinks that a merit system is not friendly enough at the moment.

Only members who care about the forum read the Meta, so I wasn't expecting anything close to 100 votes, especially since only 364 of the 7765 active members in the last 30 days posted on the Meta, so I'm not surprised. We only have a bunch of signature/bounty spammers who are more active than the ones who care about the forum's welfare. 34 votes is a significant number on a Meta, in my opinion.

When something like this comes up, the bullies and DT oppressors avoid participating in the conversation.

These are the three vital issues......

Unfriendly discussion enviromment    - 5 (14.7%)
DT Members opression    - 8 (23.5%)
The Merit system    - 7 (20.6%)

Currently we are at 34 votes in the poll and again it another unfair reflection as to addressing the subject title of the thread. Without a doubt there are innumerable factors that could contribute to members not participating in a vote but seriously such low numbers are indicative of a regular pattern.

Start a thread looking campaign participants and it will be flooded with hopefuls trying to get selected yet something such as important as this is virtually overlooked when using as a comparator.

---------

What could be the cause of the forum membership decreased

Unfriendly discussion enviromment    - 5 (14.7%)
DT Members opression    - 8 (23.5%)
The Merit system    - 7 (20.6%)
The moderation/Rules    - 0 (0%)
Low Bitcoin adoption    - 2 (5.9%)
Others    - 12 (35.3%)
   
Total Voters: 34

I look in the back pages of the Bitcointalk boards, and I found a museum of archives, when most users actually wanted to improve Bitcoin and a very restricted set of alts. An Atlantis under water.

All of those users have since gone, and are now replaced with people who are only interested in making $10 out of some airdrop/pre-sale/bounty/whatever.

I do not think it is the trolls or DT who have done this, but rather, the insatiable attribute of greed. As people started to chase more easy money, more people stopped doing useful work on the networks, to the point where most of the development that *is* done in cryptocurrency is minting some coin or NFT (probably using a few clicks of a GUI, that is without even writing any code) or organizing a rugpull.

This can be seen across the entire industry, not just bitcointalk.

I don't believe that 3.5Million individuals actually registered on bitcointalk, in old days especially before the introduction of merit system people used the bitcointalk as money making forum, they simply post some garbage and gain activity and rank up then enter into campaign and just keep spamming then in 2018 theymos figured the spam is out of control so he introduced merit system which really made those accounts farmers to vanish from here. So I still think introduction of merit system reduced the rate of registration in bitcointalk.

Also I feel we don't have enough topics to discuss or that makes me too engaged, more people are just doing forum politics, merits hunting so they chase merits and purposely posting posts which is kind of annoying or atleast to me.

I see lack of patience as a major factor for the decline in participants here. Most of the newbies lack patience to working and doing the right thing. They want short cut to climbing up which is not possible here. Some hardly make post and do not contribute in any way to growing their reputation here and at the entire end they get frustrated and leave the platform as a result of not being able to meet up with their target. They blame forum policies and members being to harsh on them forgetting that there are laid down rules on every platform to go by if you must be a member.

Merit system can likely be another factor because it determines your forum rank after getting much activities to back it up. Without merit one remains in a particular spot which is not good. However, merit can only be awarded when a member sees your post or comment worthy of being merited. Of lately, it seems there are few merits source active which makes it looks like a million years to get a merit reward from a merit source as they can not go round the boards to check on posts and comments always.
If this could be looked into, I think it would increase activities too as many would be encouraged to do or show more working. It feels not alright after much efforts and yet still not merited. Maybe this scares them away.

Thank you for starting the topic and inviting for an open discussion to take place. Since finding this thread I have been pondering what to write especially after reading many excellent opinions already posted. To some extent I am surprised it is being discussed now when it should already have been discussed in great detail such is the importance of question surrounding the actual number of real active users.

This is merely an opinion, I would say that DT oppression to some extent does take place yet it is only part of a wider DT related issue. Cliques, groups and gangs working in tandem also could be part of the issue.

I believe merits play a huge part in retention of newbies in the forum. I am not going to say whether the following is an appropriate course of action but I have seen frustrated members complain about why their regular/consistent efforts in the forum by virtue of medium to high quality posts have seen little or nothing in either recognition or merits whereas far too many merits have been given out for what a neutral observer would probably conclude did not deserve the merits received. That could also put off members especially when they create a thread about it and do not receive much sympathy.

As for Bitcoin low adoption (as you put it), would it be fair to say that stacked up against nation countries fiat based currencies Bitcoin has always been low adoption since the day it was created in 2009 and even though the numbers increase in adoption month on month it will always remain low adoption? I cannot see a valid reason a newbie to this forum would leave (just after signing up) on the basis there was low adoption.

I rarely use the BPIP website but when I do I have to say it is informative with all the scraping of data. Having said that I would advise to use multiple sources to try to ascertain statistics related to user and forum activity.

Those exemptions are proof that if a new user is genuinely interested in understanding Bitcoin and learning more, they would find this forum very entertaining and with a little more effort even enjoy their time here.
Also, those users quickly rank up and would not be considered new members any more.

I hope the forum becomes more welcoming that even users who are not as dedicated would be able to enjoy their time here.

So we have 8 votes for 5 thousand active users you counted and we plan to make conclusions from that, right? I doubt that 31 voters for 5 thousand is a representative sample. To find a way to solve a problem we should be sure that a problem we found is what is a real problem. Otherwise we can face even bigger problems.

If there is a resentful user with multiple accounts who doesn't like that his shady activity was highlighted by DT he can easily corrupt all this voting with tens of votes. If you want to know what people really think it is better to read what they write and not how they anonymously vote. It can be also corrupted but you at least can guess it if you'll look at post history and trust reviews of users.

I believe the forum has been more accommodating to everyone than it was a few years back. If we contemplate on the general forum traffic, today we have several local boards which should make non English speakers to stick around than what it was, so this can't be a language barrier causing the low turnout..But I think it has something  to do with the altcoin bubble  which we had years back, the ICOs , the generous bounty rewards that existed back then...today rewards arent attractive and most users might have given up on this as projects arent as honest as the first gens were.

The forum have had a total of 7765 active members in the last 30 days and out of which 2725 active users are Bountie spammers which left us with only 5040 active members on the general board,  the reduction is real; we are now simply a little community recycling our shits over and over again; we are less than the typical crypto telegram group.

The community votes in the last 24 hours have shown that DT oppression is real and has caused to a significant drop in membership; the question now is how do we fix this?.

When you think about how many of those "survived" members are using multiple accounts here it surely would reduce the overall count far below 56K.  Bots, alts, newbies that will never come back...  I'd honestly be surprised if there were 20K real active members here.  Still, I think the poll seems like people are figuring out the issues here.  DT is no longer a reflection of activity and trust on these boards, but a showing of political posturing and dealmaking to protect each other's interests and punish those they disagree with (SHOCKER: mostly liberals trying to silence and discredit conservatives).  It's actually shameful that it is still around in it's current form, but the only people who seem to care are the ones who's obsession with gaining trust inclusions has caused this mess.

Is it possible to separate IP bans and accounts with no posts from the 2.7 million? When I think about it, it's still an insane number to ignore.

316k over the last 4 years is still an enormous sum, and if we drill down to from the forum's creation it may be about a million members, which is not far from the number in the OP.

I'm not sure how old you are, but I'm guessing that by 2030, we/the most active users will be gone, and the forum will be run by our generational newbies. 2030 is SEVEN years away. Death, jail terms, life could happen to any of us.


Might not be 100% accurate but its close enough and big enough to raise eyes balls you know....


Is it okay if I categorize your opinion as unfriendly to discussion/users since you believe the reduction/small size has to do with how old fashioned the forum is and how difficult it is to navigate the forum with a mobile phone- its a bigger problem because the new generation newbies do not want to belong to a forum that looks like an ancient Egypt forum, where users need to zoom and scroll left and right on mobile to read a post and still have to wait until they reach a particular rank to be allowed to post an image when there are other places that give them this much privilege, I would think newbies restrictions play a role.

Most people come into the forum with the sole aim of making money out of bounty campaigns and as that's the only motivation, care for nothing else but to make sure they get the needed merits. Once this doesn't go according to plan, they lose interest. It becomes a passing fancy.
 Secondly, some leave as a result of not having to ability to stand criticism (both constructive and destructive).
I think the forum is better off without spammers, scammers and the like, and if these are what sum up that number, then it's better for it be reduced.

Oh boy. That's what I thought when I read the first lines of your topic.

LoyceV beat me to it, but there are not 2.7M banned or nuked accounts. Archived is a term used by BPIP to say inactive for more than 90 days.
If I take random accounts from this BPIP page: https://bpip.org/metalog.aspx?d=2023-05-22
RoadSideRomiyo is archived on BPIP, but I can guarantee you that he is not banned.
nemec is archived on BPIP, but I can guarantee you that he is not banned.
mertcanidig is archived on BPIP, but I can guarantee you that he is not banned.
And so on...

Mmmmm April is the time for Theymos jokes. And 2021 was about the NFT thing and Theymos used all the buzz words. When I was talking about multi-accounting here... +200K people is really huge, and it's a theory out of my ass, I have no evidence to prove it. But when I see that tens...hundreds have put their real photos for the KYC joke, I must not be very far from the truth.
Human stupidity.

I wasn’t particularly aware of the forum user base reduction, and thank you, OP, for this analysis, even if I am not sure it’s fully reliable.

Of course, user base reduction is easy to guess. It’s in human nature to get bored of things, and for sure, posting on a forum is one of those activities one can get bored of. I guess it’s pretty natural for users to stop logging in to the forum, and this is even more true for “historical users” who probably got into Bitcoin in the early days. Posting on an internet forum can be perceived as a dull activity when life can move on on the back of the intergenerational wealth accumulated in those early years.
So no wonder there are many early, inactive users.
I have been looking into this as I am on the brink of entering the top 1000 users regarding activity. I am currently slowly grinding activity surpassing long inactive users.
On the other hand, I have been shilling the forum to new users. Who, in theory, should replenish the inactive users in the big life cycle of events.

I have been quite unsuccessful in this task for a series of reasons:

• Forum Format: the forums are a legacy format for the internet. Today we have different mediums of interaction between users: Reddit, Telegram, and online chats. I am not saying those are worse or better than forums. I am saying that most users are not used to posting, waiting for hours for an answer, and having a “static” way of interacting with other users.
• No Mobile theme. Accessing bitcointalk.org via mobile is a nightmare (I can assure you this as I am writing 80% of my content through mobile). This is a problem when mobile users are ubiquitous. If a mobile user wants to try the forum, and it is welcomed by a mobile unfriendly theme, then i think he wouldn’t give it a second chance if ever he logs into a laptop.

On the Italian board, we have been playing with telegram channels, with @mendace and @babo, trying to mimic the forum threads and merit system. The results have been good, a few users registered and posted a few messages on the forum, but retention has also been difficult.

I don't think those accounts (as counted by BPIP) are all banned, they could just have never created a post. And many are proxy banned because they're created by spammers from an evil IP. Not all bans are a bad thing

Since I started keeping track 4 years ago, 316k users have been banned.

Lol. One way or another, (most) Newbies aren't welcomed. Luckily, there are some exceptions.
More likely: the social media generation doesn't like forums anymore, where there's no algorithm (designed to keep them hooked as long as possible) that decides what they read.

I would never look at these numbers as something important, because as others have already written, it is not about unique users, but about numbers that largely result from the fact that many have created tens or even hundreds of btt accounts and then they abuse various signature/bounty campaigns. Many of these members tried to rank those accounts in such a way that they plagiarized everything that could be plagiarized, and then someone started a bot that did a big cleanup and a huge number of btt accounts were banned in a very short time.

After 2018 and the merit system, many people gave up on creating btt farm accounts, and more or less all the shitposters gave up on the forum because they no longer had the financial motivation to be here. In essence, those 56k btt accounts you mention are quite a realistic number for one forum, considering that forums are not something that attracts new generations.

My first assumption would be that people come and go with the bullruns and the huge altseasons, they sign up to talk about speculation and then never log in again, once the prices tremendously fall beyond expectation. It is something usual with shitcoins, as we all know.

On the other hand, I doubt the forum could disappear by 2030. Even with low traffic, still there will be people and users around here participating and providing quality commentary, because the administration has enough resources for forum maintenance.

We may become a smaller tree house club, but we will continue to be a comfortable one.