Topic: Improving Signature Campaigns (Read 300 times)

I'm new here as user and I work in online marketing company, I want to share my thoughts about signature campaigns and in general to bad quality posts.

- I created a cryptocurrency stats website and I discovered this forum few days before. For me, this forum is like a gold mine, not only because I have learned a lot about cryptocurrencies, so many business marketing opportunities here!

- The forum encourages this to happen: Signature campaigns, account selling allowed... and the most important thing: it's like the official forum in 99% of altcoins, stay in first page of ANN thread it's very valuable.

- This situation is bad for these reasons: spam, bad quality posts, and good quality threads going down very fast.

- They (forum staff) work actively deleting shitty posts. They deleted 3 of my posts, one of them with a "good luck" in ANN thread of a coin that I invested money, they consider it a bad post. Understandable.

- This situation is good for these reasons: business inside the forum attracts companies and users = valuable forum, lot of good content, be the world nº1 cryptocurrency forum.

- Forum can stop signature campaigns and all business around the forum and this forum will be better, that's a true. The problem I see it's that the forum will lose companies interest, maybe cryptocurrency creators interest too.

- I don't know how they can solve the problem. Maybe training people to control relevant threads, relevant posts, and be more aggressive with bad quality users/posts. Creating a system to prioritize good quality threads. Improving search (when I search something, it's very hard to find the content, and sure it's in the forum).

- The forum propitiate coin creation with all the business generated here. It's a win-win for the forum and the sector. If forum stops bounty campaigns, signature campaigns, etc..  it will lose the users that wants to earn money for sure, but these users also buy coins, they (we) want to earn money in all ways, crypto, forum, etc..




- And finally, for me the forum is the real core of this business. The essence of the cryptocurrency world turns around the money earning. The essence of the cryptocurrency world is in this forum. I wouldn't find sense to this forum without all the business generated around and I like it as marketing lover.

nobody cares about quality post anymore nowadays.
threads with a lot of pages most likely draw attention than fewer ones.
you know, it's like a market, people wanna know what's going on if they see a lot of crowd in there.

Agreed! the OP tomwalsh is a participant in said sig. ad. campaigns yet he is here to open a "Formal" discussion on how to make it better? 

The forum makes $$ of these sig. Ad. posters and will never be against the rules.

You think bitcointalk.org is financed through regular users here? HA it's Financed with SPAM.

Almost %90 of spam comes from bounty participants, Jr members-members-full members should have their signatures disabled.

I bet they tried automating this.  Guessing it didn't get too far because I am not sure of the natural language processing skills.

You could theoretically use a variety of 'paraphrasing', for example a paraphrasing algorithm might generate the following similar phrases:

I hate this guy, he is so dumb;
This guy is stupid, I hate him;
I despise this dumb guy.

Just do that on popular thread titles..
Paraphrase the 'comments' from the last thread with the title you used for paraphrasing and 'BAM' you can almost automate a shitposter in terms of both starting threads and commenting on them with their sockpuppets..

And that is one of the less sophisticated ways of doing things.
Maybe I shouldn't be discussing this after all.

The real problem with these threads is not just the possibility of mindless alt-english replies, but the fact that the poster can start a similar thread by copying one of the previous replies, and everybody can pitch into that with their same tired old meaningless replies. You can end up with 9 or 10 real threads on page 1, and a load of bumped clone threads.

We might even see guys with their sockpuppets and their friend's sockpuppets chain quote each other to increase impact scores..

Already know they start threads in (altcoin announcements mostly) just to have somewhere for these accounts to post.

No, it’s not the only section, that was an example. But I often see what could be called quality posts opened in the Bitcoin Discussion section, which often go down and disappear because to reply to them you need to have some knowledge of something (not necessarily technical), whereas simple posts where people can just express their opinions without much prior knowledge about the crypto world remain there on the first page.

See for example: The Dream of Getting Rich with bitcoins.

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/the-dream-of-getting-rich-with-bitcoins-1553984

It’s currently 113 pages, what people here would say is a spam megathread. Someone who has just signed up onto this site can post his opinion there without having to know much about bitcoin. For me, a post like that is fine, whereas for many people on this forum it should be deleted because once it goes over 100 pages all possible answers have been covered.

In my opinion, the problem is not so much going over 100 pages, as long as people are giving their opinions about their dream, and in some cases exchanging them and having a debate on it. It is more of a problem that some people just post whatever with bad English, without having read the first two pages and the last two (because nobody is going to read the over 100 pages) and just to increase post count.

I don’t care about the so-called quality posts, unlike many people here. I mean, I’m in favor of reducing the current level of spam, and I report people who are spamming, but my concept of “spam” is narrower than those who think there should be only quality posts here.  This is simply because a forum with only quality posts is more similar to an Encyclopedia, where only some people with deep knowledge write, and there is almost no debate, whereas a forum is a place where people exchange opinions, sometimes about trivial issues, sometimes about their dreams, and the like. High traffic comes with the latter, and it necessarily brings some amount of spam. There is spam in other forums as well, the only difference I see here is due to people getting paid for their posts, especially people getting paid for shitty posts (written in bad English, or repeating what has been said in the previous page, etc), so I favor something be done about it.

You're right as I'm not a coder nor do I care about the technicalities hence I haven't made a single post in the development section. Would that mean that this section is the only place where people can make quality posts?
The reason why there's almost no spam in that section is its specific nature that limits the number of people able and willing to contribute. This doesn't mean there's no spam or comments that don't add up to the discussion.


And to make things more interesting this one is by a legendary member.

I don't know what the community consensus here would be on having subscription accounts for members. I think that adjustment could help out on the quality of individuals that would be a part of the forums. With that the quality of posts/threads could improve as well. When it comes to signature campaigns I do agree that a good manager could spot check posts, especially the high counting ones, to see if there is spam. To combine that with specifying boards to post on could help them as well.

Depends what your definition of quality is.

In making this post my definition was something that gets the community engaged and interacting and secures the lifetime of the forum.

You have a point about hat not necessarily being high quality discussions. Maybe another metric could be introduced such as length of post (Which some are already doing) and relevance to topic using keywords.

My thoughts are that it could be an addition (a working one at that, definitely needs refinement) that improves forum quality. It would do it through incentive's forum friendly behavior rather than forcing it with admin threats (not meant to replace admin control just aid in a friendlier approach).

In a forum based on decentralization and community involvement we should be focused more on the carrot than the stick. (it is still a highly centralized forum)

I think you are completely mistaken here. Quality threads get way fewer replies than shitty threads, on average. You just need to go to the Bitcoin Discussion section and see how many spam megathreads there are, and then go to the Development and Technical Discussion section to see how many replies quality posts get.

I don't fully agree with that. If i see a signature ad on a quality post I would be far more likely to click into it than if it were on a crap post. I trust that the person making the quality post has some level of intelligence and is looking for bounty of a coin they believe to be valuable.

I think the main problem is that it is infeasible for campaigns to manage quality over quantity. There is no simple metric of this offered on forums like bitcointalk. A campaign manager isn't going to go through every single post of every single person to judge quality, so they have to settle with quantity as it is simple to measure.

Furthermore if a new thread post isn't quality then it will quickly get lost in feed and have no views. However a quality thread feed that has people returning to it constantly and constantly maintains a top position in feed will get far more views and is worth far more.

The problem campaigns don't care about quality. They just want their add spammed as many times by as many people and as quickly as possible. Whether a post is one word or one sentence to them is irrelevant as it's still one more ad impression promoting their crapcoin. If you want quality then you should hire a campaign manager that will actually do something about spam and who only accepts quality users, but leaving things up to the campaigns themselves is the issue here because they can't be trusted and are too lazy to run them so that falls upon staff who have to do it for free. Improving them would be quite simple: If companies or projects operate a badly ran campaign then they should face punishments which include their threads trashed and accounts banned. People would quickly get the message then that spam is unacceptable. 

I think the biggest problem with signature campaigns is the spam of useless posts it creates. People merely want to get their post count as high as possible and will spam any nonsense to do so.

With the development of the new bitcointalk forum i think there is a great way to solve this:

Implement a functionality for signature campaign managers to track IMPACT of posts, not just post count.

For example a post which has created a valuable discussion thread with many replies is awarded more impact points than one with only a couple of replies. Likewise the more times the post is quoted or upvoted (if this becomes a function in the new forum, I have seen much talk for and against it) the more impact points it receives.

Therefore campaigns award not only post count but impactfullness of those posts. (maybe even a penalty for large numbers of unimpactful posts)

This allows campaigns to improve impact as well as cleaning up the forum of useless spam.