Topic: Truth about bitcointalk users 2.0 (Read 900 times)

There is no real way of telling that someone has alts without them actually telling it.



When you are done scraping, if you are not up for analyzing  the data in respect to member rank ans activity. Let me know , I would be interested to take a look.

I'd be interested to see some stats about the alt structure here. This account is a Jet Cash alt, and it was set up to sell crypto domain names. Jet Cash has three other alts of member status, and one protective registration. Hopefully they are all contributiing to the forum in some way.

I don't have a goal, it's something Pffrt asked about.

Fair enough.

BTW what is your goal with information of the 20 last posts?

I don't want to do that, as the "1 request per second" limitation is set up for a reason.

The forum has three versions of rank system, so I think it is more correctly to differentiate forum users into three categories:
- Bitcointalk users 1.0 (November 22, 2009 - January 22, 2018: Without activity requirements)
- Bitcointalk users 2.0 (June 18, 2013 - January 23, 2018: Activity requirements)
- Bitcointalk users 3.0 (January 24, 2018 - by now: Activity requirements + Merit requirements)
Read more here: History of bitcointalk.org's rank system

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I am one of them, and I have been a Hero member since the last days of July.
I am on the way to Hero Member rank. Within less than 2 years from register day
I am on my way to that rank, that I did not think of it in January 2018. But now, from what I achieved (with 524 merits received so far), I do belief that I will make it again in next one year and jump to the top of member ranks. It is possible, from my experience. My next target for next 12 months are: Legendary, and one position in top 50 of most merit profiles, according to BPIP.
People who can make it will become highly competitive (especially) than part of old-era Legendary members - whom still kept posting shitposts and have not received merits recent months.
Like this guy, whom posted in early pages in the Merit announcement thread, stucked by now.
If we notice, recent months, we have not seen users complained like that "Damn it, with merit system, I will never rank up to Legendary? What the hell is this? blah blah blah"

You got that right.  There are a few members who are outstanding contributors to the forum and have earned enough merits to get to Legendary once they get enough activity, but they are certainly rare cases.  Members who are just registering an account now are going to have a hell of a time just ranking up to Sr. Member.

Wow, I thought there might have been more than that but I guess it shouldn't surprise me the number is that low.

Makes me wonder if Legendary members are a dying breed, i.e., if the extinction rate is going to exceed the growth rate.  Accounts going inactive and/or getting banned leads to fewer accounts of that rank, and we know damn well that there aren't many members ranking up that high since the merit system was introduced, so....

It seems that you added all the ranks excluding " Brand new" and tought that they are active users.
In this case, you are far from truth.
First, this analysis at the time was done for only 1million of the users. Second, not all the users are active.

The last thing i did was - analyzed the activity much deeper. and by scraping 2,37 million users with their last post time, the result was that.


Lately have not had the time to scrape the forum. In order to scrape it faster you could use multiple virtual machines, it took me less than a week to scrape those 2,37 million.  I did scrape the time of the last post not the 20 posts . I dont think that you will be able to get much more information regarding activity with those 20 posts than with the last one.

In either case it would be fun to see how the activity has changed over this time.

Isn't that what signature campaigns managed by strict campaign managers do?

If I'd have a list of active accounts, I could scrape the last page of each user's post history (20 posts) to check this. I've been scraping all new posts from my VPS since 2 weeks now. In a couple of months, I could use that to get a list of active users to start from.

Over 165 thousand active members is quite a healthy community base. Is rhere a way that we can encourage an increase in posting by the high end of this asset?

Only if they are good posters and received enough merits. There are not too many users nowadays can rank up with merit system, especially to earn 500 merits (if they start from Brandnew/ Newbie); or even if they start from Senior Member rank, they have to earn 250 more merits to get Hero Member rank. That is a difficult task for shitposters.
I don't count, but from the list of ranked up users here, they are not too many
Forum chronicle - UP Rank List (statistics, trust, who is who) - I get this list of Hero members.
And, this image is from Bitcointalk Merit Dashboard.
There are 70 ranked up Hero members (from the image, but real figure likely higher a little bit); and 11 of them are totally self-made Hero members. They are counted for 15.7 % of total ranked up Hero members since merit system born in 2018.

When did you do the timestamp of this result?

From 11 05 2017 to the date of this thread 11-07-2019 we had 113 weeks.

You can have a max activity for users registered on 1st week of this range of (113-1)/2*14= 784

Since the legendary rank requires 1000 merits and 775 activity if you are lucky, only the users registered on the week of the11-05-2017 could be legendary on 11/07/2019.


This is very close to 0%.


For Hero ranks, if I read correctly your considerations, your numbers are incorrect.

I'm the user number 1339716 and I'm Hero, as for me, few more people with id 1xxxxxx are Hero now.

It would be interesting to filter with one more entity. Out of those 165,148 how much users are not posting any social media report? Anyway to filter it out? That would find out the actual number of people joining here.[/list]

That number has risen to over 70% now.  A more detailed analysis could show more evidence of spam waves.

• 2,656,378
  Largest profile on Bitcointalk
• 16,117
  Deleted Profiles
• 1,915,785
  Archived Profiles
• 575,445
  Inactive Profiles
  
• 165,148
  Active Profiles
  

The reason is stated in the OP: Dates of analysed accounts registered between 2017/05/11 and 2018/04/03. That rules out Legendries and Heroes since those accounts have not had enough time to rank-up (at the time of the analysis).

Nevertheless @mazdafunsun has a more complete and recent topic (the OP is partial) here, with data for all ranks: The real activity of bitcointalk.org + full stats.

In addition, you can take a look at Analysis - Bitcointalk Accounts – Date of Register vs Last Active per Rank to get additional insights of created and dropped accounts per year and rank.

Why legendary rank was not included? I was also thinking about how many users with this rank because I have seen many legendary users in this forum. I wish to see this post to be updated with it if OP would consider the request. Anyway, Jr. member rank down to newbie and brandnew users had the greatest number of users registered. This maybe because the bitcoin market price hype on 2017 made this possible.

I think @EternityFirs's explanation above will account for the largest chunk of these. They don't get to know about the evil IP until after the account has been created. So the spambots will just keep making new accounts and when they can't post they just try again with another IP address and repeat until they get one they can use. From Vod's numbers over 50% of all accounts have never posted.


There's probably some of that as well.

You are right, i have scraped 2million users so far.  
I will defintely think of what can i do to show information you suggested, it would be interesting. It seems that there is big interest to see more on "new account" statistics.


My apolgies if I came across as not welcoming.
I learned something new from your post, thanks for your input

I meant an automated system: when a user gets banned, the Rank gets changed to "banned". That shouldn't be too much work to implement.

Too much work for the staff - we used to have the Scammer rank.

That would be stepping backwards from the trust system to a centralized one.