Topic: Is this forum getting worse and worse? - page 7. (Read 2170 times)

I don't think that's the problem. Sure, we might had more people discussing if there was an app as much friendly as Twitter, but it wouldn't rise the overall quality. I've caught myself shitposting on my mobile. It's self-encouraging, because you're typing with your thumbs and you can't be typing for a long time.

Facebook isn't known to having freedom of speech. Plus, lack of anonymity makes it even worse to opening up yourself freely. (e.g., you wouldn't publish your TXID in a FB group in case you had a technical problem)

Time flies, doesn't it? At that time, I wasn't aware of how it works at all.

It's one of the worst platforms, though. You're forced to summarize everything within a few hundred characters, and there are shitcoin-shilling bots everywhere, even in advertisements.

While having having forum better optimized for mobile phones would definitely be a good thing, I don't think that if would reduce decline at all.


Maybe 7-8 years ago, but not anymore. At least that is my experience as majorify of those that I've been part of are in the even worse state that this forum. Nowadays, Twitter is the place to be as everything important in crypto gets published there first.

What is the connection between privacy and the fact that mixers are not allowed on the forum? Let's admit that this is not the case. The fact is that people fled to another forum because they paid for companies that were not here. Can't those people use mixers and continue to participate in the forum? The point is different, especially for those people who are excellent specialists. Christopher Nolan coined an interesting phrase for one of his films: "If you're good at something, never do it for free." I think this is the reason.

Yep, it's complicated and caused by many reasons.

1. Some users don't like to promote casinos and altcoins, which make them only want to promote mixers, exchanges or other small projects. Unfortunately if those projects only pay small, some users feel like they wasted their effort and time, which make they think it's better for looking to other opportunity.

2. Many users will reduce their activity if they didn't get paid or get paid less.

3. Unfair competition and didn't get appreciated since many users only want to share their merit to their gangs/locals.

Merit and money are two big reasons why people like to post, if they didn't get two of them, then goodbye...

Why would they be?

It's not like they are doing anything wrong.

This is going to seem like Groundhog Day because we have talked about it before. Here the question is whether the forum will continue to be a site with traffic and discussions or it will be a ruin like the remains of a Roman theater. We already know that theymos has enough money to keep it running even if nobody comes.

Here's the thing that most people don't realize: the forum doesn't need to do anything, except continue to exist.

Close to 15 years old now, the Bitcoin Forum is an SEO powerhouse that will continue to attract visitors and appear prominently in Google search rankings, forever.

So long as theymos continues paying the bills and keeping the lights on, the forum will remain the foremost repository for Bitcoin-related information; especially from a historical standpoint. Not to mention the plethora of luminaries and legends that have created accounts and posted here over the years.

I don't know about that forum because you did not share its name but bitcointalk forum can be very different than that one.

Because we have a departure of Satoshi Nakamoto, the founder of Bitcoin and Bitcoin forum. After that, the forum did not die but it was taken over by Gavin Andresen, sirius and theymos. After Gavin and sirius left the forum, retired as forum admins, theymos was the head admin so far and Cyrus was appointed as another admin. There are 3 global moderators who can become forum admins in future too.

It's unimaginable with me to see this forum dies because of one or two admins' decisions to leave, retire.

Social media + mobile devices

This forum is tedious to use on a smartphone (there's no mobile theme, font size is too small, you have to use landscape mode + zoom). How come nobody has mentioned it? Theymos could fund some devs to improve the forum.

Most cryptocurrency folks prefer to use FB groups for discussion these days... I'm not saying you're going to find quality discussions there. It is what it is.

This forum has been on a decline long before the mixer ban. Same for other fora too.

Monero has been here since 2014.

I remember back in 2020-2021 I had told you about XMR and its benefits compared to BTC...

Mixers were always meant to be temporary, just like exchanges. Nothing centralized lasts forever. That's why Satoshi created Bitcoin and Monero tries to follow the same cypherpunk philosophy.

Exactly. Satoshi made bitcoin to be simple. That's where most of the communities civil frustration with each other comes into play. Everything that has been said has been said.

Also, having a website in 2024 in full white is bad for first impressions. It his people in the eye like a flashbang if they see bitcointalk.org for the first time in a dark room or at night. Yeah there is a dark mode, but the forum should have moved to a default dark mode a long time ago in my honest opinion. Literally every time I show someone this website and it's dark their eyes wince. Mabey its a problem with my screen brightness LOL, but I digress!

We need to literally think of every option to onboard as many people as we can to this forum. The time to talk about that is now, when all hope seems lost that the forum looks like it's hitting a wall in terms of activity.

Let veteran users press a button to make it light for them. I personally like it white.

2013 maybe before that just going on my own experience is when I remember there being companies being on the forum and in signature or avatar etc.

I used to be on a mixer campaign years back, manually I used one and also reviewed it, signature and so on and also quite a variety of other companies over the other years.
   The mixer company as I remember it was brief because one day it was closed down by the FBI I think so the logic of the forum is that has happened more then once & it was not actually their own decision taken but the lay of the land.

  Purely for the longevity of the forum is to avoid association, just speaking roughly it seems fair they dont want the complications not that any side was being taken in what is fair or not.

Ive been on some big forums since 2000 including the tech one that referred me here.  The one big forum I remember dying off was because it was just the people running it and the owners retired, they finished with their interests in technology via their jobs.  So that core interest of the original people died off (graphite pencil modding to oc cheap chips and heatsink cool, big experts on that field) and I think forum was still there last I checked but they dont have new people now, its shuttered I guess.

I dont see that BTC has reached any point of retirement and disuse, its likely to increase and this forum will be useful still.   Even if it were alot of gambling use with BTC or other blockchains even, people want to review or complain about those companies so its still relevant to have somewhere to discuss.  BTC was always with alot of gambling even in 2014 it was like that, probably the years before also.   Im not anticipating the end of that, so theres a demand in a multitude of directions and I hope BTC keeps improving in its utility to the mainstream so it'll get bigger.

Leo is the saddest of the departures, and most recent. But, more people have either left, went very inactive or even betrayed the community.

Perhaps it's personal, then. I frequently find myself uninterested in most topics for the last few months.

That's hopeful. I hope it's true!

I strongly agree with this one. Mixers were only a temporary solution, at a time when decentralized, self-custodial solutions were non-existent.

Me too. And the problem is that there's a lot of work that needs to be done. Scalability is not resolved. The notion that Bitcoin does not need further improvements is an attack vector.

Sure, I can agree to an extent, even though speculation topics are discussed at orders of magnitude more frequently than technical, but I wasn't talking about the technical board. I'm pretty sure we can have constructive and interesting discussions elsewhere, more often. See, for example, what's posted in stacker news.

NotFuzz, sorry to sound a little bit stupid but -- do you really wanna make your own analysis on how we could basically improve (ofcourse, this is about creating pathways for improvement) based off of your daily routine? I'm one a hundred percent certain that atleast 89% of users in here aren't miners, which doesn't correlate with that fact that privacy orientation doesn't bother you at all. It could definitely be a fair plan for you as a miner.


Signature campaigns were introduced way back 2014 right? Lemme get this straight: how populated was the forum compared to the recent times? Has there been very much differences between the early days and the new-era?

There's never a time that these hasn't been an issue... I think we gotta let it out!

It seems that most of the topics from the technical side have already been discussed enough times, someone could think that everything has already been said. New projects (Bitcoin-based) do not appear that often or at least they do not consider it important to have a presence on Bitcointalk.
The activity is dominated by casinos and instant exchangers for which, this forum is a solid source for marketing activities. None of these branches require activity in technical discussions, it is more a matter of presence.

I wouldn't fully blame the mixer ban for all this, even if it likely contributed.  But, you're completely right, Bitcointalk feels like it has lost its excitement.

The talks just dont grab attention like they once did.  My feeling is that genuine development and debate over real projects is lacking these days. The Altcoins section is mostly full of scams and shitcoins and Bitcoin technical discussion rarely touches on anything new.

Lets think hypothetically,

and since I have nothing to lose I'll ask the question. Idc if I get heat for it but,

How would everyone react if casinos were banned on the forum?

The youth is the key to the adoption of bitcoin. The youth, and casinos, don't mix well together that's all I'm saying. I've taken care of far too many suicidal young adults whose biggest driver of their mental illness being financial stress from gambling. They got their whole life ahead of them, and they want to die because they blew 5k on stake.com. Because Drake made it look cool.

I don't think it will be GG, but it might cause the forum to go kaboom. And I don't mean the forum itself, but it's users will go kaboom mentally because of how important casino's have become to modern forum culture, lifestyle, making money, buisness, etc.

What u guys think? It's a crazy question I know.

Casino's are in every single one of our signatures, and it's why half of us type on here in the first place. I get that.

It's so obvious what would make the world more willing to come here and be social. It's right in front of us, but do we have the willpower to do it?

Forums are simply not as popular as they used to be and what's going on bitcointalk (lack of interest and new members) is going on every other forum that I have been part of and are generally in decline for at least 10 years and probably even more. And even if mixers stayed on bitcointalk they wouldn't stop the decline, maybe only slowed it down.

Another thing to keep in mind is that vast majority of new people that get into crypto are mainly interested in altcoins since they think its too late to buy bitcoin. Problem is that if you are altcoiner, there's really no reason to come here and I think that this is a missed opportunity to turn some of those altcoiners into bitcoiners.

Perhaps OP is fully aware of that, but he's concerned with the well being of the forum as it the forum traffic reduced drastically since the ban of mixers unlike before when the forum was with mixer campaigns.

He's saying indirectly that a lot of users we have nowadays are merely here for the campaign rewards and not a genuine bitcoin lover or a privacy Oriented people, but to you Blackhatcoiner, I can say that your observations are correct but at least in a 100% 20- 25 percent might at least genuine posters.

But in conclusion we are gradually reducing from even from my observations too but when I check the WO thread I see a lot of old and genuine posters who are only focused in conversations regarding the bitcoin accumulations and not the welfare of the forum generally.

I wouldn’t say mixers directly but some signature campaigns that weren’t about mixers too ended and the forum is filled with Gambling signatures which you know requires participants to post more on gambling board and that has actually reduced the participation of members most especially reputable ones in the forum, so yeah the signature campaign actually did have its effect on the traffic here.

The few boards that you will see getting busy this days is the gambling board and also the speculation board when there is a huge pump or heavy dump. This days people just come online to meet campaign post quota and pass on to the other places. Seriously the forum is at a decline when compare to last year

And there's another thing. There's people that are newbs to bitcoin that think they need to involve themselves with literally every part of the forum. I'm just like you @NotFuzzyWarm, except I like to hang out in Beginners and Help, Meta, and Project Development. I don't go near mining because I don't need to right now in my journey lol. Explaining that part about BTC to people is so hard. It's a journey.

I know this because I've fucking tried. I've tried with so many people peer to peer IRL style to try and onboard them to this place and it just never fails to intimidate them for some reason! Now, every time I teach someone bitcoin, I like to hone in on their strengths and hyperfocus on one or two forum areas they might be interested in.

When my therapist asked me if I had any hobbies, I told her "bitcoin", she said "Oh! Are you a miner or a trader?",

I said neither, I am an educator and promote mass adoption efforts. She gave me a surprised look like, "Oh shit never heard that before".

There is so much room for education and mass adoption efforts, and I feel that mass adoption efforts start on this forum.