Topic: theymos, monetize this forum ;) (Read 736 times)

OP you have a wonderful idea...for Theymos to poop on us with. 

There are some eternal idiots I'd love to see get whacked with a tollbooth fee, but that really would be a naked, bald-faced cash grab on the big man's part.  And I don't think it would enrich anyone else, nor be all that effective.  Well, maybe.  There probably wouldn't be as many throwaway noob shitposting accounts, but I suspect the big spammer cabals would see it as a drop in the bucket. 

Most importantly, I certainly don't want to cough up any moolah to a forum already awash in dough.  We aren't even mobile friendly.

How do you force somebody to join a campaign? even if you are paying $10 per month, you have paid it, whether you'd post or not, there will be no losing more than $10 per month.


Anything more than $0.5 per post is extortion, $0.5 should be the fixed maintenance fee. you are free to pay more.


Where is the incentive if you are paying a fee per post? what are we doing now other than posting on spam megathreads or contributing something useful?


Why would you keep wearing the signature after the campaign has ended?


What if there is no manager? there is nobody managing Bountyhive campaigns.


Are you talking about the same legendary members with 10-20 accounts? they would rather to contribute with alt-accounts since there is no incentive to earn merits for. if you are exclusively using forum to win money, you would continue with spam whether you are paying a fee or not. you would have incentive if what I have suggested is implemented. you either pay $0.5 per post or report any spam/garbage and post for free per accurate report. the money people would pay per post, should be given to top merited members as a reward.

I don't see how such a kind of signature fee could reduce spam. It could even increase it, because users that pay this fee would be forced to participate in campaigns all the time to not lose money.

Let's assume such a "signature wearing right" costs $10 per month. Most signature campaigns pay a bigger amount (~$100), so it's not a big deal for a campaign participant to pay this fee. A $100/month campaign, thus, de facto would become a $90 campaign.

But there is absolutely no incentive for this campaign participant to increase the quality of his posts. He would get his $90 if he posts in spam megathreads or if he contributes with high-quality posts.

Now let's assume the campaign ends. The user has to continue to pay the fee if he wants to wear signatures. So if he doesn't want to lose money, he is forced to join a new campaign as fast as possible. At the end, this can become an incentive to spam, even in times the user cannot or doesn't want to contribute that much.

So those that lose are those that live a "normal forum life", contributing when they want to, and are using signature campaigns as a little "extra money", like it is intended. People that exclusively use the forum to win money can continue like now, and those are the people that are most likely to spam.

I think - apart from the merit system, which I fully support - the better approach is to control signature campaign management a bit stricter. There are very good managers that really read and control the posts and punish and ban those who spam the forum. There are others that don't care about it at all. Here staff should put up clear rules and ban managers that do not follow them.

Bad idea. I linger around the technical support and alternative clients boards to see if there's anything I can assist with. I'd estimate about 90% of the OPs there are newbie or brand-new immediately after making their post. Whether these are alts of more senior members that don't want to look clueless at legendary/hero/SR member level I don't know but as a point, this'll make those board really quiet (everyone will turn elsewhere with issues like the forum Reddit). Or they'll start posting their issue on someone else's thread.

Also the marketplace section has a lot of newbies selling stuff (I think some of those are probably legit trades that take place).

Just your opinion, shitty posters are the same, they are just posting their opinions, nothing else. if this is not the right solution, what is in your opinion? giving more sMerits to low ranks or paying you money every time you post your opinion?


Forum is not paying you for advertising via your signature, unemployed and hungry people are. they are paying you to advertise for them and you are getting paid, they are getting money too, only one not getting anything other than garbage upon garbage to clean up is this forum.


What happens if you are not in a signature campaign, would you post as usual or would you try finding a campaign? when my campaign ends, I will post and keep on being a merit source. you and garbage posters wont do anything if you are not getting paid.

Don't worry, me too. All of us join signature campaigns in order to earn money. How silly to to put a fee on wearing signatures then later paid the one who wear it after advertising. In my opinion, this is not the right solution for eradicating shitty posters, if we really need to check all of user's profile one by one then so be it.
I agree with you on deleting spambait topics but prohibiting lower ranks to create threads? No offense but I object. Rank is not a valid basis to tell someone whether he/she has the right to create a thread or not, as long as the one that you created is informative and not same as "what is bitcoin" threads then I don't see any problem with it.

Pretty sure if new accounts are asked to choose one of the two following options :
Offer their ids with a real time video in order to check 100% their identity or paying $500?, well most of them will choose the first option.
I may be a little bit aggressive toward users in bounties board and trying to figure out a radical solution for their misbehaviour, but I suggest to search for new ideas, this one is a little bit Trumpy (building a wall with mexicans money?).

Rather only the members with less than 10-20 earned merits in the last 90 days should pay a fee per post with signature, paid or unpaid.


Only to check if they have been given merits by sources, otherwise it would be extremely time consuming to monitor who is who and who is doing what with their sMerits.


You don't get to decide how many posts people are allowed to submit. we have spam when you are posting with 10 accounts and 15 posts each to earn tokens after a few weeks or months, main cause of spam production. if you would have to pay $150 for 150 posts, you would never join a bounty if you are not getting paid at least every week. if a bounty campaign doesn't have a minimum of one week payment for their advertising campaign, what they are doing is using Bitcointalk to get money, when they see nobody is joining their crapcoin-token campaign, they would not launch an ICO every day.

As I have suggested a few hundred times already, if you don't want to pay per post, report accurately, and post for free for every valid report. people would spentd their time on finding merit abuse, garbage posts. we would have the current moderators with no need to hire more. members would help to moderate the forum if they would have to pay per post to earn money otherwise.

OP deserves some merits from me, if he had 30-50 posts more than activity.

theymos already monetize this forum, he auctions the ads slot on this forum
charging a few bucks for signature privilege will not reduce spam, in fact it will increase spam exponentially
people will justified themselves after paying 'signature tax' to the 'authority' (theymos)
and the 'authority' thru mods can't ban spammers with ease, there will be conflict of interests

Some of ICO's end up being spam, and their tokens worth nothing. Most of the people here make no more than 500$ from bounty if they're not lucky or senior members. That is from 2-3 months of posting. I agree to pay if I have a nice colorful signature and ability to wear avatar;D. Then all ranks will be basically useless.

Who will decide signature is paid, It simply mean everybody should need to pay for signature for whatever purpose they are using.
(I simply see, somebody create a forum /or secret deal outside to sell signature here and every user can claim it is  personal signature)


The forum is global and there is so much economic disparity in world, I think then we need to decide the price individually for each country of the world.
 
Let me go to principle of economics to explain how paid signature will not help in reducing spam.
Let take example of oil , If company buys oil at $100 ,they will take profit and let say they will sell at $120. Now if they buy oil at $150 , they will not going to sell at $120, they will sell at $150+. So paid signature will just add the cost of advertising.


We should decay the sMerits. Theymos was already aware of this scenario of Merit abuse while implementing it.



The real problem is forum is not getting more members but it is getting more fake accounts and they are posting rubbish.
To add value to bitcoin we need "head" not more hands.




I also earlier thought of "Removing signatures or sig ads globally." might be good solution but now google and facebook against crypto ads and we remove it from here also, then  they are left with very limited options.

Now coming to real problem of spam.

I think SMAS list is a good initiative.
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/smas-signature-managers-against-spam-light-version-1545652

Whoever caught spamming should be added to list with timestamp of first occurence.
Two more column of occurrence/number of time  and latest timestamp added in the list to keep track, how many time user spammed and last time when user caught spamming, and if somebody caught spamming more than 2 times in a week, then ban the user for a week.
User who is featured in this list will have there signature disabled at once (So they cannot take part in any sig campaign.)

if even 10% of user here use "Report To Moderator" to report spam  then in no time we will get this list populated.

Additional step we can take to further filter out.
Only user that have earned Merit (not default merits by virtue of rank)  in last 3 months are allowed to take part in sig campaign.
Check of merited post to verify that merit is not traded.
Campaign should not ask more than 14 post a week

Am I the only one who believes that this is a BAD idea?

That will not stop the spammers from paying to have their signatures on but it might discourage quality posters from participating in the forum.

Why don't the mods start by disallowing newbies and Jr. members from starting new threads and delete spambait topics at the same time?

Maybe because it won't do anything at all!
Do you, or does anyone of you, think that most shitposters are indigent people? Actually, most shitposters are those who can pay that fee (OP said above) rather than those who can't. And let's assumed that it is already implemented, people who can afford to pay fees would pay fees no matter what, even if they are shitposters or not. Then let's say a shitposter pays for a certain signature, do you all think he/she will stop spamming? It was like, "a criminal always remains a criminal no matter how long he/she spend his/her life in jail".

Even merit system can't stop them, am I right? Only those who want's to rank up "shitposter before" would be change by merit system. Ask them a question, those who are shitposters, do you want to rank up if you already earning at you current rank? He/she will say yes! But I assure you it's a LIE...

So maybe, theymos and other mods should think a much better way other than that.  

Okay that is a good point which i missed a lot, i am sorry for the post before. I too believe that there are too many cheaters that come from Indonesia which make Indonesia name bad and affect all the "good" Indonesia. I guess it is better if theymos him/herself can gives us the reason why he/she doesnt want to charge people like OP and you @hillariousetc suggest. For now, i think the suggestion is good until we find other compatible solution and compare them head to head, and i cant think of one now.

I would like to start with the information you shared about the benefits of more members getting involved with bitcoins. This is really an important point. Once the member starts getting some bitcoins and then sees growth in the price of those bitcoins in future, he will be encouraged to invest own money in bitcoins as well. Most of the people think that signature campaigns are giving free money. If we observe carefully, some time goes in making posts required for getting paid by the campaign. If you use that time for any other freelance activity, you will get paid there also but in cash mostly.

Since it's been stated above here in a quote of one of Theymos' posts that he's ruled out this idea already.
I could only offer two additional suggestions (I've been skimming this thread so it's possible these have already been mentioned).

However:
 • Charge campaign runners to run campaigns here (as charging for signatures seems a bit rediculous IMO as some people might just want to put random stuff below their posts to advertise their services, and if we charge for signatures then do we also charge for a personal message and avatar - like my bitcoin address that I have left there?)

 • Issue fines for BOTH or Either campaign managers or signature campaign owners for running campaigns that just support bad posting quality. I don't mean, one user posts with a low quality, I mean that the entire member of a campaign continues to get posts deleted by moderators (like more than 5 or 10%). This money could then be donated to the moderators for the job that they do to help clear up the forum and to theymos and his developer teem to keep new ideas like the merit system flowing.


Also, more members getting involved in Bitcoin increases the acceptance of the currency as a thing and also pushes the price up a bit.
So many members discussing Bitcoin shows that the currency has a user-base behind it and that it's potentially worth its value as it is.
And it helps with the delocalisation of the currency and if more peopole have a small amount, it becomes more valuable as it's split across more people.

I didn't miss anything. You're just taking things out of context and only reading what you want to see. Why wouldn't theymos be happy if somebody can earn for making quality contributions. It's the shitposters that we're not happy about and the number of Indonesians and Filipinos contributing much of value to this forum is dwarfed by the thousands of shitposters who contribute absolutely nothing and are only here to earn on their 12 accounts by posting meaningless drivel post after post.

I do not agree to this idea because:

1) One of the reasons behind the popularity of this forum forum is that it provides an earning opportunity to new members without paying any money. There are various other websites that charge extra yearly fees for special ranks that are associated with privileges like signatures. Those forums will never be able to touch bitcointalk in terms of popularity.

2) Because of the above reason , a lot of new members keep joining the forum in the hope of getting accepted. They also make posts here and all this results in forum getting traffic. Indirectly, these members are also helping forum and are responsible for the advertisement slots being sold here.

Well pardon me, but it seems you have missed a bit too @hillariousetc

It may reduce the traffic on this forum and ultimately it may affect the revenue generated through the paid advertising on this forum. I am not sure, there could be some other reasons also. Overall its a good idea but need to work on it, in order to implement it effectively.

I think charging people to have a signature is going to be the only way we'll stop the majority of the abuse. If it doesn't cost people anything then they will find a way to get around the system. Merit is a great idea in theory but we're just seeing people farm merit now and those with a lot of accounts or "friends" just trade it between themselves in a you scratch my back I'll scratch yours scenario. Remove signatures and make everyone pay $500 or something to get one and that would pretty much kill account farming and severely limit the amount of accounts people could have. Punishing badly run campaigns would go a long way as well. If we'd have done this then we wouldn't have had this issue in the first place and as long as spammers continue to get paid nothing will really change.


You seem to have missed this bit:

My bad sorry. I've never seen him explain his objection and I didn't understand it to begin with. Since then I've seen some of his posts that make me think he has a certain outlook on life that he wants to give people a chance to better themselves and make a few bucks here regardless of whether they can afford to pay upfront or not. That's just an impression I get, I might be completely wrong.

The price should not be too expensive but enough to make it inconvenient for massive spammers, the equilibrium between the two.

---

The addition of merit system has prevented new accounts from being farmed so this idea is no longer urgently needed but I think it'll be somewhat effective to combat the existing one.

I was referring to theymos.

I think a remember seeing hilariousandco post the same thing again very recently so I don't he has dropped it. Maybe he's just a bit less vocal about it since Merit has been brought in. I also thought it was a good idea but I suppose theymos has chosen another way and I'm happy to get behind that and give it a chance.

I have seen his/her post about how happy he/she is because there are many people from 3rd world country who do a good job and contribution to this forum and make money from it, and the money is considered big in their country. If this system happened, then the poor will be troubled a bit if they want to join the sig campaign. It will be like a money game, one who has money will have a higher chance to be in the game.

Let me post this first and i will find theymos’ post. This reason is just a conclusion from me tho.

Okay, this.
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.32203954

the discussion about spamming is never ending but when merit feature was implemented the problem of spamming is somehow lesser than the old days.
hilarious suggested to remove sig and ads globally but theymos didn't take action to that, maybe Theymos Has better Idea But Hilarious's idea is also a contribution to the forum. and now OP wants  users to pay for sigs, and I/we don't know if theymos will take action to that also. Let theymos and other superiors decide what would be the best way to this Problem.

Only if theymos make it live 

hilariousandco has proposed the idea numerous time but it seems theymos didn't like it. I personally think this is a great idea though, it's better for all those ads money to go to the forum and quality posters rather than the spammer. IIRC he never mentioned why he dropped the idea, so I would like to hear his opinion on this.

i guess it will not reduce the spam and more likely creates more of the farm account. imagine you already earn crypto because of bounty and the only ways to make more is to pay for it.

Great idea, perhaps you should pay $500 for coming up with it

I've been reading meta for some time and I see lots suggestion about signatures and how to reduce spam and so on.
I couldn't find data on how many users are participating in various campaigns, I think that number might be 100K, maybe higher.

What do you think about forcing users to pay for wearing payed signatures?
Why don't you charge few bucks for it? It doesn't need to be big amount of money, it can be around 10-20$ monthly. Discount for larger time period could be included.

Imagine it, 100,000 users will pay 10 - 20 million dollars every year just to participate in campaigns!
You can even donate some money to charity 

IMO that would be great way to monetize forum and reduce spam.