Topic: POST QUALITY VS QUANTITY (Read 440 times)

Here is the real answer. Bitcointalk is now quite barely a bitcoin forum. People are using it as a tool to earn some quick bucks, as a juicy source (it terms of SEO) to get a backlink from, as a good way to earn people's confidence and scam, etc. I don't mean people who joined the forum with a willing to contribute have left, they are still here. But the shitposters outpopulated them.

Bitcoin protects against spam attacks through the use of a transaction fee.

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Notice that the boards are just the discussion boards: the actual announcement section has nearly three times the amount of posts. That's some hefty posting. And then there's the bounty section, with 7.9 million posts alone spanning 13.8K threads: that's 500+ posts per thread - I wonder how many of them are useful?

As it currently stands, topic creation is free. I can create a token for free. I can use a Newbie account for free and I can hire free bounty marketing spammers for free. Thus, we get the NANO treatment.

There has been positive changes with the Altcoin sections though, the implementation of the bumping system helped with reducing the amount of fake bumping or at the very least prevented most users from ever seeing it. So, despite it still being of lower quality compared to other sections in the forum, there has been improvements in the last few years.

Now, how we actually combat it further without stating the obvious; removing the possibility to run bounty campaigns, I really don't know. As far as I can see as long as these are allowed, and altcoins remain popular there will always be a spam problem over there.

Bitcoin Discussion still has its lower quality posts, and this isn't because of bounties, at least not primarily. So, its obviously an issue outside of bounties also, which means removing bounties probably wouldn't eradicate the issue inside the altcoin sections either.

Even just from a simple comparison:

Bitcoin Discussion (which is bad enough): 2326K Posts, 93.7K Topics
Altcoin Discussion (which is far worse): 3209K Posts, 100.1K Topics

I could exclusively report 90% of posts in the Altcoin Discussion section and they would probably all be considered spam.

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Low risk from bounty side + low payment + lack of oversight = low effort shitty posts + swathes of accounts posting the same bullshit.

I think probably >95% of what’s posted here these days is completely useless as far as Bitcoin is concerned. This has turned into an online social community and is no longer a Bitcoin development forum. Trying to police it or complain about it doesn’t do any good. Change would have to come from the top. All you can do as a user is create a Bitcoin project and try to run it honestly and positively on behalf of the community to add value here or try to help others with aspirations of helping Bitcoin.

To be very honest, sometimes when I reply to such threads where the same question had been repeated, I feel like I fed the troll. 
It is not our fault but either newbies or the old guys pretending to be newbies and making the same question pop up so to have a discussion sparked up but that is stupid. Nobody asks technical questions except a very few of them 'and I think they either had an account or they are more experienced in technicals of Bitcoin than us'.

No, even though a merit system never implementation, the quality of post should still be prioritized by all forum users if they wish to stay longer here and to avoid post deletion. The unofficial list of (official) Bitcointalk.org rules, guidelines, FAQ states that:

because merit is a special need to rank up, the quality of the post is of the utmost importance and influence. The merit system has forced/ not all users to put their ideas and thought on quality post for rank up. Whoever want to be promoted rank, merit is required. We all already know how someone will be merit, so I don't have to tell you anymore.

This is one of the prior things won't change anytime soon and we can't get rid of this in just over night. In service board section manager maintain the qualities by giving the priorities of quality posters but bounty campaign management system relatively poor so we can't expect best possible output. Some users are taking too seriously to meet weekly requirement which lead post bursting. I do believe situation is not much worse than before, some users are trying at least. What we can? For now reporting to moderator.

These quote would fit prior to merit system implementation not now.

Merit/rank is necessary, and for that 'quality' is necessary.

This's the keys.

I agree that most bounty hunter are the ones who post a lot of spam on this forum, and I was one of them before. A total of 100+ post were reported and removed by moderator, but at some point I started to think that spamming the forum in large number would just keep me from staying here any longer. Change may not be planned, but it must be done in a good way.

I'm sure some of them do want change, but because their mindset isn't right, the change hasn't been made.
The final answer when I interview someone about post quality and this is completely wrong thinking in my opinion.

Well, bounty hunters will do what they have come for their duty, which is to make as many posts just to meet their quota, and that's why the merit system was introduced so that a person just can't rank up by only posting more and hence limiting their chances severely to participate in any good paying campaign, however it seems that they actually quarantine themselves to the bounty section only, and not disturb other areas of the forum with their spams which is a good thing as they are too busy to make those bounty hunting posts but yeah, we should all make an effort to eradicate spam and report it whenever we see.

Chipmixer crew need to max out their earnings. Don't be too harsh on them.

Besides. Aside from high level technical discussion that serves to solve the trilema  and other such important issues, then what need of the rest here really.

I mean original thought provoking posts that have made any real difference on this forum outside of technical ones are like rocking horse shit. So quality is difficult to accurately assess.

Mostly group think and regurgitated valueless word salads here. Bitcoin forum is okay and not actually that spammy.
The best board may be the politics section now.

The quality has drained away because people have left that were into bitcoin for different reasons than those that turn up now.
The 2011 crowd told the 2013 crowd the forum has gone down hill, who told the 2015 crowd it was a dive now, who told the 2018 noobs they were just a bunch of low functioning greedy spammers.....who told...

While the forum is seen as a pay piggy then the quality will be sparse.

A tiny tiny fraction can make important technical contributions
A tiny fraction want to enjoy a transparent and fair community that rewards those who really bring value. Or just a cool place to hang out with others that are fair and interesting regardless of personal financial enrichment.
Most want money at any cost for as little input as possible.

They did not read the welcome message or read but don't mind
Quality, quantity are discussed in the welcome message

They will be charged by their spams
- Can not rank up
- Always join bounties because they don't have any quality to join good campaigns
- They might not get payouts after many months of posting in bounties
- They can be banned from spam

You can do
- Report their shit posts: [Unofficial Guide] Reporting effectively
- Ignore them: click on Ignore link below their username & avatar or add their username to Ignore user settings in your profile settings
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=yourUID;sa=ignprefs

As it's better to post and ask than to search and make a 5min read for a whole thread. It does make sense now as it's always being repeated every year (or every other month?) And most of us are still being fed up and answer the same question over and over again.

We see the same questions been popped up multiple times even being answered by more than thousands of different users where those users almost add no productive value to their content after the first, second or up to fifth reply of that discussion except if some other questions are asked by the newbie. These users just try to reach their minimum quota for whichever campaign they are working. I am not saying that all their posts are garbage, but many of them will be and the number of active users compared to moderators is too big where fighting spam cannot be met to that big extent, still they try their best and some very good reporters do their job well and help moderators remove that junk out of the forum. So when there is bad, there is something good too that is defending the forum's credibility.

Ah, that argument has been batted around for the last few years, and I'm not sure if anything has changed.  I know some bitcoin-paying signature campaigns have merit requirements that potential participants have to meet before they get accepted, but I don't think many (if any at all) bounties that pay in tokens even have that little safeguard.  And it's barely an effective one at that, since merit requirements are generally pretty low anyway.

Bounty managers tend to not care who they accept into their bounties, and that's always been the case with few exceptions.  I've had to put Bitcoin/Altcoin Discussion on ignore because of all the nonsense posts in those sections--and it sucks, because Bitcoin Discussion should be one of the best sections on the forum.  Unfortunately Theymos hasn't put any sanctions on bounty managers, so they've been free to employ shitposters galore. 

The good part is that most of the garbage posts tend to be in those sections above which I've put on ignore.  Some threads in Economics and Speculation can get pretty crappy, but at least Meta and Reputation tend to be spam-free.

I've seen threads which were siding on the side of poor quality be overturned, and turned into good discussion simply because of the replies added depth, and the discussion developed from there. So, we can all play our part, for threads which aren't quite bad enough for reporting, we can try, and develop the discussion by adding quality discussion. Unfortunately the issue we have is there will always be more spammers than there are users reporting, and moderators to handle the reports, which basically means unless there is a change to who, and how bounty campaigns work, we'll continue to have this problem.

I'm not completely opposed to bounties, and offering rewards for posting, and I don't usually like imposing restrictions when they aren't needed. However, I'd like to see something altered to better combat this type of spam, without enforcing too hard restrictions. There's been numerous suggestions in the past, but I'm not actually positive that any of them would achieve what we need, unless you completely remove it.

I don't know theymos' stand, but as cryptocurrency gets more popular I can see this getting a bigger, and bigger issue, and if there isn't a way to mitigate it, I expect that there would either be restrictions implemented if there are any that would benefit the forum, or if not a complete removal of bounties. Obviously, this is just my personal view point, we've managed the with bounties, and signature campaigns for a while, but at some point in the future if there is an increase in concurrent users I do see something being done about it.

Just to further prove my point, after I posted my stat on how many posts were interpreting the context wrongly (see prior post of mine in this thread), and therefore talking about something that was not what the base article was on about, the following seven consecutive post didn’t give a damn, and kept on talking about the wrong context. Which leads one to think that the usual habit is that of reading the title, skimming through the OP, and answering without paying attention to what prior posts in the thread have come up with (specially in Bitcoin Discussion). That's probably related to the quantity factor ...

Who cares actually? When hunters can earn by spamming then why they will work hard to create quality posts? This isn't just the mistakes of hunters only, there is also the responsibility of the campaign manager to ensure his/her participants aren't getting paid for spamming. If managers avoid accepting such spammer who doesn't care about the forum then all hunters will be forced to make at least good posts rather than spamming. There are a few managers who aren't accepted, spammer. But due to no requirements to become a bounty manager, so even a spammer would be a campaign manager. As a result, spam is just repeating again and again. I regret when I see companies hiring spam managers just to pay low. It's quite impossible to prevent spam totally from the forum.

As you can see there are a lot of bounty scammers right there just to satisfy the number of the post count they need they neglect or ignore the number of the quality contents they created. One of the best thing why we have the report to moderators links to make them aware that that kind of members does not give benefit to the forum instead they are just spamming for their own goods.