I have been following meta dynamics with a little bit more attention lately.
I usually analyse Italian board situation quite attentively, but I recently have been looking more at the forum as a whole thanks to this excellent @ddmrddmr thread:
Very brief overview of Merit Source sMerit Increase impact (first few days)Apparently, since there have been too little time to properly judge, the move by @theymos kranked up merit system again, and this week he had what is the
third biggest merit increase ever (the first being a brrr-like merit spree by Theymos).
@ddmrddrm posted on his thread an image, supporting the evidence of merit circulation system, that contained a disturbing detail in my opinion.
Here it is what saw:
Merit receivers, the active users posting good content, or at least merit-worth content, have been on a steady decline almost since inceptions. Same could be said about merit senders, or users actively engaged in the merit system.
On the Italian board I have noticed the same pattern, and as you know the Italian board is one of the highest merit/post ratio local board. Hence I suspect this has little to do with the merit system, but it is rather a broader phenomenon.
We have been discussing these kind of data since a long time and we came to the conclusion that while old users got disaffected to the forum because boredom, getting disaffected to bitcoin or, why not, getting too rich to post on a forum, Bitcointalk.org failed to attract new users because of the forum format itself.
New users might be attracted to different media: Twitter, Telegram chats or Reddit. All those forums are quite different, but all 9fcthem, bar reddit, are prone to a very short attention span. Search functions are very limited and I can’t see JJG posting one of his wall of texts on a Teegram chat, where it would be immediately spammed by users asking “when lambo?” Or “I bought shitcoin DEN and I have been scammed!”.
Forum are more of a slow rhythm, deep tought, knowledge intensive conversations (yeah WO thread included), while other media look to me more like instant gut-feeling dominated brawls.
To me this is what our forum has to offer:
- longest serving bitcoin forum on the internet
- world class list of users. Not only satoshi, but also @gregmaxell, @achow101, @elwar or @theymos himself are the first came to my mind
- Ideal platform to knowledge exchange. Allowing to pondered, well written and formatted post, without the need to abide to the prevailing short attention span (160 chars on TW, almost instant like reaction time needed for TG chats
- world spread userbase, providing a diverse approach and omnicultural experience about bitcoin
- ability to integrate/link other media into the forum. You can add link YouTube videos, tweets or external website as a reference, and discuss their contents on the forum (they are called hyperlinks, I know. Not a big deal in 2021, but still..)
These are the step that might be useful to attract new users
- mobile theme. Allowing decent navigation from mobiles (something I already expressed in my interview
- ability to relaunch your posts on different social media. I have tried to “shill” Bitcointalk.org trough my Twitter @fillippone1. All I got are 51 followers, I suspect half of them are bots. Same on the Italian bitcoin TG chat, where I continuously mention Bitcointalk.org: same result, no apparent effect on the local board. Maybe it’s just the fact I suck at PR
- Do I really need to mention? New software?
What do you think? Do you think forum is losing userbase and this is a bad thing? Are there other reasons this is happening and other solutions?