Topic: Is Bitcointalk.org losing user base? - page 7. (Read 3253 times)

This is very correct sir and the merit system is working effectively. Maybe I used the wrong word to express my point. However, let me rephrase and see if you, @Charles-Tim and @Pokapoka124 will understand me better. Reward I meant is not monetary, which cannot be unless from campaign.
Let me draw an instance from a firm that has employees. Salary can be likened to the merit system here. All staff are entitled to salary provided you accomplish your job specifications. Some staff may receive something lesser than the standard salary because of irregularities and inability to accomplish task, which is likened to inability to earn good merits. Cool, then some good staff who do well may receive Bonuses (additional reward), job security, promotions etc.
I might be very much out of tracks in my suggestions because here is a forum and not a company. However I have a group of children I mentor, I used the system of additional reward to make every one the best.

Yes, in their guess to hit the moon (additional reward), they all landed at the star(the set goal)
Since my interest in this thread is on quality and regularity, hence my submission.
Perfect peace!

We have lost a lot of members recently and while they may have caused drama that is what got people engaged and currently Bitcointalk does not have any drama or major drama, mobile theme, aging forum software, mosts threads are beating the same bush a million times and people are getting tired of it. Its natural for high profile members to take extended breaks or leave the forum permanently just like any other forum but we are not replacing them. If you look at the top page for each board you will see the same names there are no real interesting members emerging and that could replace the old. The altcoin boards are a mess and that does not help encourage good quality members to join the forum and while the main bitcoin boards are ok we just lack the sort of discussions which would encourage members to join the forum. Most people joining the forum will find it via a search probably asking a question and seeking an answer but once that question has been answered they will disappear we just do not have the lure that the forum once had and I am not sure we can fix that. This is just how websites go and other forums are having similar results now that social medias like Reddit are a thing.

I hate to say it but I think going along with the NFTs and try to use that to stay relevant is the only way to go as that is bringing in the most attention right now.

What do they expect when all we get from them this days is, 'I'm a newbie here, how do I earn, how to get merits or the funniest, newbie advising other newbie how to be a good newbie. The beginners and help board is just a comics board this days with all the hilarious content been posted daily all in the name of creating a merit worthy content. The newbie getting attack are those too inquisitive to get merited or start earnings from the forum and this can be observe from the kind of discussion they engage in.

This type of users won't be productive to the forum in future, chances are they're just account farmers and majority of the time, it turns out to be true. The real newbie aren't getting any type of hostile treatment, they're widely accepted and getting as much support as they can. This type of newbie you see them trying their very best to engage in regular discussion, asking questions when they're confused or that have no idea on what is been discussed etc.

90% of the time, they spend less time in the meta, beginner and help boards, just viewing their posting records and it'll be obvious they're actually beginners. I'm not justifying the hostile behavior to the newbies but just know, majority of the time, the feedback you get as a newbie is from how you present yourself.

I created a somewhat similar thread in February. Both trading activity and forum advertising revenue are way down. In the past, forum ads would run for approximately 10 days, but they are now being run for 30 days.

In the above thread I created, several people suggested the forum could take steps to encourage LN use.

While there is a lot of interest in bitcoin, over time there has been less to discuss about bitcoin. This is especially pronounced when compared to the sum total of discussions related to cryptocurrencies. The only crypto I currently own is bitcoin, although I have owned a small number of altcoins in the past, I find it unlikely I will own any altcoins in the future, and I do not own any NFTs (nor have I ever owned a NFT).

I think there is the potential for a lot of discussion around things such as smart contracts, stablecoins, ERC20 coins (and similar), and NFTs (this may be temporary). The current structure of the altcoin section does a poor job at facilitating conversations around these topics. I think that at a minimum etherum and stablecoins should be given their own main sections with subsections. This is not a reflection on the technical superiority of the above, it is a reflection of the interest in, and the potential conversation topics of the above. Neither of the above are a short-term phenomenon, and both have a significant impact on the overall cryptocurrency economy. In the case of stablecoins, they influence bitcoin markets. Consideration should be given to creating subs for things such as smart contracts or NFTs.

I also think more difference should be given to proposals that are unlikely to gain consensus to be implemented into bitcoin, such as alternative "proof of" methods (POS for example). It remains my firm opinion that POW is superior to any alternative. I think arguments in favor of alternatives such as POS will result in more debate, which should attract more technical-minded people to the forum. Discussions about these types of topics may also eventually lead to improvements to bitcoin, even if no original proposal is ever implemented.

I might be personally interested in stablecoin discussions, and I very much enjoy debates about policy proposals, but I would probably personally not be interested in participating in most of the above-proposed subs. I do however think there is probably demand for topics involving the above subs, and there the above may increase traffic, and unique actual users who participate in the forum community. There will need to be merit sources who active read the above proposed subs to give out merit to thread participants for the metrics in the OP to improve.

This is just accurate already. Newbies love/like their posts to be merited, the quality posters among them are merited.

KingsDen, with what is going on this forum, no newbie that actively become a full member will find it difficult to join a signature campaign paying up to $40 weekly, is this not a reward enough when there are still bounty options for some that purposely register account for bounties.

The reward system of this forum is accurate enough and not comparable. Or, which reward are you implying? I believe it will be one of the ones that can result to this forum becoming spammers forum. One thing I noticed the admin accurately gotten rightly is the merit system which is enough as the reward system.

Can you give an example of what kind of rewards system you are talking about? How it would work, and where do the rewards come from. If a newbie manages to rank up to full member (and some have even ranked up to legendary), the whole community took part in his progress. That's the reward. The 100, 250, 500, or 1000 merits he received along the way is the community's way of saying we see you and we appreciate what you are doing.   

Jealousy isn't the motivation that will prove helpful. The merit system in itself is enough to motivate one.
The Bitcointalk Urban Achievers Merit Scholarship Program is good motivation

The hostility comes from the years of frustrations of being flooded by arrival of newbies who don't contribute, but just want to know how to get free bitcoin. A lot of newbies ask the same questions over and over without bothering to read the answers, this trait tends to upset some people. The attitude you speak of is not limited to bitcointalk forum, there is no perfect ecosystem except maybe the matrix lol. But if you ever feel like you are repeatedly attacked by the same person you can confront them, or you can use your ignore button. It is your choice


There is the service board. We don't need to create a new board for skill acquisition.

your right we must treat newcomers even older member in this forum very well me must respect one another.




In my opinion Many users Left the forum not because they don't like bitcointalk but I think they not treat properly to the older Member as I saw other higher rank not treated very well some newbies remember that Newbies are still learning and developing their knowledge so we must treat them like our friends we help them. Some high ranks looking down the newbies witch is not Good for a role model.
And some users left us because the saw other source of income or they felt  and odler version of the Forum.


I suggest that we must update the bitcointalk to a newer  version and more interesting  or update our posting methods especially the way we treat newcomers we must handle them with care we should be a good role model in their journey so that many users will comeback to us and many user will come to this forum.

Maybe when the forum was first established, it could meet all kinds of needs. But we have arrived in 2021. Smartphones are everywhere in our lives. Phones have become the main tool for managing our lives. Perhaps the greatest need of our forum is a mobile application. As for other forums, I don't think any of them can be Bitcointalk. There are some great writers on this forum. They found quite rich things in terms of content for the forum. We can't see this in every forum.

I totally agree with what you're saying. There has to be a change in the manner which the upper ranks engage newbies. There is boundless information to learn here  and it is impossible to know everything at once. Its true there are a lot of spammers who have bad intentions. But please don't label every newbie the same. I think its more effective to treat newbies are like children understanding the time, patience and training that is needed for them to grow run. Sometimes I think every one is too serious and uptight. This is a forum of crypto lovers. Why can't we just have fun?

I highlighted the above portions of Op and @Daniel91 posts because one pointed out a problem and the other one stated how the problem is created. I want to in my little way suggest a solution.

A system that has a means of punishing the offenders or disobedience, should have a means of rewarding the law abiding members. When there are no means of rewarding goodness, it will surely decline.
For instance, if there is a reward for a newbie who under few months grew an account to full member without spamming or plagerising, it will in no doubt jealous others to begin to make merit-worth posts.

In the case of hostile welcome of newbies by older members. I am happy a legendary member pointed out this issue. I believe many, very many new users dropped because of this.
We should endeavour to help and mentor newbies that show inclination to grow and help the forum.
This might not be obtainable or should be disregarded if the purpose of this forum has been achieved years ago. Maybe, we are just here for formalities. If not, let us encourage the new users who are really willing to add something to the system. A mere suggestion by a newbie will attract countless attacks.

At a point some new users will be advised confidentially to limit the number of posts they create. Be mindful of whose thread they reply or whose post they quote in other not to get into troubles. A newbie who can make 10 quality posts will limit to 2 from 2 to 0 or become dormant or a shit poster.
Alternatively, he will begin looking for alternative forums that will appreciate their weaknesses and encourage their strengths.

Please, I am sincerely inlove with this forum. I regret why I haven't known this forum for long. Here is like an institution for me, even though I will not be certified, the knowledge I gain here is high. Let us uphold the sanity of the forum and allow love lead.
I also wish to suggest if a board like "Skill Acquisition" can be created where people voluntarily teach skills. It will be a big empowerment, such that whenever you leave this forum for whatever reasons, there would be memories to remember, efforts to appreciate and relationships to uphold.
Perfect Peace!

My two cents: the forum is dying - and perhaps that's deserved / inevitable.

The kind of discussion this forum was build for is no longer desired by the "mainstream" "consumer" of forums, nor was it ever, probably.
eg. there's (was) little to no groupthink (or an enormous amount, depends on how you view it), although the introduction of the merit system changed that a lot for the worse IMO, a lot of esoteric discussions about technical details etc...

Add to that a terrible UI, terrible average poster + shitcoin campaigns and you get an inevitable deflation once said campaigns stop and end up with nothing of value apart from some very technical discussion no ordinary user will understand.

Of course, when you have a devteam that's literally just scamming instead of improving the forum that's not helping either.

So yes, bitcointalk is losing her users, and it is totally deserved. Over the span of ten years nothing has been done to improve accessibility, useability, or its reputation. Instead, bitcointalk was just "first".
I guess we see what that has lead to, but don't get me wrong,
I think it is inevitable that a lot of users have switched to forums/social media such as reddit either because their opinion is better represented there, the discussions are better, or because it is simply much more accessible in such a way that bitcointalk never could have competed with.

So what's still so special about bitcointalk IMO?

- It was "first" blabla.
- You can "make money" posting. > Make money promoting morally dubious products such as bitcoin m***** or complete scamcoins, mostly.

User activity grows exponentially on the way up when there's the opportunity to spam shitcoins for moola - and declines exponentially when interest cools down in crypto. Seems pretty inevitable.

I mean, no one should forget where most of the popularity for this forum has come from for the last couple of years: a self-reinforcing hype of idiots constantly promoting rugpulls, shady casinos, or other shady financial products to each other. There's nothing necessarily wrong with that, but it's just bound to lose steam at some point until the next "framework" (what crypto is to the internet, kinda) to play these games in comes around, and new suckers are able to be drawned in.

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Also seriously, I get an ad for "Elon Coin" by a DT1/DT2 member called lightlord? Wow. seems like the forum is extra desperate for cash these days promoting really obvious false grassroot rugpulls.

I also took the same steps to make a little analysis about the activities of local board and also about the sustainability of the forum and its users for local Indonesian board.
1. https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/diskusi-keberlansungan-forum-diskusi-bitcointalkorg-5209309
2. https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/chart-tampilan-bulanan-aktivitas-lokal-board-bahasa-indonesia-5348298

Since theymos implementing merit as a new requirement for rank and rating quality post in 2018, I've seen a decline in the forum's user base exacerbated by bounty situation, most of which ended in scam. Many local Indonesian users stopped posting and left their account especially users with low rank. That condition lasted throughout 2018 until the price of bitcoin and most altcoin began to rise in 2020.

Yes, I have seen a decrease in the user base. Even though the number of registered account has exceeded 3 million, I'm sure there are still many old users who leave this forum.

I also found data showing a decrease in the number of merit distributed on the local board as well as the number of users involved in the merit cycle since I updated that thread every month since 2021 whose data I retrieved from the DdmrDdmr Merit Dashboard. Of course it is not the best condition if we have a number of merit source scattered throughout the forum and some of them are also representative of their respective local board. But I think this is not only happening in local board, but globally this decline is clearly shown based on merit dashboard data.

I just hope that once the merit source is increased to 111 users, there will be an increase in the number of users involved in merit distribution and encourage users who have never used sMerit before to get involved in this cycle. The forum's user base may still increase if the bitcoin price hit ATH again, but the user base involved in merit distribution will not grow if user interest in using their sMerit on quality post is not stimulated.

Merit givers aren't giving merits because there aren't any valuable discussions that deserve merits, else I don't think that merit givers are doing it any bad. The ones who are leaving are maybe because either they are fed up of the merits system (which was released to actually weed out those parties who don't post with constructiveness), or they are not seeing any more campaigns coming online because of the exhaustion of companies maybe or such are scared to come up with BTC campaigns following highly volatile moves being seen in it nowadays (maybe). I believe that if it's losing some users, then they either don't deserve to be here or they have lost interest in crypto (again, maybe) or they've become too busy IRL to come here.

I couldn't agree with you more about your analysis of what bitcointalk is compared to the social media sites you mentioned, and I hope this forum doesn't start pandering to the zero-attention span crowd (and I'm not sure how that would be accomplished, but I'm sure it could).  Admittedly, my own attention span is asymptotically approaching the zero point, but with bitcointalk being what it is, it forces me to slow down, read, and put effort into what I write.  Anyone should should do the same when making posts, whether they're in a bounty/campaign or not.

This is probably the only suggestion of yours that I'm 100% behind.  Cross-posting on Reddit and other sites I don't personally care about and would be fine with, but there are a lot of users who access the forum on their smartphones and I've done so myself in the past--and it's a pain in the ass trying to navigate the site without it being mobile-friendly.  Even if that new forum software never comes out, the least Theymos could do to improve things is to make a mobile-friendly version of the site.  That could be done prior to releasing whatever changes he has planned with the upgraded software I'm sure.

On the merit front, I still think it's a bit too early to judge whether Theymos's recent changes have had or are going to have a significant effect on the number of merits being distributed.  And whether or not there is such an effect, I don't hear too many members bitching about not being able to rank up--certainly not like they used to a couple of years ago.  So I hope the changes help, but if they don't, I'm not convinced it'll be a crisis for the forum as a whole.

I think this community in its current state is not very welcoming for new members and that will effect the amount of people are register but also the people who do register might not want to engage out of fear of hostilities. I am not branding the whole community as being unwelcoming because there are definitely people out there that make it like their goal to welcome new members into the community but overall I do think there is a problem there even if it is the minority. The only way we are going to correct that is by more senior members correcting their behaviors. As for attracting new members I do not think theymos or any of the staff are going to do anything but as a community we could organize things. Hell the only thing that seems to work around here is signature campaigns so maybe we could do a community funded advertising campaign for those that have big followings and pay them for sponsored content or we could fund raise as a community and pay for advertising ourselves but I would like to see some of the forum funds used for this.

Whatever the solution we need to find one as the forum is slowly but certainly losing its members.

Does anyone have any accurate data on the amount of active members in the Bitcoin boards?I do not agree that Bitcointalk should mimic Bitcoin they are completely separate entities and are different in the ways they grow. If we carry on with the current user projection then Bitcointalk would need to advertise to try something to try and get more people registering. If you take a look at the forum currently you will see there is a lack of new members and only existing members contributing to discussions. Over time these existing members will leave for different reasons and if we are not replacing those members with new members then the forum will quickly become a ghost town. Even when Bitcoin hit a new ATH the amount of new accounts being registered was much less this time than in 2017 so something is definitely effecting that.

AFAIK, topic OPs are the only posts that rank on google search. And those that do (mostly in the technical, ANN, and service boards), are usually in the top 10 results because of Bitcointalk's very high domain authority (89).

This is quite an interesting thread with lots of similarly interesting opinions; The charts in the OP does show a progressively decreasing engagement in merit exchanges which could be indicative of a decrease in overall engagements, but previous higher numbers may not be something to miss as the forum has for long been filled with spammers leading to changes like the newbie jail and enhanced newbie requirements and the early period of the merit launch led to the growth of lots of account farms - Not all traffic is beneficial.

About users losing interest; This could be due to the retro forum layout which is a bit difficult to navigate for someone new to the forum, I can remember how alien this forum looked to me in my first few weeks here, but anyone who is truly interested in Bitcoin should be interested in this forum, regardless.
As the OP mentioned, there are lots of useful information here and members do not have to be active or even logged in to access them, if I didn't have much to contribute, I could simply use this forum as a digital library for Bitcoin and my presence would not be felt, I can imagine some use it this way.

Does the administration need to do anything to influence traffic?
No, in my opinion. Bitcoin does not change with the times and does not market itself, this forum is a reflection of Bitcoin and should mimick it.
Comparing bitcointalk to other forums is not necessary imo, as any other forum run the way this is would have lost almost all of their userbase, regular social platforms constantly market their service and make regular changes to their software, btt on the other hand has had the exact same outlook for over ten years with no updates, but still retains a good number of active users.

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As I've mentioned in another thread, a new forum software would not matter much in attracting new users, but only to add changes that majority of members have been requesting.

Its funny that you wrote this thread as this is something I have been concerned about for a while if you note down the number of reddit subscribers at /r/Bitcoin and note down how many members are here on Bitcointalk you will see that the sub reddit is growing at a quicker rate. I am not sure how we are going to compete with forums and reddit which allow more text like speak but I would like to see theymos put something together. If signature campaigns disappear from the thread or die down a little bit then the forum would lose yet another part of its appeal.