Topic: Is it just me or has the quality of this forum dropped immensely (Read 3505 times)

Some forums encourage member participation. I think you'll find that usually the biggest incentive in some of the non-gambling/money-based forums is just activity and reputation. I think people enjoy being part of a community and discussions.


This is true, but the problem is that most of the broken English posts (let's say 99%) are not quality posts. You can try to bring up anecdotal examples of quality posts that do have broken English, but I'm willing to be that most of them are short (one sentence, but still useful). I will say that usually if the post requires you to read it more than once to understand the WORDS (provided they're moderately simple and not technical terms) then it's garbage.

And this is just from observations, but I can also say that over 80% of posters that do not use capitals (type posts all lowercase) are spammers.

Example:




And... when the posts begin with "yeah" or "i agree", it's usually spam.

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It should also be noted that not only are one-liners spam, but also longer posts that are just recycling content over and over again.

Example:

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All of the examples are taken from the same thread, by the way.

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And this isn't exact a thing about spam, but it's just the form of typing: When You Capitalize Every Word In The Sentence It Doesn't Look Nice. I have to strain my eyes to read, and usually it's not even worth reading - an attempt at looking grammatically correct is what the capitalization does... and it fails.


What an eyesore.

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So what is a quality post? Perhaps... something that takes brain power? A post that requires you to think about what you're going to type, instead of just literally reading the title, none of the past posts, and replying as fast as you can to pump out those cents quickly. Just my fifth of a dime.

There are enough people in the staff member group that are active, although they can't do much about this particular problem. You have to be a global moderator or admin. Please do more research before posting next time.

I think we need more good mods to tackle this spamming problem.

This is an example of semantic quibbling. Money is a concept which is made into this world by means of technology (metalworking in case of gold and cryptography in case of bitcoins). In fact, specific technology is secondary (papermaking itself doesn't make paper into money). Though I basically agree that signature campaigns greatly contribute to the popularity of this forum, despite all their drawbacks and flaws...

The negative consequences of which (such as excessive spamming) could still be alleviated if properly taken care of

Lol the irony is that you yourself is wearing a signature albeit your own site.Practice what you preach.Why blame theymos his job is to run this forum efficiently and he his doing his job well.
Every forum allows signatures and there are some kind of incentives on every forum for encouraging members participation.
Just using technical jargons or grammatically perfect English doesn't make a quality post

I suggest another tactic. Instead of directly banning or otherwise punishing spammy users, ban managers of the campaigns that these users are spamming under. Yeah, I understand that it is a drastic measure in and of itself, but in this way, we would nip the problem in the bud. The forum rules should be appended with a special section about campaign managers bearing personal responsibility for their campaign members and what they post...

A monthly ban for negligent and promiscuous managers would most likely resolve 90% of spam issues here

The only cure for this cancer is to turn the signatures off completely and rely on selling ad spaces to people willing to advertise on the forum. But I think the trade-off for that will be decreased traffic to the forum because 90% of the forum population will just leave when they have realized they are not getting cash. Do you think the moderators would spend most of their time in here every day if they were not getting paid? No. Because they are the garbage men dealing with the heaps of crap every day pouring in here and frankly I have limited my time in here only to reading news and checking out sports tips because believe it or not I have been gambling way before I ended up in here so yeah. So embrace the shit storm or press that Ignore button until your fingers start to hurt   

I've been here almost a year? and YES "this" forum has gone down (even further) from then.  Agree with other poster, "this" forum is known for scamming/easy $ etc.   It's kinda like the Bitcoin Blackmarket and YES L.E. IS HERE!!

The farming, selling, pretending, scamming, is just laughable.  It doesn't take long to figure out there are a few groups here with tons of accounts engaging in the same scam  

The sig campaigns, I don't have issue with.  I wish they would use some discretion.  For me-when I see a scammer/bullshit post with a siggy attached...........I'm not looking at that website, not even a click.  YOU ARE KNOWN BY THE COMPANY YOU KEEP!

The broken English gives me a headache, yet, gives me many laughs so eh even trade off. I've seen shit here that I've never heard before.  Other countries version of insult:  Your Dads Gay (ya i LOVE that one) I just don't get it I'd rather be called an Asshole/Cock/Cunt/Bitch at least I understand those insults.

I can't blame owners/moderators/others.  If you have a legitimate point, hit report to moderator. Don't waste their time on nonsense there is plenty abound.
 
I think members should do their duty by other members/forum and add feedback positive/negative (Although, I have a problem with it's legitimacy -at least it's a starting point for one to come to their own conclusion).

Lastly, there ARE some good people here.  Gotta take the shit w/the glory.  

I fully agree with that.  Nothing against non-native English speakers, but when I see them trying so hard to make a basic sentence into the length of a paragraph in order to make their posts seem more legitimate, I cringe. Hard.

Even if you can understand most of them, the content is 90% garbage anyway.  I don't want to have to struggle to read shit posts.  But whatever.

I have great respect for folks who can speak and write multiple languages, that isn't the problem.  It's the crap posts in broken English.  These people wouldn't be posting on an English-language forum if they weren't getting paid.  That's my take on it, at least.

Maybe they really didn't have the need to learn it and this is the first time they're using it. Also would you like it better if they spoke on their native language or on unleast broken english? Maybe their english isn't that good but you can still, somewhat,  understand  them.

It is a forum related to bitcoin and we are having general discussions too because people from all sort of background uses bitcoin ,tech and non tech and they are here because they see the monetary gain associated with bitcoin, about english language ,it is used as an international mode of communication and you cant expect everyone to speak proper english  


Common wealth countries use English as their second language and so the figure will increase again

Agreed.  People get so defensive about English language skills being piss poor here, but it IS an English language forum we're on, local boards notwithstanding.   If 90% of posts are crap anyway, throwing incoherence on top of that is an insult to me.  I think a lot of posters here ought to stick to local boards...but then they wouldn't get paid. 

See you have to look the other way! bitcoin was technology which had a currency value at the beginning, but now it is currency based on technology. So this is the way it would go, I don't justify that this is correct but personally I'd love to say bitcoin is money rather technology

They have brought people (people not knowing Bitcoin before this) that were searching on Google for ways to earn money via the internet, and ended up here.

And exactly these people are ruining this forum with their the Bitcoin and Google translate language that adds nothing beside more junk.

Don't make me laugh, because that is pure nonsense right there.

What you call *hard* I call almost not doing anything.

You cannot expect everyone to speak about technologies of bitcoin, Previously there were only users who were attracted by bitcoin technology but now there are many more who uses bitcoin just for its value. So don't expect everyone to speak about bitcoin, transaction, wallet, blockchain.

Since bitcoin became currency for many services, the discussion and talks would divert from bitcoins. Now this forum is not a small community of members who just cared about bitcoin.

Signature campaigns have brought some spammers, but that has brought many new users and made this forum as good place to advertise. Don't just look at the negative side, there many campaign participants who doesn't spam and more campaign managers trying hard to kick out spammers. Thus making this forum at least in a sense as decentralized.

That's BS. It has only ruined this forum by encouraging junk posting and keeping year-long pointless threads alive with banal content.

The solution is just to turn off forum signatures completely. They add nothing.

I created a thread with discussion of why disabling signatures is the only solution, and of course after a few pages and months even that thread was just signature spammers rehashing junk posts at each other.

By inaction, Theymos has made this forum not worth the time.

But that wouldn't be that much often, and someone can surely make a  scrypt for sorting comments based on number of characters, time posted, frequency of posts, etc... Like there should be some criteria, or maybe like an upvoting (like + and - trust) where people could be upvoting  a user if they fell like they're contributing the forum, so if someone is really active and really helping out the community, maybe they shouldn't wait as long for their rank.

Personally, I do not agree on the latter; it's like when topics related to earning(s) and/or how to get your hands on some Bitcoins, there's always a bunch of people saying 'through signature campaigns'; and, off course, >90% if not near >95% of them have them campaigns in their signatures.
Off course not all contributors doing signature campaigns are rubbish or hollow contributions; in fact, some of them are pretty good actually! Yet it still remains a fact that due to signature campaigns, we at least can say they contribute to a whole bunch of useless and double/triple/etc posts and answers; likewise goes the same for facilitating the selling and buying of accounts. If there is money to be made, some people will just do anything to do so, and everything else comes second in line 

Signature campaigns have contributed a lot in making bitcoin mainstream and in growing bitcoin community.Campaigns have also helped many bitcoin related business to establish.
I bet those whose who oppose sig campaigns are the ones who have hoarded lots of bitcoins and feel jealous when they see others earning them.

That would be too drastic a measure. Disabling signatures for anyone below a Hero member rank would do just wonders in this regard and most likely sweep away a lot of spammy campaigns along with their shit posters. While enabling signatures back might be an option at moderators' or trusted users' discretion, though not completely free from abuse...


And that would definitely be a hell of a job

Well if you do that, probably a lot of people would leave just because of that, and I'm not really sure how this forums gets around, is it by donations or ads or smthn... Maybe bring in the new way, a new system of ranking up. Where spam posts wouldn't be considered as posts at all, where a true contribution would be rewarded.

I don't like this way or ranking up with points every two weeks because it's allows spammer to rank up easily, maybe something like after a certain period of time you can pm a mod or admin and ask to review your account, if you weren't spamming and your posts are on point, then you will get a higher rank. Tho, there might be some more things to add to that like what does a certain rank require and things like that. That's just my opinion on how to solve that problem, since then spamming would leave you nowhere and people will actually give a productive response that just "yes haha" or things like that. I've gave my proposal, it's all up to admins. :p

Well when there were less people and less signature campaigns posts had more quality, now when there are tons of new users, many more new signature campaigns, and signature camps. require a certain rank, then you have people that are shitposting just to rank up and whether you know english or not, it's not stopping you from posting. :p

No, it is not just for you. Spammers ruined the forum, and we can't do nothing.
Maybe the only way to fix this problem is to ban all the signature campaigns.

Allowance of signature campaigns and buying/selling of accounts is something I find awkward; such things make a forum to be known like a place where people can earn (easy) money, and attracts unwanted elements negatively impacting discussion(s) and quality as a whole. If talking about the Bitcoin, blockchain and other related stuff regarding would be the core, then the only place where people could advertise should be that banner space up for renting; allowing, and thus facilitating, any other form just simply downgrades the forum as a whole, it's quality and it's content.

I guess the only thing that would be close to guaranteeing that the quality of posting here increases is to stop sig campaigns (yes I'm aware that I participate in one).

It'd stop the shit posting to reach weekly quotas but at the same time this would make the forum a lot quieter.

False. If nothing is done, the exact opposite will happen. The quality will be even worse than it is now, which says a lot since some sections are already mostly unreadable.

Quite annoying, redundant and rule-breaking threads, yes.

Unless something is done, that is likely the case.

I think it would be the reverse, actually. Do you remember back in 2015 when there were 4-some bubbles and a billion of the same threads about "btc is $n now" or "how high will btc go?" appeared?

Increased adoption will only bring way to more people... with the majority of those becoming spammers.

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What it will do, however, is bring in more ad revenue for the forum and potentially help with the new forum software.

We're in a period of low price volatility. It's all gone a bit boring, forum traffic & increased adoption will improve the quality of the forum, we just need some good news to pump the price.

Just have a bit of patience.

This is why I spend time paying in Development & Techbical Discussion and Technical Support. Spammers don't understand what's there or can't be bothered to make sense of that, they'd much rather post in "Do you think bitcoin is a good investment?".

Heh.

It depends on what you mean by quality. I joined this forum a little over 5 years ago, and I'd argue that the quality of discussion was higher, but that means a lot of things. I speculate that conversation was of higher quality because Bitcoin was more technical at the time. People came here to have discussions on the technology and how to use it. The fact that that isn't necessarily the case anymore in my opinion means that the technological barrier is decreasing. The userbase is now more diverse, and their #1 question isn't, "What steps must I take to avoid corrupting my Bitcoin wallet and losing all of my money", instead it is "I bought Bitcoin, what do I do with it now?".

Of course the discussion is going to be a lot higher quality between fewer members with the same interests that respect each other. If there were only 1000 Bitcoin users world wide, I believe that would still be the case. Now, we have people who barely understand Bitcoin, but use it anyway. Take the good with the bad. Bitcoin user's interests aren't a monolith anymore. Some people are interested in the technology, some are interested in mining, some in Alt coins, some in shopping, others in business, some in scamming, and some in spamming.

Associate with the good, ignore the bad, and try and have discussions with the people who are interested in the same aspects of Bitcoin as you. Especially the spammers, please create a single thread and spam with each other. Also be sure to take role, record your names. *grabs the ban hammer*

Thanks for responding. As I was reading your comment i was thinking you were going to imply that the short statement was the reason. I'm genuinely surprised you think it was the number I listed. But maybe you're on to something.

First, yeah, I do make that much from my day job (in fiat) and what I listed is the BTC equivalent.

Second, I love bitcoin and having good discussion on this forum. Signature campaigns is a very cool way to make some money.

Last, if that's the reason they kicked me out...it just proves my point that the decision making is arbitrary and without logic. He could have sent me a note saying "hey, you don't really need this so I gotta give your spot to someone else".

people will spam regardless
as long as there any incentitives to post,be it actual money from sig campaigns or increasing the post count (e-peen size) or just sound smarter than that other guy,some even go as far as helping others with their problems(these are the worst)
bitcoin community grows,many non-english speaking members type "bitcoin read information" or similar into Google search and come to this forum
for every 2.2 decent posters statistically,there are 5.34 wankers who murder not only english language,but also common sense and my patience
I learned to live with it
I forgive....

Now there are many spammers who arr trying to eatn easy money. But I didn't noticed that moderators would fight active against them. They allow to post shity spam in and threads reach 50, 100 or more pages. And there are also hundreds of farmed accounts, who creates majority of spam. These farmers was catched by users, but moderators didn't taked any actions to stop them.

This has been toe situation for a few years now, nothing new

Haha... so true.

Isn't this always a problem? People writing crap to gain higher post counts? Isn't the opposite worse? nobody writing anything at all!!

I think I can guess why you got kicked from the Bit.AC sig campaign. I was also a little surprised at first to see you kicked out (though I seriously doubt that the quality of your posts "was far outweighing others", to be honest), so I looked through your post history, and I found this entry of yours in the week preceding the payment after which you got excluded:


I don't know about SFR10, the BIT.AC campaign manager, and his reasons for kicking you out (provided it was his decision in the first place), but I consider it rather strange that a guy making 0.84 BTC per day would be participating in a signature campaign that was paying him, according to his rank, only 0.00055x50=0.0275 per week for 50 posts which he still didn't make. Just in case, I'm in no way affiliated with either SFR10 or BIT.AC...

Do you really earn so much and still want to participate in a signature campaign (I am just asking)?

Admittedly, the spam has become worse this year, but there is nothing that you can do about it.

There are two groups that are basically bringing down the quality to all time lows.

One group is recognizable as they use Google translate to post their crap in this forum, and the other group is well known for their the Bitcoin posts.

You must be slow on the uptake, its been like this for months if not years

Du u spend coinz on real life?

You should do your own research before opening a thread though. Here's the latest one with the discussion regarding this particular problem:
Shouldn't non productive topics be moved from Bitcoin Discussion to Off-Topic?

I like that the forum's open and lightly moderated. Some other forums are way too heavy handed and limit you posting the most basic of crap.

The quality of the comments here are so fucking low it hurts.  I hate the people in here.  They are always asking about how to get women and porn to use more bitcoin.  Fuckin' stupid if you ask me.

Well if they were banned, then there would be barely anyone left on this forum. Most people on this forum advertise for a signature campaign and I don't think that is going to change.

Nonsense. This forum is at peak signal to noise ratio. If fact, I recommend adding a second signature space (right below the current one), to improve the forum further.

Agreed!

I took a break from the Forum from about January until September. Coming back I noticed that there are very few new threads being created. It's indicative of the spamming going on from the worst signature campaigners. They just add new posts to the same old threads.

Then you get the signature campaign runners getting arbitrarily tough on the campaign participants. E.g., I just got pulled off the Bit AC campaign for "post frequency and quality". But my post count was 20 for the week, spread over 4 days, and my quality was far outweighing others. I tried to contest it but the guy running the campaign couldn't even cite a specific example of how I violated their rules!

I think campaigns are a good thing, they help the businesses, the grow the economy, the help the owners of this site make some coin. But the quality of talk on the forum is certainly suffering. Fewer and fewer new discussion. And no one is really policing the existing spammers out there. Although I have noticed there is a more strict review to be admitted to a campaign, which is nice.

We could all go to the other forum, www.bitcoinforum.com

But the rules for the sig participant isn't reaching some eligible post count will be removed from the campaign is the big enemy from the forums. could remove this rules? so really strict for the participant and the forum.

if you don't love it, leave it !

You're not wrong. There are a lot of spammers on this forum more interested in making a quick dollar by posting shitty replies to a worn-out or irrelevant topic than there are people interested in actually discussing Bitcoin and talking about it in a way beyond "this ting es coll mang". Maybe if they took some of the money they earned and put it towards learning a language I would have a bit more respect for them, but it is hard when every other post lacks basic English skills.

the forum owner believes in open markets and freedoms (though has had some ironic examples of limiting freedom of speech on other platforms)

The unfortunate part of all of this is that there are people farming hundreds of accounts to earn their satoshis. Just look at this thread:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1597201.0;topicseen

It really takes away from us legitimate posters who just have some passive bitcoins being paid to us for something we would be doing either way.

yep. its due to greed

when the sig campaign owners reduce their reward per post. the users signed up will spam post even more, just to try staying at a certain level of income. they will start making multiple accounts as another way to try increasing their income.

the problem is that asking the sig campaign owners to not decrease the reward also incentivize spammers to spam more.
the only solution is to completely stop sig campaigns.

sideline notes about English:
bitcoin is not owned by any country and English is only used as a first language by ~420mill of ~7bill.
English is adaptive,
the tom8o tom@o. color vs colour, trousers vs pants, knickers vs panties debates prove this
aswell as the differences between a british scouser talking to british cockney.
aswell as the differences between an american hill billy and someone from the bronx

in short we should not limit bitcoin to only be used and talked about by oxford scholars, because we have already begun to failed the world by pricing bitcoins usefulness out of third world countries by having the transaction fee higher then several countries hourly wage.

by the way i am a brit, yet see the bigger picture

Every topic I look at lately is just a bunch of spammers trying to raise their post count when they should really be spending some time learning English...