Topic: The effect the mixer ban has had on the forum. - page 2. (Read 4435 times)

Youtube has better cosmetics but it does not allow thousands of people to earn $50-150 a week without much effort.

I am not quite sure of how to make signature campaigns work better than they do here at this time.


Yes I am aware of the spam , but I would post a lot less here and more on other forums if signatures ended here. Most of my posting here was not done with a signature. I would think 25000 maybe 30,000 posts were done with no campaign.  But the mine ended and I can use the income from posting so I post.

That is absolutely right. Not only ban of signature campaigns negatively affect this forum but on the other hand, if signature campaigns lower pay rate as low as 40-50 USD per week, then this forum will experience significant lose of high quality posters and will be left with bunch of spammers. By the way, I wonder why other forums didn't copy this strategy of Bitcointalk, i.e. to allow signature campaigns. I don't wanna be "that" guy but I think that o_e_l_e_o was here because of high pay rate and he left because of low pay rate and we lost a very amazing member because of that! o_e_l_e_o was a real asset (I know he said that he had an illness but I don't believe it, sorry but I love him, he will always be in my memory).

I think I agree with you but on the other hand, these cosmetics are why this forum struggles to attract youth. At least theymos has to make this forum responsive, it's not that hard.

Spot on bold type black

but I think the worse we can do is fuck with cosmetics. red bold type

I believe these cosmetics are why the signature campaigns work so well.

I found this forum user interface to be perfect for the reading, even though it is out-dated but still it is effective. If you're someone who love to read that this is a good forum without any much distractions. Even the signature designs do not irritate you as there are no flashy pics etc. Also, no ads on the forum make it a good ready spot 

Coming to the OP question, its been almost 5 months that the discussion of that topic are banned, but that's the rules and we have to obey on what's allowed to be discussed and what is banned. Still there is a lot other topics to discuss and while it can be frustrating to have restrictions on certain topics, it's good to focus on what can be discussed. 

By definition, a forum is a platform used to bring in discussions, sharing ideas, or anything of a certain category, whether offline or online which means privacy/anonymity is just a feature that we took and implemented according to our needs.

Bitcointalk is special and for no reason I love the old school theme than the fancy UI of other forums and also forums that replicated bitcointalk tweaked some feature than has been requested by the community more often but still people here love to hangout and participate in the discussions than anywhere, probably because the active members with actual knowledge is more than anywhere else and we can't deny the participation of signature campaigns too.

This forum is in no way more special than say any other forum with the exception of two things:

- the historical associations to Bitcoin and crypto in general
- being unique in the amount of money it generates

For example, in any of the names it adopted before the current it was where Satoshi posted therefore it has been called a library and a reference for the work of Satoshi.

If theymos were to ban signature campaigns, the forum would lose almost all members and it would drift in to obscurity (except for the library and reference analogy).

As for cosmetics, the forum was due an upgrade many years ago and it is clearly lagging behind.

On the contrary, dear d5000, your definition of a forum is too broad. Are you comparing TikTok where people show their faces and do little dances with this anonymous forum? Or Instagram which is a social network where people show idyllic lives? On Instagram or TikTok there are hardly any discussions.

You have failed to include in the definition of forum the social network BeReal, where people not only show their faces but when they receive a warning they record what they are doing at that moment (except if they are shitting, I guess). I can't imagine Satoshi, if he created bitcoin now, creating an account on BeReal (or Instagram or TikTok) to talk about it.

The main difference between forums and social networks is anonymity, and that the forum is written-only.

Here we have to distinguish between the platform and the client.

If somebody wants to found a Bitcointalk-style decentralized forum, create a (e.g. Steemit-like) blockchain, and set some rules for it, that could be achieved with a dedicated "platform". Another idea is to use an existing "platform" like the various decentralized Reddit clones and create a Bitcointalk-style variant of it. Or, even alternatively, you could design a client software (either local or web-based) which is able to access several "platforms" (e.g. different Mastodon, Nostr, Reddit-clone etc. instances), filters them for Bitcoin-themed "subforums", and creates something like a local Bitcoin-themed forum coming from different platforms.

Every possible variant of these concepts is possible. There is however one main problem one has to deal with: spam. For example, let's say you create a decentralized forum where everybody could create a subforum. How do you prevent that subforums are massively created?

Basically this is the same problem than the problem with moderation. There are two approaches to this: one is that you could implement a governance function, e.g. with a token. This was basically like Steemit did it: if a post received too many downvotes it wasn't displayed to users by default, and this could also happen to subforums. You could also the users require to vote for subforum creation, but due to sybil attacks you would probably need a PoS-style system, which has also disadvantages.

But there is another approach: let the clients (e.g. the web interface operators, or the local software) decide. These softwares could include an own content classification and also moderation system. This could also be a factor for them to compete: who has the most interesting and attractive interface?

I think you're defining "forum" too narrowly ("websites that look like the forums of the 90s and 00s, like Bitcointalk "). Twitter, Instagram, even TikTok are also "forums", only with a slightly different interface. These are platforms allowing people to discuss, react to other posts, and categorize posts thematically (if that's done via folksonomies - e.g. hashtags - or ontologies - subforums defined in some kind of a "top-down" manner - isn't that important.) There are even some successful forums which are very close to the 90s instances, particularly Reddit and their clones.

Of course instead we could talk about a decentralized Bitcoin-focused social media platform. There are many functions in modern social networks I would like to see in Bitcointalk, for example to follow other users and be alerted in the watchlist whenever they post. This is absolutely no problem in a forum software, modern softwares like Discourse allow it. And this would also be no problem in a decentralized forum. You would have only to implement filter rules, like in the "listunspent" Bitcoin RPC command you can filter by address.

The forum is outdated because only one person is responsible to update files and database. Theymos already made many changes in the forum core, I am no sure if all these are documented. If it is not documented then it will be harder to check all the updates and restore to any other theme [not just SMF but the new forum software if we ever move].

The different kind of advertising idea helps users to stay active in the community, everyone likes to get something in return of doing something that they always do.

Also the reason BTT survived?
I think BTT is just special and maybe some things like signature campaign has been a key to keeping here going.
The reason forums got outdated could be because of lack of the modern day UI/UX amongst other things.

I don't know how the setup works or is there any such setup at all. If you are referring Google domain was hacked [I would say legally bought] by someone when it expired and then they decided to take it from the new owner and giving it back to Google then I think I read such story. 

the best you could do is a three or four server mirror system.

all in different countries.

but this still means  individuals attached to one of the servers could get grabbed up and charged by a country.

We have to face the simple fact that the world is not as free as we would like.

This sounds like you're sure the Google owner didn't hire the neighbour's nerd kid to register a domain and make a simple site for him. 

Things that cannot be compared. You trying to compare the corporate management of digital assets (with the domain as the basic asset) to a situation where a examplens ^{just example} account has been hacked and she now has to go through authentication and proof of ownership of the account. And all this while the administrators, who are in different time zones, may not be online, so the process can take days.


That's a myth.
You don't really think that only two people are cooking a drink for the whole world.

Are you guys seriously getting your heads around a decentralised forum? Forums are things of the past and those that survive are because they were launched and were successful in the past. I think the only thing that hasn't completely killed them is that a lot of people forum during quiet times at work.

Tor browser wasn't the best example. Maybe torrents are a better comparison: nobody expects to download torrents through a centralized website that does the download for them and gives them the file. Instead, you install a torrent client. Or you rent a "seed box" from a specialized provider.
If I imagine a decentralized forum client, it doesn't have to be restricted to only one forum: many different forums could be accessed from the same client, and every user could create their own forum.

So, hypothetically, the forum could be accessed through a browser through one of many centralized servers (which together provide decentralized access), just like you "access" Electrum servers through the Electrum client. That sounds good to me!

If many individual "points of entry" are competing for SEO, users can just choose the one that doesn't add too many ads. Or the fastest server with the best uptime. I hope to see this in reality some day.

"For everything that breaths - there's a limit, might and most importantly, an end". What's saddens me more is how ignorant we are about the fear of transition(maybe getting involved in a ghastly accident or something). In any case, we aren't planning our funerals already when we're still alive so I'd say - for now, I think everything is under control.

If the forum's domain is accessible by Cyrus himself, then I think it's way better. We just gotta need someone to stand in should there be a need.
That's more like COCA -COLA and it's recipe. I learnt only two People have direct access to it and they can't fly in the same aircraft?

If there was any pressure put on the other forum surely it would have come in the form of contact between law enforcement agencies and the admin/owner of the other forum. If that contact had really happened, the admin/owner of that forum should have posted about it on his forum. What could be happening is that other forums might be following the same route theymos set with exactly the same reasons.

Well, you can't dictate your users which type of client they should use Is Bitcoin less decentralized because users use Sparrow/Electrum/mobile clients?

The crucial question for me is that it should be possible to use it without any restriction directly connecting to the blockchain (or Torrent-shared database), and ideally there should of course be an easy to use interface to post this way. If anybody however wants to run a web frontend publishing the posts from the blockchain there, then nobody can stop them; and this additionally would make SEO possible. And this was true with Steem too, as all posts were stored on the blockchain. However I'm not sure in this case how user-friendly the Steem blockchain client was for users wanting to post and read.

A web front end existing would not make the project more centralized, if it is always clear that the originating posts come from blockchain/torrent/IPFS/ZeroNet.

The only possible issues I see with this "hybrid model" are copyright and duplicate content issues. Copyright can be relatively easily solved, you could simply require a Creative Commons license from all users posting on the forum. But duplicate content depends on the search engine algorithm (e.g. Google's). Basically the web frontend operators would compete for the top SEO spots but they would harm the whole project if they compete too hard. If they don't work commercially, they could however refer to one version of the web-delivered content as the "canonical" one.

The problem of Steem(it) was not the decentralization of the content. It was that the founders-run web interface (which was not the only one) was too dominant. People talked more about "Steemit" (the main web interface) than about "Steem" (the blockchain project), and that was for sure also intended, because so it was easier to promote. There was also the issue of the "sponsored accounts". This was a requirement because on Steem's blockchain there was a fee to create new addresses, which was quite high for some time when Steem bubbled (more than $5), and only if you registered on the Steemit web interface you got an account for free.

But all these are flaws that don't have to be repeated by a really decentralized project. The crucial issue is that the database distribution and content creation are decentralized. What the web frontends do is their business (as long as the copyright issue is solved, see above). If one of them is coerced to censor information, users can switch to another one.

In my opinion, a token could be involved if it's necessary to secure the blockchain and it's distributed in a decentralized way (e.g. via PoW). Even if it's a bitcoin sidechain, it could be still necessary to run a different consensus algorithm to secure that sidechain (if it's not merged-mined). (Such a possibility is for example one of the reasons I'm so interested in sidechains )

I thought however that Steem's monetization model wasn't bad, it was basically similar to what projects like "Flattr" intended to achieve 10 years ago. What however was totally bad in Steem was the initial token distribution. It seems there was no premine but the coin was heavily instamined by the founders in its initial stage, when it was promoted as an "experimental blockchain" without any marketing and so there were few miners interested it. Later they switched to DPoS.

Good point.

However, I wouldn't say that steemit is censorship resistant.

Although the backend has some decentralization,  the front end (which controls all the traffic,i.e, the value) can easily censor words, authors, etc... and the founders can be coerced.

The probability of dying percentage is interesting LOL.
Probability for theymos not to die in 2019 was 100% 😂 but anyway, considering the statistic is the same for year 2024, the chance of 1% still seems too high. Let's hope many of us will be able to watch the mining of 21st millionth bitcoin.

I don't know if there is a way to have multiple access [be owner] of a domain or not but if there are such feature then considering such option will be helpful. "Bitcointalk.org", imagine it's not in the hand of a person who do not deserve it [Ver don't deserve bitcoin.com but we could not do anything because he was in control on the domain]. The domain "Bitcointalk.org" is a brand for all.

I am sure, Google have a setup so that whoever is in control of the domain have any situation that he is no more, we will not see Google lost Google.com. The same for Facebook, x and many others.

Loyce.club can set up a team with a few trusted and knowledgeable people who have the same interest so that we do not lose the work.