Topic: Post per day/ per month falling. (Read 1299 times)

If we can consider the numbers of those joining the forum each day, we could easily depict the fact on what is going on, we cannot expect an increasing rate of posts when we are having a drop down in the numbers of those interested to learn and join the forum, the second aspect, we can say that the signature campaigns also are part of what constitutes the increasing numbers of posts, which means, if we are having a drop from the statistics of the available signature campaigns, then it's automatic that we are going to also experience a drop on posts.

The second reason that you talked about is not really true. It may be correct in a decade time ago when bitcoin was young. There was no campaigns at the time but people were here to gain from knowledge each other. We are still learning from each other this time but if there is no campaigns anymore, forum daily posts will reduced by almost 95%. You will be very surprised if you see those that you thought they are here for fun that they will be the ones that will first leave not posting anymore.

This is not true and it seems you even wrote the opposite of what is happening on the forum. First, we should know that the traffic of the forum can't be static or the same at all times, it has to be dynamic, and just like the market charts are displaying, so is the trend of the forum activities. It is normal that there will be times of increasing traffic and there will be times of decreasing traffic, but on average, the forum still maintains a very good reputation traffic-wise. As for the factor, fewer topics are not being posted as you alleged, and as a matter of fact, there are more topics, and they are interesting ones which I often see daily. There are also low, medium and high-ranking members who are active, so I do not know where you are getting your metrics on this matter.

However, for me, the two most important reasons are the inability of some users to join a campaign. They might reduce their gambling activities due to that until they are again fixed somewhere. And the lack of will is the second. The second part might sound funny, but when the average of those who lack the will to post is high, it becomes obvious, especially if the happenings on the forum bore them at a point. This is not coordinated but could be coincidental to have such an effect.

Hopefully people are migrating to a community that wants to improve bitcoin, not hoard it.  

The price will fall if it's not being used.

Members not partaking is as a result of less topic post made and also no interesting and debating discussion thread been brought up. If this board can bring up more interesting discussion thread, more members will participate. They see it as a thread about the Forum only and some selected high rank members left to discuss about it. Even the active members here don't engage post at times, this leads to intending partakers to be unmotivated.

I thought Homeland Security was a taxi service in the US. I know that in England it is a ferry service.

 

I know Homeland Security isn't here. 

It would be great if we could win back some of the members from a few years ago. Characters like Tman, and helpful posters like JackG were beneficial for the forum. I'd also like to see some of the big names in the industry posting here. Could we attract Larry Fink - that would be fun. Biden would be even better.. But seriously, I'm not really sure where Bitcoin Talk fits into the crypto world any more. It's a great place for newbies, and people with Bitcoin problems. Maybe the FBI members here could raise their heads and start posting.

After cutting off a large revenue source for users like signature campaigns for mixers it isn’t crazy to think the posts per day would drop. This is why community projects are important for this place and running around leaving people negative trust at the drop of a hat for trying to create use cases is probably not in the best interests of this place.

absolutely.  but as I said I suspect there was a large farm or 2 or 3  doing miners here.

and if they did 10 accounts 40 posts a week that is 400 posts gone say 1650-1700 a month
if they did 20 accounts 40 posts a week that is 800 posts gone weekly say 3300-3400 a month

so two farms that size means 5100 posts lost monthly

just think that could have been 13000 usd a month income lost for the farms.

I like to think that a hidden benefit of the mixer dump is we killed off a few farms.

I can't generate that much traffic just by myself especially since I am honest and only do a signature here.

But 70-140 posts a week I can do clean and legit.

If I bothered I could do three or four accounts with 30-40 posts a week which would have made money at a decent rate doing the mixing.

Maybe I could have done 200 posts a week and made 600-800 a week.

I do not operate that way but I know how to do that. I am not the only one that knows how.

Have to think these people just stopped posting what do all that at altcointalks for only 150-200 a week.  Since you need to properly tack and account for all four accounts to look like you are not the same person.

If we look at the longer time periods, then it seems that the forum activity has stabilized on a relatively low level since late 2022.

This can be seen also positive: I feel that since 2-3 years most subforums have become readable again. For example, in "Bitcoin Discussion" or "Economics" in 2017-20/21 you were lucky if you found a single interesting thread on the first page. Now while there are still lots of "spam megathreads", there are some gems here and there, like the Mempool and LN Observers.

In general the evolution is not too bad, considering developments like the overall decline of forums versus newer forms of social media and communication in general (although I think this has stabilized somewhat in the last 5 years).

The ad stats linked by the OP are giving some interesting ideas around the general forums' evolution:

- first a slow growth, then in 2013/14 an unique user explosion up to >20000
- then a decline which lasted approximately until 2016, with a low of around 10000-12000 users
- then a massive growth, reaching the maximum of 115498 users in January 2018
- in 2018 a massive decline until 2019/20, reaching again the 10000 mark
- then a temporary new increase, but not reaching the maximum of 2017/18, up to around 20000 in late 2021
- and since then a decrease again, this time fastly falling to a level of 8000-10000, which is the order of magnitude we have now.

I think much has to do actually with the attention level in general on cryptocurrencies. We see that the maximum activity was always close to a marked Bitcoin ATH, and the minimums were in the early bull markets, when everybody is still bearish. (I actually don't think we are still in this phase, this year perhaps the mixer ban did cost some activity, perhaps otherwise we could be at 12-13000 again).

But of course there are other factors too. The merit policy could have contributed to the extreme downtrend in logged-in users in 2018 (a 90% loss!), which is not only negative (see above, I think most of the people left in this era were shitposters, but there may have also been "OGs" leaving because they were annoyed by shitposters). But also the burst of the ICO wave surely has contributed.

What to do? I think to further stabilize and grow again a little bit, apart from a positive Bitcoin price evolution, a slight visual update would surely help, above all a better usability from mobile devices. I could imagine for example a CSS format for longposts, where you can chose to use a style which looks like a Medium post. So this could incentive people to link quality posts in other social media and drive new users into the forum.

---

PS: It is interesting that stats like the "Unique IPs from logged-out users" and "Impressions per slot" are growing. This means that for advertisers the forum could be becoming more attractive again.

I am just bringing different perspective, what if Bitcointalk has covered everything and anything related to cryptos so there is no point beating the bush around again with the same topics when it can be found in the searches?

Another reason is people have their own life outside of bitcointalk, at once I lived 24/7 on Facebook probably in the year 2012 and around that period then things changed and now being at bitcointalk around years and I never know when I might leave, or here's my destiny ends.

I agree there could be a barometer to add that could provide more statistical data but the term "high quality posts" is highly contentious because the meaning or understanding changes according to the person reading the post. For example, what you might deem to be a high/good quality post could be assessed by others as being low quality or spam.

The number of characters in a post (200 or otherwise) cannot and do no denote the level of quality associated with it.

That's a good point, bulk user registration negates measuring the number of new user registrations per day. Maybe one way to measure success of the forum could be, the number of users that have registered within the past 90 days that have a higher postcount of 50? Even then it's difficult to assess as spammers could still achieve this. Maybe the only way to assess the success of the forum is how many new users are joining, how many merits they obtain, as this is an indication of high quality posts.

New users aside, measuring the quality of posts per day is the difficult issue. If measuring characters per posts per day in insufficient, which I agree with, then the only way is to measure the "semantic load" of posts, which requires some sort of large language model or machine learning to make an assessment of all posts made per day which is probably computationally intensive.

Nevertheless, I am sure the moderators of each forum section converse regularly on the general trend the forum is making and they discuss options to ensure the sustainability and viability of the forum.

I think you are the one who is wrong here, or perhaps you did not understand what @SickDayIn narrated very well, or you just wanted to stress on what is not there. The guy is 100% right if you view it insightfully, even though there are no perfect metrics in what he cited as a basis to add value to the forum, nevertheless, what he said is on point, and you are only finding excuses. Good posters can write long posts and bad posters can as well do that, and the same goes for good posters writing short posts, and the same is true for bad posters. These are mere distractions in this context if I must say, they are not the goal here.

The main points he was trying to point out are; 1. Traffic generated and 2. The number of opened accounts considerations. You can't underrate them in valuing the forum by an external valuator. Whether you like it or not, they add value to the forum regardless of how they are created, who created them and how they are being operated. When it comes to the quality posting per se, it is a different bargain within the forum. Know the difference.

You say the best assessment is the number of high quality posts and then you name new user registrations as a relevant metric, you're wrong bots or spammers can create multiple accounts just for spamming, so it's not a good metric to assess the overall quality of posts. Neither the number of characters. We see many users belonging to some signature campaigns, posting very long low value posts. They never receive any merit and some of them are even tagged as spammers by some DT members, so it's not so easy.

Halving brings ethusiasm and ethusiasm is attracting new members. At least from what I've noticed, during every bull run, especially one after halving, you'll notice more and more posts regarding Bitcoin's price and generic speculation ones from brand new and newbie accounts. Even I returned to the forum after the halving of 2020 and the upcoming bull run that pumped Bitcoin's price back to $20,000 after many years. I believe this is the reason the OP is correlating the halving with posts per month.

I also remember the forum being more active in 2017, especially in terms of signature campaigns, but the content wasn't as good as it is now. Keep in mind that the merit system wasn't introduced yet, and there was a large amount of gibberish due to them being able to participate even in low-paying campaigns.

Generally, even with Bitcoin's new ATH and high price of over $60,000, I believe that this isn't the best period for a large number of us due to certain circumstances in our daily lives, which is the main reason I'm not as active as I used to be a few months ago. 

Posts per day and Posts per month is a fairly simple metric to observe or attempt to correlate with the progress and success of the forum.

The best assessment of the forum, is the number of high quality posts made per day and per month. This could be measured based on statistics such as "posts per day with minimum 200 characters", or "posts per day that received merit" or "new user registrations" even. I think digging deeper into the analysis with more specific metrics will provide the outcome you are seeking..

Halving bring enthusiasm for Bitcoin and not posting on the forum, if there's anything we should be doing during that time is making our plans in preparation for the aftermath of the halving. Lets take a chill pill and look at things from a different point of observation because I know we're always quick to point fingers at some things that we feel are reasons for less activities on the forum but lets not forget that people have a life outside the forum and some times life outside might be the reason for the less activity on the forum.

People are suffering from different things that might make them to not be available for posting. I myself haven't been as active as I use to be because I'm having some life challenges and I believe others might be facing similar issues. When there's reductions in post activity it could be because of things like this and looking at some accounts that used to be very active on the forum are no more so obviously there has to be reduction in post quantity on the forum.

We too need to look at the fact that the bounty/signature campaigns aren't as motivating as they use to be to those that need it to get motivated to post on the forum and the other reasons that have been mentioned here that I don't have e to repeat are also contributing factors. But still we are having a very decent amount of engagement on the forum to keep it alive so I think we're good, the activity will.come back up later eventually.

I think you have a valid point here. If there was a day when alt-accounts and those enrolling in campaigns using their account farms were expelled from campaigns, there is a possibility they will stop posting here and it will affect the forum usage. Let us not forget that competitor forums are increasing there user base therefore it could (in the long term) put this forum in a precarious position.

Keeping all that in mind, any form of cheating, rule-breaking and abuse should be discouraged at every stage therefore I am glad I am not the one hiring and firing campaign participants.

I think it was pretty obvious that I was referring to the number of posts when I wrote "that our numbers for the last month are the best in the last year or so". But I am sure that now there won't be any confusion.


Let me take a devil's advocate role for a second and ask if its even in the forum best interest to remove all those that are abusing campaign rules with their alts? Removing those means less activity on the forum which then may cause fewer campaigns which then may cause less overall activity etc.

I cannot state either way about the number of account farms that operate and how many have multiple accounts enrolled but I hope campaign managers stay vigilant against abuse.

If there was any real way to get factual data surrounding the number of account farms that exist and how many of those accounts were enrolled in campaigns pre-mixer ban (compared with today), would be interesting. If one puppeteer is operating 5 accounts at the rates you stated they would be very happy. With the exclusion of mixers, they will have to step up their game if they want to remain relevant and try to join as many campaigns as possible without getting caught out.

Best in what way exactly? Number of posts increased or they became better people and complained less than usual?
Even without checking I can be sure that our local king and gambling expert is still the same on top of his throne.

If you post less on the next day than the previous day, it's normal for your post count to show less on the chart. If you post five posts every day, then this chart will remain unchanged, but if you post five posts six days a week, the chart will look random if you post more than five posts or less posts one day. You need to post consistently to keep the charts steady.

Well, all forums are generally outdated; it's not just Bitcointalk; the user interface is likely to be the least to blame. People want more interactive content, such as videos and short reels, while the rise of social media has created a large number of pages and groups regarding pretty much every subject you can imagine, from cryptocurrencies to investments to car-related pages, all of which someday had their own forum. The mixer situation certainly impacted the forum; however, I don't think there's a large number of people who moved to the other forum; the majority are active on both simultaneously. However, that has allowed AltcoinTalks to grow tremendously compared to what it was six months ago; I didn't even acknowledge that such a forum existed.

But bitcointalk is usa based and I am sure the forum is not looking for this

https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2024/04/24/samourai-wallet-founders-arrested-and-charged-with-money-laundering/

"Samourai Wallet Founders Arrested and Charged With Money Laundering"



There are problems with mixing

 does a terror supporter use it?

does a guy just want to pay for an item and not reveal his wallet totals?

First case is a good reason to bust mixers.
second case is not a good reason to bust mixers.


It is a shame the forum members have lost such a good income source.

I earn less now posting on two sites then when I posted on one site.

Yes but with time they maybe having the same traffic as BTT, though I will have to agree that before this will happen their content quality have to improve but this is from the fact that before mixers move there, they were having little or no traffic, since we can see there that most thread posted there for years just recently got reply which some are mainly from the teleported members from here. Also majority of the teleported members from here has  really been influencing other members at altcoinstalks to improve their post quality and it will bring more traffic in the long run.

You have always been the beast in posting except against ChartBuddy lol, I still remember how many times joker_josue tried to catch up with you, when both of you were still in same campaign.

This will be a total turn off and after the mixer banned things really became difficult here for them, I guessed that's why there where quite more threads about account selling and buying here this year.

Well I do two signatures. One here and one on altcoinstalks

I post like mad because thats what I do.

I likely now am posting 15-20 posts a day on the two websites.

But I always did just a signature. When I did do a campaign.

Think of a quality signature thief.

When mixers were good he or she may have had 5 mixers with 5 alts making $750 a week.

If you really ran signature farms well and made 750-1500 a week.

You are far less likely to switch all of that to altcointalks as the mixers will pay about 40 and account

or 200-400 a week.

So I think some major signature farms are gone. This would drop us way down in posts.

I am lazy and a lot of info on the old mixer threads was stripped so researching exactly how many mixker signature posts existed here and how many move to altcointalks is too much work for me to do.

But getting paid 40 a week vs 150 a week for a cheater with 10 accounts

means 400 vs 1500 a week . So some may have just dropped off. From bitcointalk.

Also youtube has a ton of influencers doing all kinds of videos.

while they can be full of shit often they also have some good videos.

we do not do embedded videos. this hurts us a lot.


I look at youtube videos 2-4 hours a week ones on mining and gear. when I do that I am not posting here.

The forum owner should be interested in identifying the problems and creating a better, attractive environment for newbies but for some reasons, he doesn't care (pardon but that's truth). But there are many good members that try to create different beneficial tools, like bpip.org, merit bot, post archive and so on.

---

If post per day or per month is falling, that's not a huge tragic. I always prefer quality over quantity, I hope that quality doesn't decline with it. If bounties and ICOs were driving this forum, then it might be a good idea to create an NFT board additionally. Now this is the trend (but we will attract spam, not quality).

Registered accounts don't make much sense if we take into account the number of quality members on both forums. Regardless of members who "teleported" to another forum and members who have been there before, I think that BTT is still far ahead when it comes to the number of quality members, and therefore the content they create.

The pay rates on the other forum are still almost half as much as here, and at the moment I don't see that there will be any big increase - because top mixers used to pay $200 + per week for 30-35 posts on BTT, and now they pay about $50 for the same number of posts on another forum. If they could raise it to at least $100+ per week, I'm sure they would attract more quality members from this forum.

Ninjastic.space recorded 2,644,742 posts made by all active users throughout 2022 - but unfortunately, I don't know how many posters there were throughout that year. In 2023 - the number of posts drops to 1,887,184, also I can't find out how many active users that year. Then as of April 23 2024 - there were 562,194 created by 14168 users, of course this shows a significant decrease.

I don't know what the exact cause is - but several reasons have been mentioned by users before me. The number of active users is one important reason that correlates to the number of posts made throughout the year - but it is not the only one.

True, any local board would feel loosing few core members, let alone local board of our size but luckily few more appeared that are helping us keeping decent activity.

Speaking of activity, I am just finishing monthly overview of the local boards activity (It should be released tomorrow) and you will be glad to hear that our numbers for the last month are the best in the last year or so. 

That is true, but I think we lost some quality members in last few years and that affected activity and number of posts in our local board.
However, there are few new members that appeared also like SirJohn, Luno-something and few others that contribute more with quality than quantity.
 

Yes this is true and while there are also members here who have moved to altcoinstalks and still yet are able to keep up to their posts counts here just like before, we can also agree that some have not been able to do the same.

Though they probably may be having many more registered accounts sooner or later than BTT as the traffic there grows since it's much easier to rank up there and also getting reputation because the forum is still growing, which is an advantage for getting picked in a campaign. Also as the traffic grows the pay will likely increase aside from the fact that mixers campaign pays more than any other campaigns while altcoinstalks is not just limited to mixers campaign, others  will definitely come and try.

It's true that some members (including me) became active on another forum, but that doesn't mean we stopped being active here. My number of posts on BTT mostly remained the same, and as far as I can see, most of those who are active on other forum are also active here. In addition, the number of active sig campaigns on other forum is far less than BTT.

The forum has allowed millions of dollars in signature income to be earned.

The income went down and the signatures went down.

Not very complicated .  Just look and see how may posts went to altcoinstalks.com.  Their post grew a lot. in the last 4 months.

Thing is this is expected. The whole site is dated and besides the OGs like me and those that are looking to make a living out of this forum, there's not much people on the net that would want to visit the droll white and blue bitcoin forum site anymore. But even if that weren't the case, we also have to understand that there are just even more reliable sources of information on the web right now when it comes to crypto. Reputable crypto influencers and analysts who knows their shit and are willing to impart their knowledges to the users, with ease of access too cause users can just get back to watching their shit without a shitposter obscuring the flow of info, among other reasons, that causes people to just lose confidence in this site altogether.

Plus there are quite a number of people in here that are appalled by the recent changes in the forum, particularly with the banning of mixers. Where a good amount of people here who have been in mixer campaigns switched to altcointalks or other sites to chase that bread.

Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency were gaining a lot of boasts, that was when many great projects were coming in, so many free coins from airdrops and you only needed to join Bitcointalk and post your usernames.
The forum is still doing great we have a saying that the wine tastes better as it ages, forum still gets massive traffic because they are on top of the many keywords related to Bitcoin-related.
Some keywords can be found here in Bitcointalk, I don't think Bitcointalk will lose its authority and they get more as time goes on.

We have to face the fact that young people are less and less interested in this way of communication, and that the forum has lost a lot of members who were active in recent years and who wrote between 30-50 posts a week. Signature campaigns are of course an important factor that was motivating for many, and considering that we lost mixers and remained practically only on gambling, which have even 50% lower pay rates than mixers and smaller requirements regarding max posts, the result will be likely in a reduced number of total posts.

Personally, I would not worry too much about the number of posts, but about their quality.

I'm no expert, but I've lived through different periods on the forum. Before the merit system was introduced, there was a large variety of signature campaigns, some paying literal peanuts, but they still attracted plenty of users, with the majority being full and new ones being introduced quite frequently. Although the merit system has cut down on a lot of spammers, and I find it necessary because anyone could simply rank up to Legendary just by being active, it has potentially discouraged newer users who aren't very familiar with Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies.

The number of signature campaigns drastically reduced after 2018, before I quit, while the ban on mixers shut down plenty of other services, which has played an important role in why posts per day or month have reduced during the past three months.

It might not be the mixer ban but sure it is a part of it, I mean the posting is surely going to decrease for sure if a lot of signature campaigns are going to be stopped, I was active here in the forum, even without a signature campaign but I would say that I was not posting a lot when I'm not on signature campaigns only on discussion that I like, or if I really wanted to know some kind of information, most of the time 1-3 times only in a day, but could increase up to 7 post per day if I'm on a campaign. So for sure it still has some kind of effect on the posting count.

Merit as well is also a thing since it filters the quality of the post here in the forum, so just posting some kind of post is not going to be worth it unless it's going to get some merits because it would help you to rank up.

Also if I'm not mistaken there was a huge drop when it comes to activity here in the forum, when it comes to members, active members are already dropping a lot so that could also be a factor since the fewer members the fewer posts for sure.

That website was launched in 2018 just after bitcoin hit $20k in December 2017 and ICO projects were springing up from all corners and would have been using the forum as a platform to advertise themselves. It is not a surprise that the activity then is way higher than it is now, we have not had that type of hype since then.

The admin has never tried to affect the ranking on search engines, all the activity here is organic.

- Jay -

But what is the cause of this ? The forum owners should be interested in identifying the possible causes and taking remedial measures. Like suppose, the search engine rankings are affected, there should be SEO done to attract more new active members on the forum from time to time.

That wouldn't explain the second chart OP showed, because mixers were banned at the beginning of this year whereas it looks like posts/month have been falling since 2022.  That's a very short window of data, and I haven't looked to see what the entire history of the forum shows.  Not saying OP cherry picked his time frame, but it's hard to judge when everything before 2022 isn't shown.

Are bounties still a thing?  I haven't heard much about them in a while, but they were extremely popular for quite some time.  If they went away, I'd expect to see a massive drop.  But the members who were in mixer campaigns probably went on to participate in other ones, and I doubt the mixer ban would account for a posting drop as severe as what OP is claiming.


Lately it seems like the relevance of this current halving has been blown so far out of proportion that I wonder if a lot of members here even know what one is, and if they do, why they expect bitcoin to move up or down or whatever else they figure is a consequence of something written into bitcoin's code long ago.

I only based it on post without considering active users
I was of the notion that getting the Accurate number of active users would be hard because of alt account and all.
But this link was kinda unique  https://bitcointalk.org/adrotate.php?adstats
It can be seen that the users active using "unique logged in users" has been relatively stable for some time now
But facing some kind of a downward movement.
There are old members that haven't logged in for years and was surprised to see an old account MemoryDealers posting after how many years.
Well to post about BCH.


Yes halving might not have much effect but it still has some as can be seen from the chart above.
Post count increased, is like a breaking out from a falling wedge

I am no expert but with my limited understanding I think a 90 day last login period is a very useful marker to get an understanding of the current user base. What does seems detrimental to some degree is the fact that 300,000 active members have dropped to 57,000 even though there could be a whole array of reasons behind it. It certainly is not a good sign.

If you hover over the little ? by active users, you can see it is 3 months.   I can't remember if that's what I ran it as, but I don't think SM and IB would change it.

I think the OP should have used several graphs that could be used to compare the trends over a bigger period of time as it would allow a greater understanding of how the number of posts per day were affected. Clearly 300,000 active users versus 57,000 does make a difference and will contribute to the number of posts being made.

How did you define active, was it any member that logged in the previous 3/6/9 months?

The general activity in your local board has deteriorated so much that all you got is a few update in only two threads? Don't y'all have any merit source in there ?
Theymos isn't a part of this AFAIK... You can say that some of the merit sources are becoming sentimental,Yes! BTW, I never knew most reputable members also get affected by the plague, per se
so it's safe to say that we're indirectly our own problems?

And nor should they have to.  Their role is to provide the infrastructure.  It's ultimately down to the users to make interesting and stimulating conversation.  That's where the issue seems to be.  In terms of overall engagement, it's got to be the community doing things for themselves.  No one can do it for us. 

The admin cannot do anything directly to improve activity on the forum. All through the years theymos has made little interference with the purpose of improving traffic, most of the actions has actually been to stop span which reduces activity on the forum. The community has built itself, going through adjustments in this ever evolving space.

Merits also don't increase activity, there are tons of good posts now that go unmerited. It might encourage some current members to stay on the forum, but will not bring in new users, or keep those top 2% members that pay no mind to merit.

There's something for everyone in the forum today, find your niche and ignore the boards/users which annoy you.

You never know whether more merit would attract more people in your local board. Few years ago Croatian board got few new merit sources (after being one of the least merited boards) and it didn't really help us much when it coesm to activity as it keeps decreasing, even though we (probably) have more merit available than ever before.


I don't see how that would increase forum activity.

Probably because there's less people that's interested in this forum and there's the fact that there's less and less signature campaigns that have made most people more interested in participating in the forum. Not to mention that spammers and scammers have decreased if not ceased to exist here in the forum given how so many Scam Accusations and awareness has been given to newbies here in the forum, they probably got tired of doing scams here and most of the new ones are probably new scammers that just don't know any better. Maybe if we do some kind of advertising for this forum to up the visibility of it in people that are searching about this forum, who knows right? Maybe there are people that don't know about this forum but have been an investor for a long time, that's got to be a bad thing that we've reached for them a bit too late, that's my answer to the decline, lack of advertising for the forum and visibility on the top search.

Theymos needs to decentralize the merit source.   Right now it's used as a political tool to reward people he likes. 

How hard would it be to distribute merits based on activity, or trust, or some other set of factors?   Theymos used to be creative. 

While it might stimulate posting as it seems to be an accreditation move for those that see the need to try,
It would also mean, users posting mindlessly without having much interest in what they post but, just do it anyway and remain in expectancy.

That’s to invite spam, even when it’s got a little quality in it (can that even be… I can’t say for sure though).

I haven’t been here for so long to how what it was like them but, I understand charts and what I see on the OP is some decline. This I will attribute to some of the good works I see going on in the reputation section of the forum. Having to track all them AI posts and getting these people exposed.
It’s a highly encouraging one and am so disgusted at how people use technology these days. At least the forum might get a few posts but, it’s better human than having AI garbage on the forum.

People come here to read good stuff, let’s have good stuff!

I don't really know what is the conflict, and for sure I don't want to get into it. But being a merit source is voluntary, and it's a thankless job in my opinion, and no one should be forcing you to distribute merits.

I appreciate you for contributing in the progression of Indian board when veterans left the place in the previous cycle.

So, It's official that there is no merit source available for India.

I'm not a merit source, but still I have quite a few smerits in my account which I will try to distribute when I have time 

The position has become difficult to handle and a few members were threatening me to distribute merits in our local. Hence, I have retired from the position 

The reason for decrease in forum activity is not really the availability of merit.

But talking about Indian Local board it definitely is one of the reason why the place is becoming ghosted.

Heisenberg_Hunter, you should look into the distribution of source merit (if you are still a merit source) to revive our board before it becomes too late.

Just coulnd't ignore that nonsense that lack of merit caused decrease if the forum activity. 


And how those local members got merit in the first place? Because there's shit load of it going around and not enough good posts.

It's increasing all the time... and I am just waiting to see what is going to be next on the line to be censored, probably something related with privacy again.

I do agree with you on many things you said, but don't give up just yet.
You contributed forum a lot with your projects like Ninjastic.space website and telegram bot, and this place will became worse if you leave now.
Some ''prominent'' members are just shooting themselves in the leg 

Aside from the censorship of the bitcoin mixer here in Bitcointalk, some of the members have "teleported" to Altcointalk. This means existing users here might decrease their posts here in Bitcointalk because they are also posting on Altcointalk. This "teleported" option by altcointalk could indeed lead to a decrease in posts here in Bitcointalk as users split their activity between altcointalk and bitcointalk. Well but the reason behind some user teleported to bitcointalk is because of banning bitcoin mixer here in Bitcointalk.

As humans the past tends to hold a deep sentimental value to us, so things will always look better in retrospect than when we were living in that reality. This is not saying that those who feel the forum has lost its spark are wrong, no not at all. It's just an observation of how we naturally cherish memories.

We have lost many members down the road, we've gained some great ones too, but we seem to be losing faster than we get.

C'monnnn..!!! What's happening?? The forum isn't getting anymore traffic like it used to;1miau declared himself inactive and that the case for several weeks, then you? ... everyone feels bored at some point - ain't gon' lie, I do - but if everyone feels the same way and decides to leave, isn't this gonna be named a haven for spontaneous shit posting?
Do you seriously wanna argue with him? ^{[especially on this issue]?} I'd only say the same thing in a different context.

The forum has improved a lot for us to go back to 2017 we are better now compared to 2017 when there was massive spam and so many created farm accounts because they could easily rank it based on their activity and posts

The forum improved because members need to create good and meaningful posts if there are no merits imagine all these newbies in the bounty section ranking up without contribution to the forum but only submission reports.
We can improve but going back to the past will only harm the forum.

Are you serious? Hal Finney was phenomenal, same like Satoshi. Popular people definitely will always be remembered.

We're talking about merit, is merit for popular people or good quality post without need to know which one is the sender?

Obviously shitposters are easy to rank up because you're talking about people I referred i.e. helped by locals community or gangs.

Check the merit history on top 10 Member ranks (exclude exch) all of them are from locals

Yeah I felt same too but thought it was just me been busy.
The energy and determination to learn when I first came is already dying
Like see same thing everyday
Nothing is really new just recycled except few times when something hit the market like ordinals.

I hope this doesn't come out harsh but read a post well before replying.
I said despite the halving, meaning I expected the post count to increase as the halving date approach
But I guess since its nothing new many ain't interested.

Halving? What has halving got to do with the drop in posts? The number of posts may even be higher after halving, I mean a year after it when people have already forgotten about it as a past cycle. The reason you seek is more than that and I believe it is about the low available campaigns and the time you checked it.

Well, I believe that most of the users here are posting for the benefits through campaigns, it might be discouraging if some could not join any campaign due to one reason or the other. They will have to wait and post a little or nothing until they join. Many campaigns demand a few participants, while some are being held or paused.

Also, what is happening on the forum at times is angering some people to quit or reduce their activities as the case may be. What will help is when there are enough campaigns that are active, a whole lot of participation will follow compared to the one you saw this time. And I am sure that these statistics can't be discouraging always, if you check it in a month's time, it might have improved significantly.

I kinda feel like this is what other early users went through in their time here. All the old OGs who helped make bitcoin and the forum what it is. Once the forum changed from what their view of it was, they left and went elsewhere.

It's sad to lose anyone who has done great things for the community. Hopefully something keeps your interest and keeps you around.

You are not.

I have no plans to shutdown ninjastic.space or my telegram bot, both are prepaid and have enough balance for at least a couple more years. Even if I leave and the forum eventually breaks my stuff, I would probably fix it as long as it doesn't require me to rewrite the entire thing.

Worst case the archive will stay up for older posts in respect to those who link them on their posts.

That would be sad, but understandable.   You are one of the people I have had on my trust list since the start.  (Hope I'm not one of those dickheads lol)

Would you consider selling your website if you were to leave?  It's invaluable to forum users.

Lol you serious? Its so easy to rank up now that even shitposters are reaching higher ranks.


Decline in the amount of posts started years before mixers ban so I don't think that affected it as much as people think. By the way, there are still plenty of campaigns that pay per posts, its just that weekly cap/payrate is lower.

Maybe sig spammers and acc farmers were necessary evils? Maybe theymos should remove the merit system… Maybe we should go back to our roots from 2017?

Maybe it is already too late.

sig spammers and acc farmers also enabled forum detectives like lauda. Her work created lots of forum drama and that created a massive chain reaction of posts that had its own infinite fuel source


Reading her stuff was fun and interesting.

I recently discovered the stuff with figmentofmyass and it was amazing. I didn’t know that he had multiple accs in chipmixer. I just read it and daym. Just daym. Dude was playing poker against himself wtf

Those users that usually spam the forum with bunch of post above their average post just to get the campaign bonus is the main culprit why the post count decline.

Most of the previous campaign including mixers and Stake usually reward their members that contributed more(huge post quantity). Right now, most of the campaign doesn’t have this bonus system while Stake adjust their post quota that contributes a lot on the decline of post count.

Not sure if it's the same for others, but the conversations being had just seem generally less stimulating than they used to.  Perhaps, after having been here for 10 years, many of the topics being discussed are getting a little stale for me. 

It's also disheartening that there doesn't seem to be the same level of respect for privacy and freedom that there once was.  It seems like many forum users now believe that everyone else's business is somehow their business too.  People also seem to think they can tell others what they can or can't do with their own funds.  I honestly don't know how to relate to these people.  It's as though they just arrived from another planet and don't understand the local customs and traditions.

Yeah, this is true for users who are honestly interested in learning about bitcoin and by extension the forum. What halving and an increase in price does is attract those who are only curious cause Bitcoin has again come into the spotlight and are hoping there's a way they can make some money from what they assume should be quick profits. This buzz usually dies down after a short while.

Not gonna lie, I'm getting bored of this forum.

Censorship (mixers), prominent members (or as I thought) turning out to be dickheads, can't see myself reading anything other than my local board (so much unnatural and boring content elsewhere). At one point I can see myself just leaving.

This.

Pretty much nothing left to discuss other than the price maybe and I feel like even that’s not interesting anymore because we don’t see the huge market moves very often like we used to.

We reached to the point where adding more tech is creating more problems instead of solving any.

We have seen it with the ordinals recently. It solved nothing but increased the fees which benefits nobody but the miners.

I don't think people come because of halving since people usually come to the forum to ask newbie questions about their problems (including me). Previously, there were Claymore miner threads, other miners' software, and new altcoin projects full of Q&A.

Just like what @Vod said, forum users peaked probably around 2017/2018 -> Massive spam -> Merit system, and so on.

I also believe that Chipmixers and other mixers campaign has an impact on the percentage and the diminishing numbers of bounty campaigns both in the service section and the altcoin section, we must admit it many of our members are motivated when they are incentivized to be active here in Bitcointalk

But Bitcointalk will continue to gain more visitors as there are hundreds of thousands of discussions indexed by Google as interest in topics about Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency grows Bitcoin will continue to gain organic visitors

Honestly, I am also surprised by the way those graphs have continued to develop through time. Some months ago I thought the halving and other events regarding Bitcoin would make it only matter of time before we started to see a very high increase in participations here in the forum, but I guess I was wrong...

If I had to guess about this trend, then I would agree with Vod and point towards the decrease on active members within our community. It seems nowadays, many of the new Bitcoin enthusiasts prefer to take their discussions to other platforms, like Twitter/X or Discord. Kind of ironic, keeping in mind how many scammers lurk around those applications.

Anyways, I am not very worried about it. Hopefully better times are yet to come for both this web and also for Bitcoin. There is not much reason panic for losing a percentage of activity, through years.

Can you compare that data to last year's to see if there are any similarities or differences and if there's a pattern or not? We can't say yet if this is related to the upcoming halving or if other factors are causing the decline. Is this just a seasonal trend or a shift in user behavior that's impacting the posting frequency?

C'monnn man, what are you talking about?? I've read through several mega threadslike this one   and I've observed that it has a whole number of people that left the forum before ^{[when you could make a hundreds of thousands of incoherent post and rank up like wild fire]}, in-between and after the merit system was adopted. Having these delusions in your mind is  definitely gonna make nothing outta you!

---

Ambat, the system has be adjusted in a way that detest alot of people in some ways.. mind you, death is a major factor that encompasses the deterioration of post in the forum.

If its the overall data of the forum then the big reason is in halving people are making money, so they are posting less and reading more, another reason is, that obfuscating the site's advertising is banned on BTT so there are fewer members in campaigns so fewer posts are being made plus current running campaigns require less post count I assume. Besides these reasons, I don't know of any other. But overall its not a good thing.

Yeah another reason could be some people are spending there time on ALTT now, As I am spending more time there then here I assume, as I am newbie there (by experience but trying to catch things up as I am senior here hehe). Overall, we will see the same number of traffic post wise soon when more comapings will be running.

What have halving have to do with member's post and activities in the forum, I was surprised to read the body of this message and finding out that the reduction in the posting and activities reduced not connection with bitcoin in any ways.


The only reason I can say it possibly responsible for the recent post amount reduction, may be as a reason that one of the biggest signature campaign which is stake, made alot of changes in the total posts required for each Sig member, and also some campaign manager are following the trend of posts reductions, I believe that is a enough good reasons to have such posts reductions in the past few weeks and month.

Bitcoin halving has nothing to do with activity in bitcointalk forum.
This downtrend is happening for some time but main reason for recent drop is probably decision to ban mixer signature campaigns and anything that is connected with mixers in any way.

Old members are getting less active, some of them are inactive, and in general people don't use forums so much as they did before.

When I launched https://bpip.org, there were over 300,000 active members. Now there are 57,000.  That prob has a lot to do with it.

Op, I am still struggling to understand the relationship between halving and the number of posts in the forum. Things that affect number of posts are signature campaigns, give aways etc

It is true there's spamming in almost all the boards where generic topics are discussed. It was from somewhere last year that bitcoin discussion board began to appear like a spam board. If you also check the local boards you will be surprised by the number of spam happening there. However, gambling discussion board houses the majority of the spammers.

I don't know what's the main reason of this decline, I guess there is multiple reasons behind it. And I think it happens not for the first time. IIRC in past there was even more significant decline. Don't remember exact year, but it was somewhere after ICO's and bounty campaign bubble bursted.
But it's not neccessarily bad thing. IMO, with such decline quality of discussion become better and there is less spam.

To be honest here, one of the driving force to how members make posts in their numbers can be attributed to the post requirements needed by their signatory campaign and if you check right from the start of the year, we no longer have as many as possible campaigns as before just because mixers have been banned, you can imagine if they all exist till date, how you would have seen members making more higher post all because they wanted to fulfill their weekly requirement, there may be other factors like newly available bounties, absence of frequent and latest trending news, drop in numbers of newly registered users, political and economical factors as well could in one way or the other affect the way people make post often.

Probably general decline of discussions here, so close to the halving I will have expected discussions to be on the rise as Bitcoin climbs up the search engines as one of the most talked about topics, that's not happening just yet.

Could it be that discussions peaked during the last bull run and has been gradually going back to normal since then? I understand we've reached an ATH since then, but maybe people are waiting for us to go closer to $100k before they start getting excited.

If you observe the "posts per month" graph from ninjastic.space, it's clear that the mixer ban isn't the reason for the decline. The Mixer ban started from the end of 2023 to the beginning of 2024, while the decline began in 2022, and probably even earlier. Nowadays, there isn't much hype and discussion on altcoins, bounties, or ICOs, which were the sources of posts and discussions. When was the last time you remember new projects worthy of discussion? Lately, there are only meme tokens that serve no purpose and offer no extractable knowledge.

1. Lack of merit* > users hard to rank up > demotivated > users leave the forum.

2. Less campaign > users post less than before.

*to be frank, we didn't lack of merit, although there's drop in merit sent, but the amount isn't that big. What we lack is people who give merit based on the post instead of the users, the current merit only distributed to few gangs or circles.

Why only Gambling board cant you see the amount of spam only on the Bitcoin discussion and Altcoin discussion board? Spam is everywhere if you go out and check all the boards. I agree lack of a signature campaign might be one of the reasons why the activity is going down but to think that another forum is getting the traffic would be not wiser. There are a few policies by the admin that might have resulted in the downfall of user engagement and traffic coming into the forum.

You have displayed the results of posts per day on a scale for the last 3 months, while posts per month on a general scale, which gives bias , but in general there is a decrease in the number of posts, and if the data is compared to the last ten years, we may notice that part of the decrease is normal and the other part Due to the lack of signature campaigns and an attempt to reduce spam on Gambling boards.

I think he is referring to bitcoin price that went up and halving can further push the price up. There have been more traffic on this forum when bitcoin price increased in the past.

Chipmixer has been banned which opened ways to other mixers on this forum and the competition was high among them. They pay more than other campaigns. The mixers are even paying for avatar campaign also. This encourage more people to join campaign and post. Mixers campaign ban on this forum is the reason.

Stop of campaigns that pay per posts like Chip Mixer and other mixers are main reasons if I am not wrong.

Forum posts don't depend too much on Bitcoin halving. It has some correlation but not too strong and a bigger correlation is with active campaigns and how many posts they require each week. You can see in bull run, posts can be more than in bear market but it is explained by more companies run signature campaigns in bull market.

Halving being nearby has nothing to do with the number of posts people make in a day. There might be a thread about it, but I don't think it's enough to keep the number of monthly and daily posts of all members increasing. 
 
The number of monthly posts reduced could be either because active members here have also reduced or because some people have also diverted their attention to Altcointalk as a result of Mixers being moved to that side. Some members might still be active here but might not be producing as many posts as they used to in the past since they are now posting on different forums.

I came across the chart of the posts per day and month in ninjastics and was surprised that it has been falling for the last days /month  despite the halving of this year.

---

Is there a reason For this continuous fall in posts?