I suppose it's something to do with the idea of sitting in your cacks at home while doing it being appealing but it still strikes me as bizarre.
That
is appealing though. I can post on the forum while lying in bed, while watching TV, while stirring a pot of chilli, while sitting in the car waiting for someone I'm picking up, etc.
Your point about the time/effort ratio is obviously spot on, and I earn a lot more from my regular job than I do from renting my signature and avatar, both in terms of absolute earnings and in terms of per unit time, but I can't do my regular job when I've otherwise got 10 or 20 minutes to spare like in my examples above. If it's a choice between killing time browsing Facebook or playing Candy Crush, or learning and discussing on here, I'd still be picking the latter even without a financial incentive.
Yeah, the freedom of being able to do them whenever you want can't be overstated. It's what I like about being a mod as well. There's absolutely no expectation or requirement for you to handle x amount of reports or be online 9-5 or whatever hours are expected of you. If I wake up at 4AM and fancy doing some posts or reports I can do. If I want to spend most of my day doing something else I can do that also. I don't need to get time off to go on holiday and don't need to call in sick. If I want to sleep in or do nothing that day then I can.
Newcomers are mostly being misled by their peers on believing that it's easy to earn here in the forum.
It is easy, though, if you are happy to work for peanuts. You can be accepted to YoBit or altcoin campaigns without even being able to formulate a coherent sentence. You can join bounty campaigns just by spamming Facebook shares and Twitter retweets. Minimal effort and zero brain power needed. Only time.
It's fairly easy for people like us with high-ranking accounts but the earning opportunities for a newbie are not like they used to be. Back in the day anyone could sign up and start posting on campaigns like PrimeDice straight away. Now it is very very difficult to get an account ranked up to a decent member-ship level with earning potential and will take you years to achieve that, and that's not even including the merit requirements which for an average poster are going to be very difficult to achieve.
There's always, always been a weird disconnect with earning and the internet. For some reason people would do some mindless activity they'd refuse in the real world and they'd do it for a tenth of the money too. This isn't in any way unique to crypto either.
Human ignorance never fails to amuse me...
That is appealing though. I can post on the forum while lying in bed, while watching TV, while stirring a pot of chilli, while sitting in the car waiting for someone I'm picking up, etc.
You can be a designer, a programmer and still work remotely from your
bed ( if you are that kind of person
) and earn far greater than what any campaign would you pay you. E.g I can design a logo in 2-3 hours timeframe. I usually charge anywhere between $150-$250 for a standard logo. I could virtually do 1 logo a week and make the same amount as the person in chip mixer campaign. I will have far greater "Free time" than anybody who has to fill the quota of 50 posts a week. People are usually ignorant about how money can be made. I will repeat myself There are far better ways to make "Easy" money then typing comments on an Internet forum...
E.g Programming is essentially "googling" > Stack Overflow > Copy Paste, In a nutshell. These sig spammer/ plagiarisers can make a killing if they can figure out how to code...
But you still need to be skilled in those things. I can't do any sort of designing or programming but it's fairly easy to post about whatever you fancy and all it requires is a bit of time effort and that's why its so appealing to many people. If people could earn decent money elsewhere then they likely would already be doing so, but for many they don't really have a choice or haven't discovered a better alternative yet.