Topic: How can we take Bitcoin Talk back into the Bitcoin community? (Read 1562 times)

The forum doesn't enforce conformity. On social media platforms if you express the right opinions and cater to specific echo chambers, you get followers and build visibility as a reward. You delude yourself into believing you are leading thought, when in reality you are just a slave to the opinions of your followers, who will destroy you without mercy the moment you deviate from allowed thought. On the forum your opinions are always visible to readers. You don't need to have users on the forum following you to see your posts, much to the dismay of everyone if what you post is nonsense. Now internet communities trend more towards self-censoring filter bubbles, with people getting even crazier and intolerant of each other because they've gotten so used to being around like-minded folks that different opinions are especially more offensive and egregious than before.

LN is technically impressive, but its success depends on people seeing Bitcoin as cash, which nobody seems to want to do because Bitcoin is just perceived as a tool for speculative investment. There was a period where if LN was ready and practical, maybe around 2014, momentum could have picked up to have LN succeed in payments largely due to the Bitcoin community at the time being much more supportive of spending Bitcoin and companies being interested and open. But since then the community has become way too greedy to be able to create an actual Bitcoin economy.

This isn't just a problem with those social media platforms. Even the forum enforces conformity. For example, everyone just keeps praising and keeps saying good things about the Lightning Network despite the fact that LN is still not finding any users and is becoming over-engineered all the time.
There is desperate lack of genuine criticism even here at the forum because most of the older members wearing the sigs aren't discussing technical details but just commenting on the validity of LN at all times. These people have no idea that how actually bitcoin will scale. The ideas that get thrown around now simply do not have the same weight as they are more philosophical than technical.

That is where the answer to JetsCash's question is. If you want to bring the mojo back, you have to make it worthwhile for the devs to contribute. Most of the earliest devs are on payroll with Blockstream or other organizations. Nothing wrong in that. The lesson is that people who actually benefited from the forum should contribute to projects that aim to further bitcoin adoption.

Form a hierarchy of committed and technically sound people to guide projects. The funding should come from people who have benefited from being early adopters. Most of that crowd has moved out of the forum and are busy with their businesses etc. like Cobra pointed out. Find the champions.

release the new forum software and everything will get fine. 

Support Bitcointalk community Bitcoin projects.

No one gets banned for scam or spam, those offences are corrected by the trust system(flag system),as such users are given a red trust(trust flag),while excessive spam leads to the account being nuked or temp ban, 7 days or so.
Mods are not topics or threads that gets deleted, they're humans.

The first thing we can do is not ban people unless they are clearly spamming or scamming. 

How can we take Bitcoin Talk back into the Bitcoin community?
(DELETE THE MODS)

The legitimate pro's on bitcoin evaporated already to another dimension(platform) when they gain the knowledge here. That's the kind of people I wanted to control the bitcoin talk community because they prioritize the development of the blockchain rather than some people here who literally do bounties. The introduction of this forum to others was very dirty, I can clearly say it because most of the new members here are just directing towards the income without thinking the origin and purpose of this forum. Some of the higher-ups are trying to be kings but don't really have any contribution to our bitcoin community. They're self-proclaimed king because of being the first one who discovers the forum and trying to wipe out some low profile members.

I'm a tech-related course student and trying to make some innovative research about the blockchain. I'm tired of seeing repetitive concepts like for example, about the mining section, companies are just copying the algorithms and adding some extravagant features to have investors and users of their product. Intel, AMD, and other semiconductors company are good at making hardware, components to build-up and calculate algorithms very fast while the other mining companies are just trying to take advantage of it for the growth of their platform. No one didn't try/create any innovative invention that can also surpass the current device for mining. It's very similar in here, some of here are just trying to pump their business without trying to contribute anything good for our community.

My point is, what if we create or think something different for our bitcoin community? I know someone will get offended easily but most of the people are now focusing on a good reputation but they really lack about bitcoin. Bitcoin is a very powerful masterpiece that can exist for a hundred years, maybe its name in the future is Bitcoin v.7892, like that.

The issue is a major one, and out of my ability to contribute. However, I saw theymos wrote about his ideas to build up (changes on current system) merit system, to make it a decentralized merit system there:
I created two topics in Meta, relates to the forum, so if those topics are helpful, it's good.
Steps to check potential phising links
List of scam / fake bitcointalk sites
In my opinion, somehow those topics can spread the forum's popularity and reputation out if we can better get rid of phising sites aim at bitcointalk.org forum. Hence, it might be one of way to bring the forum back into the Bitcoin community. When the forum has become better by merit system, it might become even better, and old users might come back if they look at the forum and have a feeling that bitcointalk.org changed and returned to its nearly originally pure forum.

@Cøbra has good point in this. But I dont understand why they left, to gain personal gain or more popularity of followers. This forum is live with many member good and bad, seem many forums that try to be like this one but failed and they are struggling to survive. Here you can find anything ask anything ans answers for anything. So far here I read anything from serious thing to funny ones, and this is the point. We also have disputes this is normal but I also believe that this is not just place to start but to get well informed and to learn something or to read something interesting. Here we have everything every topic that you can think about and all in one place. So my thinking is that those who left will some back but they wont be respected as they were before.

I was a part of the social media groups as well who discuss this things and I can personally say that it is too far from what people are discussing here. What they focused there basically is how to "earn" and that's it.

They are just sharing numerous sites or links where you can have or guides in getting one(which are obviously scams). That is why taking pride is very important if you know this community and you know that the information that other users were getting is wrong then educate them by leading them here.

The problem is that they will not because they don't understand it and there is no easy money scheme in here. Plus if you are an asshole you won't be targeting people who knows that you are actually scamming. Instead go to those people who absolutely do not understand what they are actually doing.


Lastly, you can easily post what you want on those platforms regardless of how bullsh*ts your post are there are still some people who believes in you because of their ignorance.

Therefore I can easily say OP that we are still leading people the right way when they come here. If I am not mistaken those people who were lead in here by their curiosity actually starting to understand the technology

A lot of prominent members in the Bitcoin community started out on bitcointalk.org, then migrated to Reddit, and subsequently migrated from Reddit to Twitter. Many of these became "thought leaders" on Twitter, and no longer are active on Reddit or bitcointalk.org. I don't think it's because of the format or feel of the forum, I think it's more of an ego thing. The thing with Twitter is that if you have a minimum of a few thousand followers, you can write a good tweet and watch the likes and retweets pour in. It does give some level of satisfaction, something that can't quite be replicated on a forum. Eventually over time you find that people start trying very hard to be liked, so rather than stopping to form an opinion, they end up trying to fit into the group think. You see it in Bitcoin Twitter especially when everyone has the Lightning emoji in their name, the whole "UASF" in the bio/hats thing, absolutely toxic hatred of altcoins, and other examples of people trying desperately to fit into what everyone else in the community is doing. Everyone is always organizing to rally against something, and that's where the problem with these platforms shows itself, it enforces conformity. Conformists are easy to control and manipulate.

See the thing with these platforms though is that they intentionally trick you to seem bigger than they actually are. How many people on /r/Bitcoin post and contribute each day? It genuinely isn't that many, and on quiet days you can see a handful of very active discussions, and even those don't have very many unique new people. But the way the content is structured masks that. This forum has an insane amount of discussion taking place each day, across many different aspects of Bitcoin and periphery topics (economics, politics, services, etc). If you want price memes and surface level discussion, Reddit and Twitter are great, but this place has more variety and people are generally open minded, if you know which topics to post in. Twitter is also quite a small sample of Bitcoin users, for example Andreas' account, one of the most vocal and well respected Bitcoiners on social media only grew by ~60k followers in the past year, nothing compared to the type of numbers this forum achieves with new users.

There will be many forums and many places to discuss Bitcoin, many social media sites and many Facebook groups. But how many of those will have been something Satoshi created? A hundred years from now, nobody will give a shit about Twitter, Facebook or Reddit. But there's a good chance they will give a shit about Bitcoin (and one can hope they will be using it). You can be sure this forum will be in the history books. Little kids will look over archives of our threads as they dream of one day owning 1 BTC. Threads like "we are the new wealthy elite" will be discussed in classrooms. Homework assignments will ask kids to go and research how the HODL meme originated. If Bitcoin does take over the world, you can tell your grandkids you were in the place where it all began. We have something that can't be replicated elsewhere: history.

I dont know what could anyway say or add to this topic. I'm not long into crypto story at all and to be honest I'm little late found out about this forum. From some time I could say that i read here and learn much more then on some social media (reddit for example). Never found anything useful there on anything. But believe that this can be solved. Probably there are good and bad sided like everything in life. Then think that maybe its better to have some serious brainstorming here. Many member are still active here helping one way or another, dont think that this can be some major step but can be start.


This is true, but like everything in tech world that is growing by the minute now, can be solved and be good again. What was main reason when this forum was created to be place for all, big paying signatures campaigns or community with multiple solutions and answers for every question, maybe this could be staring point on how to take some steps on this.

Bitcoin is bigger than this forum and it has obviously outgrown this place, but it's still an active hub (though arguably probably fuelled more by sign campaigns and ICOs than anything else right now). The video isn't a comprehensive history of bitcoin either. Sure, bitcointalk was there from the beginning and it wouldn't hurt to mention it but it's not something to worry about.

Besides, it's not like the video is wholly factually accurate:



lol


You really think removing these things would make a difference? Merit doesn't stop anyone from posting here but it certainly curbs spammers rising through the ranks, but rank or merit is meaningless really other than those who want to earn from posting here. As for trust I wouldn't be against scrapping the entire thing as people rely on it too much and assume negative or positive feedback from dt is is the be all and all of who is trustworthy or not.

All forums where I have been an active member have provided me with a means to gain an income. There is one exception, and that is a private hosting forum, but even that has a public board where I can display a signature. That forum has a very low activity though.

The best quality forums seem to be those where members' rewards are related to their post quality. For example, signatures that contain affiliate codes that reward posters by results. Bitcoin Talk has a lot of signature campaigns where the quality and competence of the poster is not relevant. The only thing that matters is the volume of posting. It also seems to act as an employment bureau for  the deprecated social networking sites.

How to turn back the forum to the community ?
Remove the things that people can abuse: Trust score, Merit.
Provide easy access to the newbies (post and send pm's without restriction count per day).
Make the access to the community more easy to everyone, not only to the old members.
Remove from your brain claims such as suchmoon's "guilty until proven otherwise" because in the real world it is otherwise.
Do not let group of 20 people "DT" to ruin people profiles, jobs, time spend on this forum based on their own drug addicted opinions.

I am certain that the forums you used before has no source of income on the site. If you compare bitcointalk to any forums there is a big difference on them as we're like a land full of oil(Altcoin sections).

You can't compare reddit to bitcointalk because
Reddit = More users because of wide selection/category of sub-reddits. For entertainment/informations
Bitcointalk = More users because there is a source of income(ICOs)

Try to move Altcoin section on other forum site and you will see a sudden amount of inactive users moving to the new forum that the altcoin transferred to.

If you are going to look at it, all the services we have on the forum is somewhat related to coin projects
Escrow services = huge amount of funds being escrowed is thru signature campaigns, bounty, ICO funds.
Design = Most of the designs are related to ANN thread, ICO visual site designs, ICO banners, ICO logos
Development = development about coin creation, website creation
Campaign manager = most of campaign managers source of income is about managing ICO signatures, bounties

We can't deny that around 70%(my estimate based on user engagements around Altcoin section) of users are here because of Altcoin section that bitcointalk has.

I also admit that aside from being in support to bitcoin I am also in to the jobs that is available around the forum.

I agree with your comment about the driving forces, but I'm not sure that they are the most important factors for the future.  Things like the rise of the cashless society, the transfer of wealth, and the fake banking crypto-currencies are the things that really matter for long term economic survival. It's really difficult to discuss these topics, as most people are obsessed with the technical analysis of past trends and events, and we are moving into a completely new economic environment now.

The driving message on BT today is price, bear run, bull runs, smart contract, ICO and the like. Hardly you see participation in serious discussion, Technical development, project development. If you can find a way to attract more members to these sections of the BT, it will reshape the mindset of members away from looking for monetary gains only.

That is probably why I don't like them. I like controversial opinion, and novel ideas. I don't want to read a load of post by the sheep agreeing with the unicorns that are leading them into slavery.