Topic: The decline of forums - page 2. (Read 729 times)

I'm on a few other forums, some that have always been big, others that have grown.

I've seen on those places nowhere near the level of brain death that's developed on here. It's ludicrous to think it's anything other than the prospect of free money that draws hundreds of thousands of google translate zombies here.

The non monetised forums certainly have their share of thickos and twats but they might make up 5% of posts vs 95% here.

There's nothing to gain by participating and ranking up on most forums. There certainly is here. You can see the effects every minute of every day.



There's masses of cool stuff popping up all the time and who knows how epic the developments will be in the years to come? It's an area that will never get old. How it's smothered with stupidity and mindlessness certainly does get old.

I hope the dedicated forum never disappears. Searching twitter or Facebook for the level of discussion you can easily access here with a quick google isn't possible.

I'm a member of a couple of other forums, and I've seen somewhat of a decline but not too much.  Those forums aren't about bitcoin and are actually about two hobbies that are dying out, so that shouldn't be surprising.  And on one of them, there's still some vibrant discussion going on from people from all around the world.  There's nowhere near the amount of spam there as there is here, and I'm pretty sure that's because of the existence of sig campaigns on bitcointalk.

On the other hand, there's a comic book forum that I'm not a member of, but that I visit every now and then, and even though there's no campaigns there, I still see idiotic space-wasting posts such as "+1", "nice!", and the like.  They often quote huge blocks of text before writing them, too.  It's really annoying.

As I've stated innumerable times, I'm not against the concept of being able to rent out your signature space for money.  I've obviously rented mine out and have done so for about 2.5 years now.  The problem is the people who can't speak the language, have nothing to say, and who create multiple accounts through which they post the same repetitive, moronically shitty nonsense.  It's not going to change, and to some extent I've come to accept it.  But boy do I love tagging shitposters when they get snagged cheating campaigns or a similar offense.

Although, it's true that signature campaigns contribute to spamming, I'd argue they're presented 10x worse than they are in reality on these forums..

I don’t see forums in general being as popular as they were. I started communicating with the larger world many decades ago on bbs sites and webrings. Then those faded from popularity and I moved to Usenet newsgroups. From there I moved to IRC which was way cool because it was fast communication. That lead me to Internet forums and I’m just about done with those. Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and others are eliminating the need for forums. Tomorrow maybe we’ll all be linked together with some perverted version of google glass that allows us to blink and link minds, who knows.

Spam may be the cause of forum decline but it’s very likely that the forums life has just run its course. There may simply be nothing new to add to a discussion. It’s all been said, done and tried before.

This is not new for any Forum, what you said is always happening to all forums. Because without this the forum wont get famous and how much famous they get that much more users will join and in that you will always get 40 to 50% of the spamming users. This cannot be avoided as every forum to get more attention and famous they surely needed this type of spammers.

I think there is an overall decline in this form of communication as opposed to "instant" messaging - telegram et al. People just don't seem to be engaged or concerned enough to be able to produce coherent, valuable, helpful "long form" content, and that's not specific to this forum. Nearly every mailing list or forum I've been on in the last couple of decades is either dead or dying or has moved into some sort of chatroom (and dying there).

This particular forum has its own specific problems too - sig campaigns is one no doubt, but also the general expansion of crypto currency development away from Bitcoin. Bitcointalk's altcoin boards are total shit, so if someone is looking for exciting technology beyond Bitcoin they'll be hanging out elsewhere.

I would like to bring to discussion here something that I have sometimes mentioned on the meta section.

I’ve been a member in some forums before I joined this one and I still participate on them nowadays but not so much as on this one.

A common pattern I have seen is: when the forum is born, there are few discussions, technical ones, but as forum traffic increases, spam increases as well. The more it increases, the more spam there is, so there seems to be a relation between increase in traffic and decline in quality.

So, nowadays, you see the senior members complaining and missing the old times when there were meaningful discussions and hardly any spam.

On this forum, spam is blamed on signature campaigns but on the other forums people don’t get paid to post and there is a lot of spam as well. The kind of spam is different, however, as here you get many people writing short answers, with poor English, and without reading what has been written before. On the others, it’s more like people writing banal threads and banal replies

My comparison can be a bit biased, though, as I am comparing forums written in my language to this one. But we have seen that happening here on this board, as it has been commented on here:

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/is-the-ivory-tower-proof-we-shouldnt-restrict-other-sections-like-the-it-3408640

This is why I am opening this thread to ask if any of you have been forum members in other forums that have become very popular over the time and can share your views on this so we can compare.