Topic: How can we stimulate Bitcoin Talk? (Read 1002 times)

As well you spend merit only HQ quality post. Obviously it will motivate people if you spend your merit on different board. All merit source should that instead of merited on few specific board. Because most of genaral people much active some specific board. Some time we can see even there HQ and useful post but no one merited him. Btw, you did always motivational work and helping forum member's.

Neh, I think it hasn't been that boring since we have this noobs that keeps us entertained with their whimps getting out of nowhere Their idiotic thinking also keeps this forum alive Although we have a big problem about spam which they casually do, their existence is without doubt important

Proper stimulation not only can stimulate the intelligence of the Bitcointalk user, but will also influence the development of the Economy, insight, intelligence, in a bitcointalk post in the future.

It is undeniable that optimal development is every bitcointalk's hope. Stimulation is one way to achieve this. The Forum Board must know the right stimulation for Bitcointalk Members according to the characters in the posts in the Forum and the stages of its development in order to be optimal.
Four things that the Forum Board needs to pay attention to when stimulating Bitcointalk Members:

1. Time
2. Ways
3. The developmental aspects that must be covered
4. Gradual stimulation of Bitcointalk members.

That is all from me....??

The "to the moon" series is in my opinion the nicest one closely followed by the Labyrinth.

To the Moon’ Denominations:
‘two bitcoins‘ Limited Edition of 21 (serials 01-21)
‘500,000 bits‘ Limited Edition of 100 (serials 01-100)
‘100,000 bits‘ Limited Edition of 250 (serials 01-250)
Source: https://kialara.com/product/silver-series-2017-moon/

Sigh.... 2017 - when bitcoin was still so much cheaper.


They actually call it the 100,000 bits bar.

The problem is finding threads with posters not posting repetitive nonsense  to earn a few bucks.

No sigs, at all for anyone under hero and any heros and legends found to be posting blatant nonsense get bumped down a level

Junior boards for any one under full member.

You would see the main boards start to flourish.

Hell if that sounds unfair just remove sigs for everyone. You still need the junior boards though because noobs have no issue asking the same questions over and over on new threads and saturating the main boards. Hence finding an interesting thread with some incentive to reply on is almost impossible. This applies to the alt boards far more than than the btc.

Then rather than feeling negative about reporting spam and endless shilling we can feel positive about going to the junior boards now and then to merit those making efforts to contribute or learn for real.

No doubt it's partly the issue of shitposters, but I'm also noticing a bit of a lull in newsworthy content to discuss lately.  Just about everything in the media is either "Price", "ETF" or "ICO".  All the least interesting aspects of crypto.  I have little to no interest in talking about any of that, other than perhaps pointing out how inane and boring it is.  I'm hoping this is just temporary and we'll have some better topics to discuss when something new and interesting actually occurs.

Even the most notorious forum's like HackForum where newbies are cyber-bullied are better in terms of content and quality posts than bitcointalk. One reason could be, most of the power in the forum is given to people who are not technically aware of bitcoin. It's a bitcoin forum, the only people added to the DT, Mod and other staff should be bitcoin experts. I'm not even surprised most of the Merits are distributed in the forum's Meta section which is sad. Technically speaking, the Meta section is the least informative section in the context of bitcoin/blockchain in general. It's so not fair to the bitcoin forum that people find quality in something that isn't related to bitcoins.
 
The fraction of people who are technically/logically strong to create or talk on informative sections is very low. Even if they're around, they don't participate in the discussions.

I think drastic measures are needed in order to stop the spam that is infesting this forum.

Like I said in an earlier post on a different thread, you need to tackle the root cause and not the effect. So, campaign managers need to be investigated if they paid spammers or not.

I don't disagree with the idea to have merit in place in order to reach Jr. Member rank but please keep in mind that there are a lot of accounts of any rank already (including Legendary), that are spamming this forum and getting paid for it.

Yes, you are right, there are members like Zapo who is running the IOU campaign like a PRO and it wouldn't be fair to restrict users from being able to be campaign managers but if there is no time from mods to check the activity of campaign managers, I would be OK with a limited list of campaign managers approved by administration. I think the grater good aka "no spam" would be more beneficial to the members here.

Anyways, the bigger problem is not really the people managing the campaigns from the Bitcoin Services section but the bounty campaigns you see in the altcoin boards...
If you take a look at their sig campaign requirements it's plain ridiculous. Not to mention they are paying members in "stakes" and after 3 months the payment might not even happen at all, essentially spamming the forum for free...  

I seem to have killed my other thread with this post. Is it worth starting threads like these? They are just three that werer the first that I thought of, and they were intended to illustrate that there are lods of topics that can be started.

Yup! This is also the way I found to escape the boredom and robot-feeling I experienced everyday inside our forum. I frequently get tired of dealing with the repetitive and nonsense posts from the most visited boards, so as a relief, I'm now becoming more active engaging with discussions like this because I know that it's worthier of my time and effort. Tbough I know that posting here in Meta as well as to the other serious boards were very hard, I never settle for less and always do my very best to be a competitive member or at least not becoming a cancer of this forum.

The difficulty here challenges me a lot. It makes me feel alive .
You are still considered lucky dude, because in my case, I'm a MORON when it comes to those matters lol . But I'm looking forward that someday I will be able to participate on those kind of discussions too right after I become more knowledgeable.

Well there's not much you can do to enforce this. I wouldn't really be against people having to hire someone trusted or experienced to run campaigns, but then that becomes an issue of who gets to be trusted especially if you never allow new people. Existing campaign managers would then have a monopoly over running them. How do you decide who gets to run them or not as well? Rank? People could then just buy an account. Zapo is a new campaign manager and he's a rarity in that he actually does what he's supposed to and doesn't accept shitposters and those without merit. Should he not be able to run campaigns because he hasn't had any previous experience even though he's doing a better job than some of the current 'experienced' managers here? What happens if you're a new company but have a trusted member of staff who is prepared to run them efficiently but they would still be a newbie here? Should we be forcing them to hire someone just because they don't have a high rank or activity? I would rather just let people run campaigns, but if they clearly don't know what they're doing then they should be warned and then face punishments if appropriate. That to me seems the most sensible way to tackle it, but the problem is the issue isn't being tackled at all right now and anyone can run a campaign as bad as they want with absolutely no repercussions at all and that's something that needs to change.

I agree that we need to enter restrictions for Newbies and Juniors` participating in signature campaigns. But beyond that, I also propose to prohibit them from becoming bounty campaign managers. Now there are more and more campaigns, especially in the Altcoin section, where managers are users with the Junior or even Newbie rank. I never understood how this could be and eschewed such campaigns, because they could often be a scam. For me it isn`t clear how a person with an activity of 12, who has been on the forum for only a few days, can claim himself as a signature campaign manager. This is a huge responsibility, a job that requires an understanding of the topic, experience and awareness. But such managers don`t care about their reputation, nor about the reputation of the campaign, nor about the quality of the work performed by the participants. Beginners on the forum should first understand the topic and gain respect from other forum participants. Not take up work that they don`t understand, and as a result can`t perform well. Inexperienced and indifferent managers add to the spreadsheet the same inexperienced and indifferent participants who spam and write shitposts.

I suggest opening more threads which are a little away from the everyday cryptocurrency discussions.
And also carefully moderating it, so it doesn't slip away as most of the threads in here.

Well we are probably the exception. For as long as I've been here I've never taken signature campaigns for granted. People used to complain that I was 'spamming' merely because I was making a lot of posts (many more than I do these days), but I was never banned despite numerous people requesting so, and I always made sure to put a lot of thought and effort into them. I still do now, maybe even more so. I know I don't need to write a paragraph or quote multiple people in the same post or write as much as I do even on Chipmixer. I know I could get away with just writing a short paragraph or even just two sentences or so, but I don't. You've also got to remember we are native British English-speaking people who have at least an above average understanding of bitcoin. It's a sad fact that many of the new people who sign up here these days do so just to earn and have probably only heard of bitcoin via someone telling them that they can earn here merely by posting. Now, imagine if you're an Asian schoolkid who doesn't have much money, can't speak English very well and knows little to nothing about bitcoin and cares just as much about it. That's a recipe for disaster, but they need to get paid and this is their best opportunity to earn online, so they either force out a sentence or two of largely hollow nonsense, or copy and paste someone else's post and that's all they need to do when campaigns will pay them for it. When there's no repercussions both for making low quality posts and those that pay them to do so nothing is going to change and in fact things will just get worse because they realise they can get away with it. Some users posts will in fact just get sloppier and sloppier as time goes on especially when they start creating more accounts to maximise profits. If more users started getting bans for sloppy posts and campaigns started getting them for paying users to make them things would change. If every campaign were run properly like Chipmixer then the forum would clean itself up rather quickly because spammers wouldn't be able to get on a campaign at all, so they would be forced to up their game or languish forever. That's why we need some standards or regulations on how campaigns can operate here. It can't be acceptable to do nothing about all about spammers and until there's punishments for that they will continue to be both lazy and greedy.


Things can change, but not without more manpower being thrown at it. Theymos says money isn't an issue so we can hire more mods to help with this. We could have a team of mods set up just to police ICO campaigns or deal with sig spam. We also need to delegate workload between staff. The need for more admins aside, either new or current staff could be assigned to certain sub boards like Bitcoin Discussion and they can then dedicate their time to cleaning up their own subs up. I've been saying for years that Bitcoin Discussion needs it's own dedicated mod (or even two). They can then trash crap threads on sight and that place will become a lot more usable in the process. These are simple fixes that will benefit the quality of content here remarkably.

Maybe I'm expecting too much from people, but if I were earning a living from something so easy to do then I would want to keep that job, and do my best at it. I 100% agree with putting restrictions on signatures though. Its way too easy to just create another account once they're account has been banned or whatever

I understand that this forum is called Bitcoin Talk, and therefore the primary focus should be on Bitcoin. However, Bitcoin has been so successful that it has spawned a massive change in world economies. I would like to see BT take advantage of Bitcoin's success, and expand into these new areas. In my opinion, Bitcoin is moving away from a basic payment system, and is becoming more of a store of wealth, and an asset base for secondary services.  Bitcoin Talk already has the board structure to support this, and I suspect that Theymos saw the potential, and wants to support it.

This expansion has created two problems. The rise of scam alt coins as fraudsters try to cash in on the crypto euphoria. The possibility for no-knowledge school kids to make generic comments to attempt to earn payments from the scammers' campaigns. The difference that Flying Hellfish has made in the Political chat shows that it is possible to move towards a new forum identity. We can help by supporting him, and also expanding the serious discussion and Ivory Tower boards

Why would they bother doing more work when they don't need to? Imagine going to work where the boss was never there and would pay you at the end of the month regardless of the quality of work that was done just as long as you met the deadlines of when it needed to be in. You wouldn't bother going above and beyond because there's no point putting in the extra work because as long as you meet the minimum requirements you'll get paid regardless. That's exactly what's wrong with the culture here. Why would anyone actually bother contributing to discussions and with anything in depth when a one liner will get them paid the same. Time is money when you're a bounty hunter or farmer so they're not going to bother writing a paragraph when they can break that paragraph into five sentences and post it over their five accounts and get paid x5. With Juniors being able to be farmed or botted merely with 30 posts over a couple of activity periods this just leads them to abuse campaigns in such a way because they need to do that in order to be able to earn a substantial amount. That needs to change. Get rid of signatures for Newbies and Juniors and let them earn ten merit before they can earn by posting (or purchase a Copper Membership).

Its because its easy too do. Where as identifying good projects to invest in or trading via Bitcoin is difficult. Signature campaigns are literally paying you to post anything. Literally anything. The standards over in the bounty section in particular are woeful. Its much more than 10 dollars a week though, and a lot of them are likely abusing it with multiple accounts. The bounty managers don't usually care.
The thing is a lot of users here live in not so well off countries, and can actually earn a decent wage off of signature campaigns. I don't blame them for doing it, but you would think they would at least put some effort in considering its literally a wage to them.

The forum has moved away from its original purpose, but we are trying to find a compromise to meet somewhere in the middle and make the forum a better place in the process. People should be able to get paid to post, but they shouldn't be able to get paid to spam or copy and paste. The people who complain about merit do so because it effects their ability to get paid to post and that is a good thing, but I think we need to go further with it. You already need merit to be a Member and every other rank after it in increasing proportions. This requirement should also extend to Juniors because that rank is now being exploited because it's the only one you can earn from without any merit. The merit system works in that it stops the vast majority of spammers being able to rank up past Member, but does nothing for Juniors and people are now exploiting that and farming or botting Juniors to do the abuse instead.


Isn't that exactly what we're doing? Numerous ideas have been suggested to help clean up the forum but we now just need theymos to implement them. Removing signatures from lower ranks, requiring merit to become a Junior and punishing badly run signature campaigns seem to be the most popular and easiest to implement and would have a drastic effect on both the spam and culture here.


We already have the six minute waiting time between posts for newbies, which can be extremely annoying. I dare say it actually turns a lot of users away, but the people who are determined to earn here will grin and bare it. We need to make suggestions that don't effect or annoy people who just want to post here so they don't leave, and the compromise isn't always that easy to be found. Removing signatures from lower ranks or requiring merit for Juniors doesn't effect anyone's ability to post here nor does punishing ICO campaigns and that's why I'm strongly pushing for them.

Sorry, I did forget about it.


I agree that those who break the rules will always be and it`s impossible to get rid of them. But we, as the bitcointalk community, can try to reduce their number. I understand why setting a time gap between posts will slow down true users and not definitively solve the shitposting and multiple accounts problem. But hardly any restrictions, even the most ingenious idea will help stop spammers once and for all. Similarly, we can`t set restrictions only for spammers, which will not affect genuine users at the same time. After all, even the merit system extends to all - both to bounty hunters, and to those who serve the true purpose of the bitcointalk forum.

I thought that we could complicate life for spammers by setting the minimum and maximum time for filling out the reply form. The essence of this proposal is that the server fixes the time of filling the response form. If the user has filled the form faster than for a certain time (required on average), then he is considered a bot or a spammer. The time set varies by the administrator depending on the complexity of the topic. At the same time, it causes suspicion if the form hasn`t been filled too long. In this case, the user can do copy-pasting from other sources of information or google-translation.

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.

---

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.

This forum is far from boring, but the quality of content is shit and gets worse with each passing month the longer we do nothing about it. It's rare you can have a decent conversation about anything in boards like Bitcoin discussion because they're populated and overwhelmed with sig spammers and farmers who only care about making low effort posts as quickly as possible. That obviously needs to be tackled if we want things to change around here. You could do that quite quickly by removing signatures completely from lower ranks and punishing those spam campaigns who pay everyone to make this spam in the first place. Those two simple changes would have a remarkable effect on the shitposting culture around here that has become both tolerated and the norm.

The only way to get a decent conversation is to talk about difficult topics like this one for example. Since they have no idea what people are talking about, it's difficult to spam it. When they will have enough to not be able to participate in the forum perhaps they will start to learn what others are talking about.

I do admit it's difficult to find a decent topic and when there is one, it's difficult to read the interesting posts. Myself, I decided to make only self-moderated thread. There are still a lot of posts that worth to read, personally I bookmarked the interesting posters in a folder and start to read the forum by using my own list.
With Bitcointalk you don't need to visit Coinmakertcap to check the Bitcoin price. You can go in the Speculation sub-forum, you have all info daily
(...
Today, Bitcoin value is $7,000...
...Hi, Bitcoin is failing, $6,990...
...Bitcoin is going to the moon, $7,002 right now, buy buy buy...)

I wish we could have a whitelist feature like with NoJs, then all other contents are hidden LOL

We cannot force these people in making boring and unconstructive posts as long as there is the existence of bounties in the Marketplace. The problem is, if the forum removed all types of bounty campaigns, the forum will come to a point that there will be no people to come here and post about their queries about crypto. If not, then I am sure that high-ranked and reputable members here will be left.

Another thing is, there are lots of suggestion in this board but none of them has not been approved even though the majority of the people here agreed.

Cases about hacked account is increasing and lots of the members are getting pissed off due to the slow actions of the administrators.

Maybe the new interface of the new forum will also add some factors in order to have a healthy discussions. Just maybe.

And I think the main factor here is the lack of active merit sources just like you who really likes to roam in different section of the forum. I also agreed that 1or 2 merit should be added in order to achieve Jr. Member, it will really help new members to have some time researching about crypto and harness their potential in becoming one of the quality poster. We should just upgrade the merit system to obliterate all useless, crap, bounty farmers. The time will come that they will realize that shitposting does not benefit themselves. They will get tired and stop wasting their time posting crap just to earn a cents.

I think you do not have any problem regarding your merit distribution, at least you are doing your part in order to help promote quality poster and make them realize to post more interesting stuff because they are being appreciated.

The simplest solution we can do is to take action from all the suggestions of reputable forum members here. The merit system is doing its part, maybe we should just upgrade it at some point, specifically merit for Jr. Member.

Eradicate all the useless account by giving them a hard time ranking up to lessen all the spams and shitposting just to get paid.

Some is also here for the technology, despite being mostly a meme nowadays.  

I don't think this will ever happen. When I think about respectable forums, I think about forums with many interested experts. When I think about Bitcointalk, I think about a shitload of spammers who are only here to earn money.

It's not that informed discussions don't exist, it's just a very small fraction, which makes them hard to find. I'll keep doing what I always do: report the bad stuff, merit the good stuff.

nothing like this, it's not boring here, like in the newspaper any news!

Several members have stated in private conversations with me that BT is getting boring. I must admit that I sometimes have trouble stimulating interest, or finding topics where I can contribute. The world is in economic turmoil with various economies on the brink of failure. Alongside this, established and new crypto-currencies and digital banking methods are gaining in popularity and strength. One would expect Bitcoin Talk to be humming at the centre of this revolution. How can we stimulate informed discussions, and help BT to grow away from its current emphasis on the crypto underworld, and gain a place in the respectable financial world?

I've started an initiative to award merits on a different board each day for a week or so, and I'm starting with the political board. Is there a better use for my sMerit awarding time?