Topic: How can we stimulate Bitcoin Talk? - page 2. (Read 988 times)

Yeah, it's the same for me too. This place is great to be in the loop with what's going on with the coins you follow or want to buy/sell.

I remember a lot of people talking about investment opportunities and coins that are expected to go to the moon and why, but nowadays it seems like people are more concerned about making money though signature campaigns (and everything related to that like MeritTalk) and getting that $10/week rather than seeing the big picture, where the real money is at.

I'm not saying signature campaigns are bad but I think it should be regarded as indirect earnings in the sense that "If I'm still going to post, I may also get some free $$ in return." and not something you're posting for. I personally see it like this.

It's sad that this is where the forum is at right now.

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I agree. There's plenty of interesting topics but you have to hire a detective to find them in this forest of speculation threads, merit begging and robot spamming.

I've gotten used to it. I love this forum, I am here almost every day and after a hard day of work, it relaxes me to bash a bit of spammers first and then read a bit about my favorite coins.

I think BCT is moving away from the purpose it was created for. 

I see the focus has moved to discussing merit, forum features that won't ever get implemented, etc. rather than talking about bitcoin or the next big thing: altcoins.
I see the altcoins section as the new "wild west" where almost anything is possible but sadly a lot of people don't see them like this and they are missing out.

I think a good way to jump start BCT is to focus on bitcoin/altcoin related sections. Maybe try to weed out the spam which is killing the forum and focus less on other trivial issues.. 

More community projects!

I didn't say that. Quite the opposite. It's theymos who has stated that the next solution will likely be to just remove signatures, but that's not as easy as it sounds either (you'll have to remove avatars and personal texts as well) nor do I think we should ever do that fully. I don't think it's fair to remove them from everyone when it's the newer users that come here to spam in their hundreds that have ruined it for everyone. What about those who just want to advertise their own business or their items for sale in their signature? They're then penalised because of the behaviour of others who have decided to monetise and abuse theirs. The penultimate solution if you were going to go gung-ho and remove signatures would be to remove them from all lower ranks. Maybe leave only Hero or Legendary or those that have got a great deal of merit (and not just auto-merit) so this doesn't penalise those that have been here a long time or made a lot of quality contributions. You could even go with my suggestion of removing signatures completely (or from all lower ranks) and allowing users to purchase them via donator ranks (copper, silver, gold etc). The problem with signatures here is that it's free to create as many accounts as you want and people do. When there's a cost to have a signature nobody is going to be able to afford them on all their 12 to 200 accounts.


Theymos has already said he will never bring back newbie jail which is essentially what you're suggesting, so you might as well forget about that and look at other ways to prevent abuse.


It also stops genuine users from making posts. Those that come here to abuse the system will just swap over to one of their 12-200 alt accounts whilst they wait. Abusers will always find a way to bypass the system whilst it puts off genuine users who can't be bothered jumping through all these hoops just to post or get an answer to a question.


Theymos recently said he thought about removing the ad slot here completely because it's too much of a hassle for him (which I think would be ridiculous to do), so I'm not sure if theymos cares too much about traffic. If he doesn't though I'm not sure why he allows signature campaigns here (or lets them do what they do). I always assumed that they were only allowed because to kill them would probably kill off at least 80% of traffic. We can still find a compromise without having to ban them or removes signatures but it's not going to happen without some help from him or permission to start dishing out punishments for the worst of campaigns.

I can't stand that unit.  I don't like having to do a math problem just to understand how much bitcoin someone's talking about--it's not hard to write out 0.1BTC when that's what you mean.  "100k bits" isn't even an abbreviation, it's more typing and more complicated.

In any case, I don't think we need to stimulate discussion here.  There's a thread about everything, but as most of us know the actual discussion is of extremely low quality.  There isn't any way to change that except to ditch signature campaigns.  Quality probably would improve, but there would be much less discussion overall--kind of like the Dash forum.  What gets written there is very well thought out, but there aren't all that many active members (compared to bitcointalk).

I'm not really into bitcoin collectables, but those kialara things are pretty neat and there's definitely a market for physical coins.  Too bad NGC and PCGS don't grade them.  I think those companies will eventually come around, and it'll be a great day when they do.  ANACS isn't horrible, but their slabs are ugly and their grading isn't as good as NGC or PCGS.

nah no more of these being made afaik.  I think mine is like #239 or something (to lazy to look at the bag in my drawer hehe!)  They made some 10k bits and 500k bits iirc as well.  The collectibles section has a couple threads all about the Kialara's

Honestly so far the Kialara's are my favourite because they are just so cool and not just another round!

We need to make bitcointalk great again!

The topics themselves are not that boring, there is a lot of nonsense posted in response to many interesting topics, making discussion difficult.

I notice that the only times I have been bored on this forum are the moments where my forum use becomes habituated to some degree. Whether it be checking the same 2 boards, only operating within a handful of threads or refusing to learn new concepts, innovations and information.  I break the slump by checking out a board that I haven't visited in awhile, like the Politics board has been much more palatable since FH became the moderator and merit has been implemented. There are certainly boards, such as economics, bitcoin discussion and a few others that will make you seriously depressed about anything and everything Bitcoin if you spend enough time there. The best way to stimulate the forum at this point would be to separate the chaff from the grain. I don't find it particular hard to find quality discussions, but it's just as likely that the discussion goes over my head; this gives me an opportunity to learn and constantly keeps me interested. Just the other day I learned a bit piece of the technical puzzle and my understanding of Bitcoin expanded, after years of research and interaction I am still learning new things.

There are people here for the wrong reasons and they are flooding the forum with nonsense. This is a double-edged sword in that it boosts the advertising numbers that enable the site to pull in an extra buck, while it dampens the experience of anybody that cares.

This forum is the opposite of boring, because the other forums that I have spent time on are abhorrent. It may seem like the grass is always greener, but I assure you that it is not. There is plenty to do, boundless economic opportunities and some very interesting connections to be made. The problem is we have too many spammers, which are encouraged by bounty earnings through signature campaigns or social media campaigns. We can increase moderation staff, change something that enables these users (signatures enabled, rules, etc.) or an alternative I haven't considered.

It has been getting better in the past several months, though, certainly not worse. We are making progress.

Ooh Cool!
Are they making any more of them?
100k bits is 0.1 btc? I haven't used bits since bitvisitor shut down (they were a great site)!

Dude it's loaded with 100k bits its so freaking awesome LOL!!!!  It's a Kiarlara.



http://kialara.com/product/silver-series-2017-moon/
Hologram is on the back!

The moon rock is in the window in the top left!  Owning a piece of the moon is really neat!

The collectibles section is a good one.
I bought a casascius coin recently and I've been looking into getting one of these coins for literally three years and a month. And I finally managed to get one a few days ago and it's great!

The bar with a piece of the moon on it, would be great if it had a hologram with a bitcoin address and an arrow pointing towards it .

There are threads like these that are really in short supply though. I got to the alts sometimes and there are sometiems a few great threads in there but the problem has become that in almost every part of the forum, we're after finding a needle in a haystack.

Not to mention that a lot of new members seem to be incapable of doing a google search.
I came to the idea of bitcoin and this forum in about June 2015 and I was really excited by it (I get nostalgic by looking at this forum on my raspberry pi even now)... It's a shame that a lot of spammers have descended here and a lot of the bitcoin developers have left the forum too!

We have theymos who has the stamp of approval from satoshi and sirius whenever he comes around...

How about checking out different sections of the forum.  I spent 99% of my time in the mining and P&S/OT for like 5 years.  Then I went to the collectibles section and found a whole different world!  There is some amazing stuff and folks there working on BTC business that could use support.  I bought a bar that has a piece of the fucking moon in it!  Its the pinnacle of my little collection, plus I spend some BTC to help BTC enthusiasts!

I bought an awesome hoodie with BTC logo on it from a user starting a clothing business, when the weather cools off I can't wait to wear it and I am so happy to be using BTC as a currency and supporting the little guy that loves BTC as much as me!

There is a project that supports and makes hand crafted crypto quilts, I am trying to save up my btc fun money for one they are beautiful.

I could go on and on what a community it is there!

I admit that things are getting boring here. You can hardly discuss about stuff here. There are very few members that like to discuss, and most things just get repeated on and on.

Everyday we see someone complaining about account recoveries, someone talking about bots, someone talking about shitcoin bounties. We see the same suggestions literally everyday in meta. So if that's not boring, I don't know what is.

I have suggested that global mods should be given the ability to whitelist/blacklist signatures, that could help curbing down spam in a BIG way. If a user is spamming too much, they should be reported(through report to moderator button), and if they qualify to be mere spammers, then their signatures can be blacklisted. Its a win-win situation. No "restriction", and lesser spam, at least hopefully.

I believe that in order to solve the problem of spam, it isn`t necessary to completely eliminate signature campaigns. I thought a lot about this issue, read the comments of other users, and noticed that many talk about spam as a consequence, but don`t pay attention to its reasons. In order to solve this problem or at least reduce its scale, it is necessary to change the rules of the game. As hilariousetc noted, such topics as Bitcoin or Altcoin discussion and Economics are usually littered with garbage posts written by signature campaign participants. It is in these topics most often you need to write in order to fulfill the requirements of the signature campaigns.

In addition to allowing to carry signatures to forum participants who have reached at least member status (as has been suggested already hundreds of times), I propose that newcomers be prohibited from writing posts everywhere except Beginners & Help and Local until they reach the Juniour member rank and the number of merits necessary for this. I believe that a beginner should first become acquainted with the information, read more both news and comments of honored forum participants. His own thoughts should be formed on the basis of an analysis of "primary sources", and this requires time and diligent work with theoretical materials.

Participation in discussions with compatriots will help newbies understand the topic (this will be easier because there is no language barrier) and, if necessary, improve the level of English (with those who speak to you in one language, this is much easier). If in the local branches the questions and comments of the beginner are deemed worthy and he recieves the right number of merits, he`ll have the opportunity to write in English-language profile topics. In addition to this, I propose to establish an official time interval, which must be observed when writing new posts (for example, no more often than once in half an hour) and set a daily comment limit (not more than 7). Thus, we will protect the forum from those who scribble meaningless and endless posts every 5 minutes.

The real problem is we can't find decent topic/discussion easily because it's covered by spam thread/post. With script/add-ons which show self-moderated thread or started by reputable/high ranked member, i could find some interesting topic even though it's a bit annoying.

Without remove/blacklist signature which owned by campaign which allow/don't care about spammer, most ideas won't work in reality.


It's not only difficult, but only developer/geek who would participate in such topic.


Few still pretend they have idea and ultimately reported/banned. I still encounter few of those (about 5-10 posts/day based on my report history) on Development & Technical Discussion everyday.

Bitcointalk isn't getting boring to be fair, it's very funny when you read thread titled like this: My father's uncle got depression after he bought bitcoin and etc. How can this be boring? Lol... Yeah I understand you mean quality of threads and posts is dropped, just see view/post ratio, it's usually 3:1 and that's very sad, seems people don't read other posts, just post blindly.
So to my mind, show signatures only in mining, technicul discussion and similar threads, remove them from bitcoin discussion, trading discussion. This way sig shitposters won't post in spammy sections if they want to get money.

I'm quite pleased with the political board promotion so far. I've managed to find a few posts to merit, and I'm running the promo through until Saturday now.

Indeed, roaming around in Developmental and Technical Discussion really gives me a headache because I admit that understanding Bitcoin is not that easy, full of jargons. It is no surprise why there is no high amount of replies in there.

Why are they going to study such complicated lectures if they can attain Jr. Members and Member ranked easily and get paid by posting craps.?

Hi, thanks for the post. I’ve been thinking about it lately because I’ve been a year in bitcointalk and at first it seemed to me more exciting, maybe because back then I did not know anything about bitcoin and this forum, and maybe because bitcoin was going up very fast.

When I had been some months in the forum already I started finding the meta section the most interesting one but nowadays you only see repeated threads: posts about the merit system, posts about possible improvements that don’t get implemented, posts about hacked accounts that don’t get recovered...

It is a complicated issue because changes depend on Theymos, and he likes to take things slowly. Also, because quality comes in hand with less traffic.

I was also thinking if we, as a community could do something. If bitcoin is going to change people’s lives in the future, something like the internet did, we could be doing something; we are the façade of bitcoin, but a dirty one.

The problem here is that we are in a boring phase. Lightning network has been being tested for a while, but it will take some time to be fully functional and, hopefully, to become widely used. We can see an economic crisis which can be like the 2008 one or worse, and in which bitcoin could play a key role, but it seems it will take some time until it comes. We expect bitcoin to surpass the December 2017 ath at some point as well, but it will also take some time. It can take months or years, so there is no excitement.

In the meantime, while we wait for those events, we could, and should, be cleaning the façade, so that when there is a new ath, when bitcoin becomes more widespread, when there is new (fiat) economic crisis, this will be the center of the resistance against the fiat power.

The main point here is that changes don’t need to be radical: @theymos if you read this please go one step further of what you have done. The merit system and the two serious boards have done something but it’s not enough, it is time to make something else. It doesn’t need to be radical but do something please. If that works, in six months more we can take another step.