Topic: How important are you on this forum? (Read 697 times)

By the way, by seeing how a person reacts to criticism, you can see what they are like in real life. Is it possible to be afraid of a stranger on the Internet? Why does it? Fear will appear when you yourself realize that you are doing something wrong. And as long as a person understands that they are honest, sincere, and really do not harm anyone, they should not be afraid of anyone. Everyone is equal on the forum. I think the admin understands this better than all of us. Everyone's opinion is welcome, no matter how ridiculous it may be. Here, even fraud is not moderated.

Whether or not a newbie is intimidated depends on how they respond to other users' comments. If they know how and don't do anything wrong then I don't think they need to feel intimidated and I would advise them to have free speech.

I've found some newbies who come in just whining and complaining but basically they don't understand how to be a good user on the forum. His courage turned to trolling but proudly said that he was more correct than the other high ranking members. I don't understand why they have to have such an attitude because I think they should be directed to be a good user even with some unpleasant words. Not all responses should be addressed as some of them are also fine to ignore as long as they are not constructive and not needed. I just hope they don't get provoked easily, but it's better to learn to be the best by expressing their true thoughts.

To me everyone that adds value in this community aside the spammer ,scammers trying to Scam others regardless of whomever that replies to your post to add value in my humble opinion is important and I don't think you're the one to determine how important you are to the community but others and people are important in various ways here.
NB: Theymos has a lot to do and cannot go about replying all post here to show how important people are by commenting/replying to their post ,I do think he attends to problems/posts that needs an answer at any given time that caught his attention. However in my general view of how important you are in this community comes from you adding value here.

That feeling always seems to be with any of us when we join bitcointalk, myself included. Actually I've expressed those feelings to anyone when someone tagged me just because of the name when I was a newbie, but we really needed to go out and talk for that feeling to go away as knowledge and experience grew.

Exactly, I've proved it even when I had to ignore some slurs sent to me via pm when I managed to catch a cheater. But of course, I think respecting other people and their knowledge is an attitude that we really need to have, this will help us to never feel arrogant for whatever we already have, including the knowledge and reputation that we have gained.

I get the feeling a lot of members feel the same way as you do, i.e., a little bit intimidated by older members here.  You're going to feel however you're going to feel, but my advice is to treat everyone here as your equal.  When I joined the forum, I came in with the attitude of "fuck this place, and fuck these idiots".  Many of my early posts were deleted, probably for trolling, and it took a bit for me to settle in and actually grow a lasting fondness for bitcointalk.  But believe me, if you speak your mind you'll probably gain a bit of respect even if people don't care for what you've got to say.  Being respectful to others is a good attribute as well, assuming the respect is deserved--oftentimes it isn't.

Having said that, I wouldn't barge into the technical & development section and roll around with a cigar in my mouth like I'm a boss (LOL).  I know the limits of my knowledge and also know where to tread carefully.  Humility is admirable IMO, and it's appropriate in certain circumstances here, but I think what's even more important is to have a thick skin and to give solid, well-reasoned opinions and information.

Take everything I just said with a baseball-sized nugget of salt.  I've been out in the sun too long today digging holes in the ground.

At first I thought that establishing communication with members ranked above me was scary and until now I still refuse to send them PM even though when I follow high ranking members like you it feels very fun especially as your own confession says with will gladly serve every member below Legendary rank.

Therefore, if the question is how important am I in the forum, my answer is very clear that everything in the forum is important because something that I don't have is certainly in the people who are here because of the uniqueness of each different character.

This is a thread for the purpose of name-dropping, salted with arse-kissing.  FYI, it is one of the reasons why people in VIP positions are sometimes reluctant to interact with people.  Take it as advice; more is below.

Sometimes, I wonder if theymos ever uses an alt account to engage with the forum as an ordinary user.  The problem is, of course, that he could not risk engaging in discussions very deeply, lest style and substance may reveal his identity.

An even bigger problem is nonpublic contacts.  If anyone in a high-profile position engages in casual PM or e-mail correspondence with someone relatively unknown, it runs the risk that some loser will go around gratuitously bragging, “Oh, I was just chatting with X,” as if suddenly they are pals.  Unless you really are close to someone, it is inappropriate—and you will never be close to someone famous (let alone famous yourself), unless you have sound judgment about such matters of social appropriateness, and moreover, privacy.  It is why I try to avoid even mentioning such things unless there is a reason to do so—even in one instance when the other party took the initiative of reaching out to me, then quoted my reply on Twitter (with my permission).  Well, that is obviously not private; but I will not pretend that I’m best buddies with X just because X took an interest in something I wrote, and we had some interesting chit-chat about a topic of mutual interest.

For referring to public discussions, context is important.  To illustrate by way of example:  If, in Lauda’s final thread, there were occasion to recount the origin of Lauda’s final avatar, it would be relevant to retrace the history of how I made a satirical thread in Lauda’s defence, and theymos was so amused that that inspired a little piece of his April Fools’ joke that year, and my satire became a kind of a meme for Lauda in some of her later posts, and she used a clip of a William Blake painting that I had made for that thread as her final avatar.  But it would be gauche to make a merit-seeking Meta thread about the times that OH MY GAWD, SO-AND-SO REPLIED TO ME (and that makes me so “important”) with a list of my past interactions with theymos, forum staff, Bitcoin Core developers, etc., etc.  As if that validated my existence.

Ucy, try flipping the question around:  How important are you to yourself?  People who are worth talking to, usually know it—so it feels natural and normal to talk to someone famous.

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Who is Chris Pratt?  (Seriously, I have never heard of him/her/it.)


So, why are you here?  If you are not connecting with anyone, and if you think your posts are of such ephemeral, negligible significance to everybody else, is there any purpose?

In some of my past disappearances, when it seemed I may not return, people have sometimes created threads asking what happened to me.  Without any intention to deprecate the VIPs, it frankly touched me much more on a personal level to find that relatively unknown people had been wondering about my fate than to have perfectly normal interactions with famous folks.

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The Bitcoin Forum is not Bitcoin.  The forum is obviously centralized; and the central authority on this forum does matter.  Nonetheless, in a different way, this evokes an important point:

Quote from: marcotheminer on August 04, 2022, 04:20:56 PM

Isn't it like Bitcoin, where no one person even 'matters' (as long as there is 1+ person.. I suppose)?

One of my favourite quotes:  “Bitcoin’s greatest vulnerability was and always is that it can’t be any stronger than the people who use it.  It’s possible for the public to be just too dumb for Bitcoin.” — nullc on Redit (2021-12-30).  The context:  A proposition that if, hypothetically, CSW were really Satoshi, then it wouldn’t matter, because no one person matters to Bitcoin.

Quote from: nullc (2021-12-30 01:57:28)

Quote from: AmbitiousPhilosopher (2021-12-30 01:17:57)

I think most people wouldn't give a hoot

I'm confident you're wrong. Too many people are hidebound authoritarians and simply can't wrap their head around a system that doesn't have a central authority.

The history of the public's interaction with Bitcoin has been a comedy of errors with people (press, organizations, etc) incorrectly fixating on one person or element of the system as being in charge of it... only to end up mired in confusion, oscillating between options, because they can't wrap their head around a named 'system' that has no central authority... even though there are plenty of other things in our lives that don't (e.g. the English language, to give an example we're all familiar with).

Bitcoin's greatest vulnerability was and always is that it can't be any stronger than the people who use it. It's possible for the public to be just too dumb for Bitcoin. I'm generally pretty positive about the world's ability on that front, but in a hypothetical dystopia where it turned out that somehow an incompetent narcissist conman created Bitcoin, one fixated on destroying its properties, confiscating coins for personal gain, and destroying its decentralization? ... in that world Bitcoin would be well outside of my personal risk tolerance. Wright would be way too much of a headwind.

This is even more true today because BSV exists so we don't have to speculate what a Bitcoin of the Craig believers looks like. It isn't pretty.

Although I disagree with him about some details, I agree with Cøbra’s proposition that Bitcoin is hyperpolitical money.  And in politics, these things matter:  Charismatic leaders, founders, VIPs—authority figures.  Bitcoin’s distributed database consensus is decentralized; its development consensus is largely decentralized, because the Bitcoin Core developers think in terms of decentralization; but its broader wetware-layer social consensus never can be.  And an ideal that contradicts human nature is worth no more than an idea that contradicts the laws of physics or of mathematics.

Each user has their own perspective on how they interpret that important word. It's not as simple as we're talking about, but anyway I've said that we're only important from a community point of view but not so much about what we are capable of providing for this forum.

Never consider yourself important just because an admin or moderator replied to or quoted your message, it should be interpreted differently. But any user willing to try to clear up any misconceptions about what bitcoin is, I believe their existence is important.

I think as long as I am contributing something to the forum, having fun with some members and having debates with few of them, I keep enjoy reading their posts and getting along with the conversation. I keep reporting posts all the time and surely seen effects on it from moderators which means somehow somewhere one of the staff is also noticing me and doesn’t matter if they reply to me someday.

The only thing that matters to me a lot is, keep surfing and reading through forum everyday without fail.

Its vital part of my life, and there is no single day I haven’t been on forum whether I type something or not but I would be at least reading some random posts on phone, work pc mow and then.

I believe we are part of bitcointalk family already!

If you think you important, you will. 

Once upon a time, in a certain community, the youths decided to kill all the elderly ones because they were so uncivilised and boring, and it was believed that the elders were the cause of their lack of growth. They succeeded in killing the elders and made a young boyy the king.
Few years later, a neighbouring community came to claim the entire community. In the court, the community that killed their elders was asked to bring their eldest citizen to speak in court, but their eldest was a 40yrs old young man  who knows nothing about the community boundaries. The youths eventually lost the community to their rivals because there was no elder to testify in the court.

I am thankful that we still have elders in the forum who could tell us stories like what I see below;

You have serious ego problems if you think you are important just because the admin talked to you or somehow did you a small favor. (Like changing your username, unbanning/unlocking your account)

It is a regular thing here. If I remember this right, Not so long ago (like a million years ago) there was an issue about lauda and theymos pm’ed everybody and asked us to distrust her. Most people sided with lauda against theymos’s dumb call. LoL. Nobody had a ban because of this.

We need to correct the definition of importance. If theymos or mods of the forums reply to us then it does not mean that we have become important. I have seen mods replying to the newbies and even to those whose accounts are banned, so it does not mean they have become important.

You and we are important if people want to read our posts and got help from our posts. That's should be the criteria of being important on the forum.

After I read this one, I agree that all of us here are important to the forum but maybe not important to one or two users who don't like us. I admit that contributing to the forum is the best way to keep this forum good as a knowledge library about bitcoin. We are all not the same but here every user is important for the forum especially because the community is the base that keeps the forum alive.

How a user is important on this forum doesn't really matter, that is, getting a reply on mention from theymos or any of the other high ranking members of the forum doesn't make you more or less important on the forum.
We all are as important as the information, knowledge we pass or share on the forum, we are as important as the help we render to other users to help them become better in terms of knowledge in crypto currencies and other stuffs.

there must be a conviction in you that always gives the positive impression to go on with your normal life style in which you don't notice but the people see that great qualities in you, atimes you discover the influence of a lamp in lightening everywhere but can not see the dark in its underneath, but believe me where two or more people can attest to the reputation of a particular person, then there's fairness in the judgement, out of many that were called, few were chosen.

In real life I have a very hard time suffering fools, and thus it makes it hard for me to interact with people 1) when I'm forced to, or 2) in medium-large groups, where there's always a bell curve of social worth (or tolerability), thereby making it nearly impossible to avoid idiots.

On the internet?  Yeah, I'll rain hellfire down on your ass if I don't take a liking to you--but the basic rule is to mirror the treatment people show me (or the forum).  I appreciate the feedback, you puppy dog.  *lol*

Sometimes on the rare occasion I visit BPIP and check my profile, my mind doth boggle at the stats.  This is my profile as of 30 seconds ago:



10th most recognized??  I know there's a formula for how those numbers are arrived at, but I seriously doubt Vod's math represents reality as we know it.

I doubt it got anything to do with 'importance', if one has something to say about topic then one would reply. People look at topic, not the name.

I had to separate a few paragraphs from your wall of text to make it easier to understand what you mean.

The title is a bit misleading when I read the content of your topic. You really appreciate theymos about something he dedicated to this forum, but why the question how important are we to the forum?

Basically this community is important for the sustainability of the forum in the long term. Without the community this forum will not be as good as expected because it can die without much activity. Someone who has a big contribution is expected in the forum mainly because they can be a differentiator that will be very useful for the community. Imagine how important a merit source for forum today, they support the system and contribute greatly to users but you can't expect them to admit that they are important here.

Whether we are important or not depends on the perspective of other users, if they think LoyceV, DdmrDdmr, TryNinja, fillippone and all staff are gems then they will surely say all names are important for the forum. But otherwise, if you, me, and the others are spammers or something, you're less important and more likely to be ignored and forgotten.

In the beginning, even though I wasn't an established member, global moderators replied to me when I DM them for anything. I don't think it's related to how important we are to the forum. All members of the forum are important, they are part of the ecosystem. But everyone can't lead. So it would be who is leading position or a well-established member.

I have changed my Display name two times which is a record on the forum. Theymos hasn't refused me both times and replied so quickly. Also regarding merit source, he has DM me. So at least I can say I am a well-Established member here, but don't know how am I important this forum.