Topic: Newbies, turn on the brain - it's not all true if it's in the forum! (Read 526 times)

From your perspective, the beginning of 2018 may have looked bad, but I have been a member of this forum since mid-2015, and before that I have been a guest for at least a year. Back then, there were signature campaigns that did not have managers but bots that counted posts (old yobit/bitmixer). I can tell you from personal experience that it was a much worse spam time than in 2018. At that time the accounts were still selling without any consequences, and it was a golden age for fraudsters who scam so many users with green trust Legendary/Hero accounts.

Much has changed for the better, but this forum is still the ideal platform for various types of fraud, of which we can only protect ourselves if we use common sense.

If you'd arrived here in 2014/15 you would've been subjected to an army of psycho bears attempting to scare you into running away. They were a lot more relentless and malevolent than any common or garden google translate zombie that came later. There was no equivalent to them in 2018 as they must have realised preaching Bitcoin's guaranteed death would look laughable by that point.

I had the opposite effect on my account. I joined campaigns without realizing what to post and in order to post or to answer queries I was in need of content which significantly paved way for learning a lot about bitcoin. If we know something about bitcoin and the market, we won't be spamming!

Learn a lot, post what you know, never repeat the same stuff which others have already said, educate others with your knowledge on bitcoin and I would say if everyone on this forum follow this, none will spam to an extent...

I joined this forum in one of the worst times (start of 2018) where spam was almost uncontrollable and people were posting even without knowing the intention behind what they were posting about. Each legit account (which isn't bought) is completely like a newborn baby out here (regardless of the account owner age in real life) and I grew up in this forum in one of the shittiest times learning all the shits from so called Sr accounts and was driven off in a wrong way. But to the contrary one who got to register here at the 2013-2014 era didn't really face any hardships and had learned all their way since majority of the old users from 2010 still had a stay here.

Hopefully I got to realize the purpose of this forum exactly after 2-3 months of registration. This is certainly the most important times when a newbie tends to realize their mistakes in the crypto world and start pumping out their potential to learn almost everything. I started with learning about the technical aspects of some altcoins and slowly moved to bitcoin. I would say this transition should happen in most of the newbies roaming out here in this forum and crypto on the whole, but the spammers and shitposters (bounty hunters from 2017-2018 era) never had this transition and were still the shittiest people here on the forum. I always had a list of forum accounts which I got to read a lot from the early times of my registration and most of them have left due to the subliminal failure of Altcoins.

I guess it really is too much work, as there is a forum rule against spamming especially when one is wearing a signature.
But I can't remember anyone getting banned for this recently. While the ranking system works fine, there are already lots of accounts with merits (bought or airdropped) that are around the forum and sufficient to generate lots of spam to adversely affect the forum.

100% agree with you, no comment. The forum sections are looking better than they did in 2017-2018 anyways, there is improvement and I can't deny it. The dozen/hundred-pages megathreads filled with crappy posts are now less visible (they were scary, lol), and most junk accounts are now around the Newbie ranks which shows how much they're starting to lose power overall. I'm starting to ignore these useless accounts now, just to make sure I'll have them even less visible than before on my side.

That'll never happen for posting straightforward junk. Too much work for starters.

The punishment is that if you're shit you'll never make any progress. Eventually that'll sink in and people will either leave or start to put some effort in. That's also starting to happen with senior accounts as well. The decent sig campaigns are demanding a certain amount of earned merit no matter what your rank is.

The merit and ranking system is far from ideal, I'd prefer to see it less demanding lower down, but it will eventually cut off most of the oxygen to the hopeless zombies out there and reward the people who make this place better.

I know the forum recently got overwhelmed by the wave of newbies. All this warnings that we can take from the current thread dedicated to newbies who do not know how everything works here.
But let's ask ourselves, how many actual newbies from all of those newbies? I bet more than a half of those users already had accounts on the forum, but where banned by different reasons, I guess the main of them is trading of merits, which is actually turned into epidemic nowadays, just because of everyone desire to become a higher ranked member to earn more from posting and commercial.

Thank you for the merit, first of all. I feel you, I can relate with your entire post. I've unfortunately been influenced by the opportunity to earn some cryptos by joining campaigns too before, and I know what it's like to post just for that reason. Made my own mistakes, hopefully those will be changed for the better. These opportunities on this forum have been turned negatively into alts & useless posts and threads.

But I think there's no way to change that anymore - the minimum rank requirement to join signature campaigns has been increased as far as I noticed in the past years, so now less people are able to turn their accounts into campaign participants without putting much effort in the forum. Now this leads to Newbies and Jr Members creating a ton of spammy threads to loot for merit so they can rank up..

These things will only disappear considerably once more severe punishments and rules on the forum are implemented. Accounts with sh*tty 1-2 line replies which are obviously just there to increase their post count should be getting punished with 4 steps:

1. Warning
2. Temporary ban (24-48h)
3. Temporary ban (1-2 weeks)
4. Permanent ban

Hopefully this reply doesn't qualify as an off-topic, I'm talking about punishments in order to increase the % of trusted and legit members.

Agreed. I am in no position to know what it's like now. But I can remember what it was like arriving and I think things have changed quite a bit in terms of the established personalities here. Back then maybe most senior accounts were credible and most of them have since left in disgust.

You would've had to have signed up in 2010 or 2011 to be legendary when I arrived which makes you a proper OG.

All the same I wasn't inclined to swallow everything they put in front of me. Ultimately I'm just another twat writing rubbish as they all were too, albeit their being rather less rubbishy.

But that was the purpose of my post. I was highlighting the fact that with a minute or two of effort you can figure out whose account is certifiable junk and whose might be reasonably worthwhile. Not many will bother though.

Click on the profile. Click on the merit. If it's empty then there's your answer.

You've spent a lot of time on this forum, so you're less exposed to the negative events that could occur on here. New users are the most exposed ones, and they don't know how to tell whether an account deserves its rank/merit or not. Your experience here surely does beat mine and 100% beats a new user's.

I'm not sure, but I think this forum was the first to ever have signature campaigns (might be very wrong here, but I've never heard of another), and REAL new users which aren't alts are not used to them. Once you get the way signature campaign spammy accounts & alts work and all, you get to differentiate users.

As a new and silly user, I used to trust most people & information here thinking this was the core of all legit info about cryptocurrencies.

Merit scores cover that to an extent, but you have to work a little to unearth it.

For me at least it's extremely easy to tell whether a more senior account earned it or spammed it. The accounts with airdropped merit and very little earned merit all write the same empty shit that you forget before you've finished the sentence.

But yes, it could do with being clearer.

Although we have ranks, merits and everything else, there should be a way to distinguish normal & spammy accounts to those of the more trusted ones. Something like.. the more spam an account makes (which would be counted by number of reports, trust, merit etc the account has received), the redder their name turns. The more trusted it is, the greener it turns.

Now that Heisenberg_Hunter spoke from his Newbie account perspective, I'll speak from mine. It takes a while to learn what those ranks mean, and the "Merits" thing makes it even more confusing for the average new BTCTalk user. I had to actually do a Google search regarding those ranks to really understand the forum's system and it still took me a while.

The Newbie accounts should have a very brief information shown as soon as they log onto their account about how ranks & merits work, or every day after "00:00" passes in their account forum time until they rank up to Jr Member, so even if they skip it 50 times, maybe the 51st will not be a skip anymore and they'll understand how to distinguish members by merit and ranks.

There are varied reasons for newbies getting scammed here or accounts who are pretending to be too good in scamming newbies. When I was a newbie and speaking from a newbie perspective, I had some respect on the higher rank accounts and believed in their facts but this doesn't seem to be the case now. Some members took advantage of their higher ranks and trolled newbies in Altcoin Discussion board before the introduction of the merit system and deceived them in following a particular scam coin.

Some doesn't really have the knowledge to distinguish between a bitcoin and other shitforks and altcoins. Newbies and fake legendary members (before the introduction of merits) think shitfork is a complete new rivalry of bitcoin which was created to outrun bitcoin and on the other hand some believe altcoins are the next bitcoin. They should understand the fact that there is always only one bitcoin and they were created by satoshi as an alternative to shitty fiat money. Shitforks are a part of crypto ecosystem (born due to a disagreement between scammers and bitcoin devs) and altcoins are a implementation of blockchain in various fields. I still don't get the idea of why an altcoin should be traded in an exchange if they are an implementation of blockchain technology? Truly speaking I never really used bitcoin as a trading scheme or a kind of mutual fund investment but rather used them as a currency (atleast after I got to know about what bitcoin is actually).

gentlemand, some think like you, but most beginners are incapable of distinguishing between a Legendary/Hero account that has some value given to it by its owner, and one that is achieved only by the time factor and airdropped merits. In this respect, we can conclude that one Legendary account with 1000 airdropped merits (0 earned) is worth no more than one newbie account, considering that 2 years have passed since the introduction of the merit system.

Yet although I believe that such threads make sense in order to raise awareness, it seems that newbies are not too interested in topics like this. Maybe the topic is too complicated, or local rule is crucial for a low interest

Another thing newbies should be aware of are the rules for ranking up before merit arrived.

All you had to do was post 14 times in 14 days for 2-3 years to become legendary, less time for hero and so on. There was no requirement for the posts to be any good. All they had to be was present.

You could post nothing other than 'nice project' or 'Yes, I agree' a few hundred times and that would be enough as long as you didn't get banned along the way. This makes any senior account without merit effectively as worthless as a brand new one posting nothing but spammy links, in fact it's more worthless as it's had vastly more time to prove that it's worthwhile and has failed miserably.

I don't see why any older account deserves any respect, but if you are prone to it then that's worth keeping in mind.

An obvious example that some do not read anything else except titles, and now he will maybe complain that his post has been deleted for some unknown reason.

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1miau, you are definitely entitled to your opinion, but I would disagree that "content is lost in translation", he is not that bad English. It's probably some kind of pessimism and disappointment, but as I said, it's not realistic to expect the bears to take over the market after halving. Optimists at least have some footholds in the past to believe in a positive year, pessimists make their speculation on nothing specific but their own opinion.

I have no doubts about the second case, the main intention was promoting ref link with a clickbait headline, and of course what's in the signature. If you read the posts, you might notice that he stopped responding to me, but it is difficult to defend all the nonsense on which he bases his speculation.

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UmerIdrees, your post is removed for being completely off-topic - and as for your questions there are no insults of any kind in my decision, please read this and this. This is a board for beginners, and I just try to protect them from what that signature campaign is promoting.

I don't have anything against the second example (https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.53604007), maybe it's a bit pessimistic that we'll see a longer bear market and the user isn't a native English speaker so it's possible that some content is lost in translation. I know a few people having a good opinion of Bitcoin but they are not very bullish and think we can see around $5000 again. At least the user isn't spreading technical misinformation about BTC, he's just bearish right now (maybe to accumulate more sats  ).
The second one (Dont let them fool you. We will see a NEW BOTTOM. Maybe BTC at 3400$ again?) is partially a little bit weird and lacking facts sometimes. I'm geting his point but he's not making the right conclusions. The problem he's calling out is the shitcoin industry damaging the whole market: not only outright scams but also "legit" altcoins where the team's intention is only making money, damaging and telling lies to small investors while making VC rich, like Hedera Hashgraph did ^[1]. Or Ripple's shitcoin XRP where the team holds large parts of the supply and keeps dumping all the time.
Of course, I'm not excusing some mistakes in (his article). 

Pro tip:read the post fully before answering to it. @OP clearly indicated that he doesn't want users wearing Yobit signature in this topic.

OT
Signal-to-noise ratio on this forum ain't the best (not that is any better on the internet in general) so everyone should take everything you read here with the pinch of salt, as you don't know if someone has hidden agenda, especially when you are new users and still figuring things out. Newbies should take their time to learn thing or two about the forum, before taking any action, but as we can see, unfortunately it's rarely the case.

Unfortunately, most choose the wrong path, which generally involves quick and easy earnings, which again leads in the wrong direction when it comes to this forum (bounty campaigns). After realizing that nothing is there, some really go in another direction, which is again like a minefield because they are awaited by the promises of mining, Ponzi/MLM schemes and miraculous algorithms that make incredible profits overnight by trading with crypto.


There's nothing wrong with hope, but even though BTC is unpredictable, I personally don't expect such a big drop in the year of halving. I know this might be an opportunity for some to buy even more cheap BTC, but all the analysis I've seen so far suggests that the time of the bulls is coming.


The rule is very clear, I think that any question of this type is superfluous. Regarding hyperlink, it is true I link page of the thread where my post is, but it was not open on the selected post. Now it is fixed, thanks for the warning.

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mk4&NeuroticFish, most beginners will believe everything they can if they see a Hero or Legendary ranks, but this is a problem that goes beyond this forum, people in high positions are not necessarily good people. I too can wake up tomorrow with some crazy idea that something bad is going to happen to BTC, but I certainly won't share it in the forum based on just my feelings.

Anyone who starts thinking about BTC, (ordinary investment or trading) should invest time in acquiring knowledge that is publicly available, then they will be able to decide what is good or bad, what is good and what is bad intent.

Seems reasonable enough. I am once a newbie who trust someone who have higher ranks but later on I noticed that some are taking advantage of what they have. It is very obvious that newbies are the most vulnerable of all especially the thread I read earlier about a newbie wanted to trade btc with less knowledge and the newbie didn't even know how to find the wallet address before someone taught how to do it.