Signature deals is one thing that can get people interested in bitcoin, and will often be the only way that many bitcoin small businesses can afford to advertise their business. The forum benefits because it gets additional impressions for the advertisements that it sells so the forum ads are worth more.
No-one without an ad-sig would ever back this statement up (apart from a sockie created by an ad-sig poster of course).
Ad-sigs have *ruined* this forum and if used in the new forum will ruin it to.
Well I would hope you would agree that Bitcoin is based on free market economics. I believe that the reason Bitcoin was created was to allow commerce to take place more freely without relying on the banking system (which is very centralized).
Without signature advertising then I don't see any cost efficient way for a small business to advertise. The last time that the forum
auctioned forum ads each spot cost 2.9
BTC for (at most) a 10 day period. That works out to roughly $1,900 per month at the very minimum. Do you think that many small businesses can afford that large of marketing costs?
My response to my above question is that they cannot. The result of this is that without paid signatures, small businesses would have difficulty advertising their goods and services, and as a result would not be able to grow. If small businesses are unable to grow, then larger businesses will be able to command a larger share of their market and will become more
centralized which is not what Bitcoin is all about.
I can say that forum ads was one major thing that got me involved and interested in/with bitcoin (I have had mild interest in both bitcoin and Bitcoin over the years, however never really took the time to buy any or to
really understand hot it works until I joined the forum), and once I started posting (with a paid signature ad), I was able to learn more about Bitcoin (notice the little/big "b" in this paragraph and throughout), although I admit that I would probably be considered who is
far from an expert regarding most of the technicalities behind Bitcoin.
Has paid signature advertising done some harm to the forum? Yes, absolutely. Paid signatures create the incentives to spam the forum with useless posts. This however is being dealt with by BadBear who is being aggressive in banning people who make insubstantial posts; it is a work in progress. People will also post "fluffed" up posts that have very little contributory value, if they do it enough then they will likely also get banned. The fact that a lot of people have been banned for making insubstantial posts with a paid advertisement has been very public and I suspect that as a result others are going to be more hesitant to go around making useless posts, and will either abandon their account(s), sell their account(s), or put more effort into their posts.
Does the good outweigh the bad for paid signatures? I think so. Any community that has grown to be as large as the bitcointalk community has grown to be is bound to have a spam problem. I would speculate that we would still have a small amount (maybe ~10-20%) of the shitposts that we have today even if paid signatures were banned.