Topic: What do you think of the Bitcoin Discussion section? Does he need to change? - page 2. (Read 825 times)

If I understood your suggestion correctly (if I didn't, correct me), are you postulating that Theymos should appoint mods from users who are knowledgeable in what the content of the particular section is all about. I think that is the case already, I don't think there is any mod currently who is not knowledgeable on what is acceptable or what it not, there is also the Global mods whose duty covers all the sections of the forum; thus I don't think is the solution to the problem.

The problem is the enormous amount of shitposts, for example, it's just like when two people are handling a job in a company that's meant for ten people, sooner or later this two individuals are either going to be inundated with duties and their input would gradually deteriorate as they would be unable to handle the task at their disposal. That is somewhat the case here, if the shitposts in some sections of the forum is pretty small, then it would be easy to pick them out and delete, but as things stand now, even with the mods and the assistance of users who report LQ posts, it is like the situation gets worse everyday.

This is why I am taken to reporting egregious users' post histories as opposed to hunting for shitty threads. Merit was an improvement but any improvements come with a time lag: you can conflate a similar analogy of sticky prices with post quality because spammers need to be "shook out" of the forum. My goal at the time was not necessarily to ban users, but to wipe a significant chunk of posts to point toward their behavior as a wake-up call. I could only imagine the impact if, for your deleted posts, you also had the merit removed!^*

In contrast, when you're peering through boards and threads themselves, you could very well participate in a shit thread and contribute some substance, although the likelihood exponentially decays against the increasing post count. Another scenario too would be the constant answering of simple, generic, and vague questions in threads posed by "Newbies". I liken this behavior to that of stalking the Lending, Scam Accusations, or Investor-games board and posting your typical no collateral/no evidence/warning ponzi reply which takes minimal effort beyond being the fastest.

Given all the amazing benefits that scammers, trolls, and spammers have on the forum, a smart account farmer could use any combination of tactics: creating Newbie accounts to ask idiotic questions with premade answers, creating troll accounts to post in the previously-mentioned copy-paste reply boards (like the style of this user), making obvious ponzis or scams to call them out, or participating in fake discussions (which is probably part of the megathread problem). What can't scammers do? They have all the privilege on the forum. Seriously.

What I’ve always found difficult is knowing who to trust, especially with semi-technical stuff that doesn’t quite fit in the dev & tech board. I love when I have a post for Gmax’s section because many who are often hanging out there know their shit and the board is run by a legit cypherpunk/former dev who’s typically engaged in everything I post there and of course is a slower board and isn’t bogged down as much as some other mods.

I don’t know if there is any way to do this but it would be awesome if theymos / Hilarious could give users who they know are knowledgeable a marking of sorts, like I believe Hal Finney and Gavin have, and other early day contributors (like Theymos,).. I have mostly learned about btc from Andreas, Szabo and my buddies in collectibles who I know I can trust since we are a close group and I’ve gotten to know who knows what they’re talking about but I wish I could be more confident posting in general discussion.. Merit helps some of course. Maybe this is a silly idea ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

That is true, they prefer quantity over quality, and that is the problem. These campaigns risk no funds at all. If the project fails (which is the case with most of them) they will simply distribute worthless tokens to bounty participants, so they will not lose anything. As a result, we have to deal with a huge amount of low quality and spam posts on our forum. Also, the number of reports moderators receive is on the rise, so I am assuming it is becoming more difficult for them to stay in the loop with everything that is going on.

The other big difference of those bounties with bitcoin paying signature campaigns is that, altcoin bounties don't have any limit for maximum number of participants and they accept any user who apply for the bounty.
In altcoin bounties, the budget is fixed and the total money shitcoins they pay doesn't depend on number of participants. This makes them to not reject anyone. They think that if they accept more users, they can have a more successful bounty. 

I second that as well, Bitcoin paying signature campaigns on the forum are more or less run by the best and reliable managers, thus I don't think we actually have too much of a problem with them, they (the managers) are open to take reports of wrongdoing from any of their participants and action would be taken subsequently against such user, these campaigns actually have the desire to promote their establishment here, I think that's why they more often than not go for the best managers so they don't get into trouble.

Having said that, the altcoin bounties is an entirely different thing all together, their managers are most times even newbies that wouldn't mind if you ban their account or not, neither would they spend an extra minute going through posts made by participants of their signature campaign, thus banning them may actually not be productive, what could work is outrightly putting a stop to such campaigns, if that's even possible, cause more often than not, what they even advertise is either BS or even a scam.

I did all that for months. Reported thousands of spam posts, reported hundreds of threads to be locked due to them being spam megathreads, reported hundreds of threads to be trashed entirely because they were low quality or a duplicate of an already existing thread. Even after my busiest days of many hundred reports, only the first page would be cleaned up, and by the time I woke up in the morning, it was complete mess again. We can report individual posts and threads until hell freezes over, but without either real action taken against the spammers and the campaigns which pay them, or maybe a couple of dedicated sub-board mods who can monitor the board near-constantly and delete/lock spam threads before they even get started, then nothing will change.

This is the crux of the matter. The spammers spam because they get paid for it. They get paid for it because of shitty campaign managers who don't care about the quality of their participants, and it is the rest of the forum which has to deal with the consequences. I've caught a couple of signature spammers who delete their own posts and then repost the exact same posts the following week to get paid, and the manager did not pick up on it. This is not an isolated incident, and is proof that many managers do not even read the posts of their campaign participants.

Why should the managers get paid for doing nothing, while it is the forum users who have to sacrifice their own time (with no reward) to clean up the mess? We need to start banning managers who don't manage their campaigns properly, or even better, banning the campaigns altogether to incentivize future campaigns to choose reliable managers.

Spammers sure, bounty mangers that would be too harsh since they're not the ones producing the spams but some punishment can be introduced although that'll mean signature/bounty are now been moderated and that'll be against the forum principle of not moderating this campaigns.

Managers can play a role here and I'm sure some of us are already doing so but there'll always be bad eggs. If we can denied posts that aren't worth rewarding constantly then the campaign promoters will get the hint of zero tolerance to low quality posts. Majorly alts are the reason behind this low quality contributions as they'll want to maximize the time they have on their hands to post as many posts as possible so as to get paid with their multiple alts.

If we can win the fight against abuses ongoing on the forum with alts spamming meriting themselves and cheating then we're a step closer to eradicating spam from not just the Bitcoin/altcoin discussion board but the forum as a whole.

We have tried to do something, but instead of any result, we are labeled as those who constantly complain about something and those who waste their time in that board. Consequently, I have decided that I will not waste my time cleaning that board if some prominent members already think that it is a lost cause.

The BD board is just a reflection of the whole forum, and obviously, we have enough boards to write off one board at a time.

Edit:

Still, it's hard to watch all that spam and not report anything - so I decided to hit spammers and shitposters even harder.

Bitcoin Discussion should be the sub forum that has the most attention we are a Bitcoin forum and there should at least be a dedicated mod in that sub forum. Members would report more if there was a dedicated mod there.

It is the bounties in the altcoin sub forums that are promoting low quality replies in the Bitcoin Discussion forum. I think the spammers and the bounty managers there should be banned if they cannot control their members in their campaign.

Thanks for your input. If we all were to report those zero-valued posts, that would be like taking away over 80% of the discussion volumes. And that's after discounting those "complete garbage" as gibberish or spambots.

Too much unnecessary work to deal with those I guess.

Totally agree. But not just spam busters. Everybody who visits these boards should be more engaged in preventing spam and keeping them clean. Also, bounty managers can be extremely useful here, since most spammers post purely to meet signature campaigns quotas. While I understand that it can sometimes take a lot of time when there are many participants and a lot of posts, but every bounty manager should plan their campaign so that quality control is a part of their process, not just weekly counting of posts. After all, a campaign won't be much of a success if most of its participants and their pots end up on the ignore lists of a large number of forum members, right?

I think the board is serving its purpose well. The board was created for discussing bitcoin and things relating to it and that's exactly what the board is doing. If you notice i don't post much there but that doesn't mean i don't visit the board often infact it's one of my most visited board but all i do is read over there.

No denying there's a huge number of low quality post but guess it's better than the alternative subboard. Mostly when i have something to post that's when I write on the board and it's usually me starting a threads.

For a change I'll suggest the spam busters over there should be a little more strick. More reporting should be encouraged and not just replies but also threads having similar contact. A glance at the board and you can identify two to three thread having similar content. In summary more attention should be given to the board as it's the most vital of all other boards.

I am a newcomer and I will check the Bitcoin discussion board every day. The quality of the posts varies, but there will still be some good posts. Even if the post itself is bad, if it can lead to some discussion, it can also inspire me to some extent.

Here's what I said about Bitcoin Discussion three years ago:


Nothing has changed. More and more senior members either don't post in it or ignore it entirely. 90% of the replies in any thread over about 3 pages are just repeating what has already been said. Trying to have a good discussion is near impossible - you can maybe get 4 or 5 good posts in an actual discussion before the spam starts rolling in and drowns it out.

Locking spam megathreads is one thing, but as I've said elsewhere, it does nothing to address the underlying issue. Given that there are tens of thousands other threads, and anyone can open as many threads as they want, the spam will continue until we either starting actually punishing spammers and their signature campaigns, or we absolutely blitz the section and spammers learn not to post in it anymore, such as you get in Mining or Technical Discussion. The second option will just lead to the spammers spilling over in to other boards, though, since they have to hit their quotas and we don't punish campaigns which pay for such trash posts.

I very rarely visit bitcoin discussion, despite being very interested in bitcoin. The bitcoin discussion sub is very spammy and in my experience, is mostly made up of threads with no substantive discussion. I might propose that threads in bitcoin discussion be moderated in a way that if the thread is not resulting in substantive back and forth discussion, it should be locked (unless the lack of discussion is due to a lack of replies). Based on the OPs report, a version of this may already be implemented.

My idea was sort of like 10 posts that are made in the same day; as to potentially remove the chances of a user getting temporarily muted because 10 of his/her posts that were made a year ago got deleted.

But yea, definitely lots of room for improvement.

My 2 cents .. The quality of the posts in this section has not changed, as all the key thought of each of the threads in this section are revealed in the discussions on the first page. All other messages, mostly spam and a repetition of what has already been said (few people read what was written in front of him).

Consequently:

[1] Or you began to write better, and analyze what you read, which influenced your perception.
[2] Or you yourself have become a frequenter of mega-threads, so against this background it may seem to you that the quality of messages has deteriorated.

I think it's Bitcoin talk and if any -Newbies- without any routine guidance will find Bitcoin broad the absolute pleasurable place, I think their are more -Newbies- I'm Bitcoin section posting than the rightful beginners and help, so with more -Newbies- posting what their knowledge isn't adequate about then the section Bitcoin discussion looks detestable or under-knowledgeable I still don't let it get to me, because I can search even in the midst of -Newbies- like post for some knowledgeable post.

That's the problem--the good stuff is only intermittent, and I'd estimate that there are far more crap threads/posts than there are good ones, and that's the reason I have Bitcoin Discussion on ignore most of the time.  If I have the section un-ignored, my unread threads feed tends to get overwhelmed with BD threads that just suck but are being bumped by shitposters, and finding good threads in sections like Meta and Reputation becomes harder.

I'm not sure what the mods do if you report a post as being of zero-value (which I've done a number of times).  Most of my reports have been marked "good" but that doesn't mean a mod deleted anything.  But if a post is complete garbage, it technically is going against the rules, so reporting them is a good thing to do.  However, once you report a post you think is crap, it all comes down to whether the mod handling the report agrees with you or not, and if anything is done about it.