Topic: Why is Meta growing fast but serious discussion and ivory tower dead? - page 2. (Read 641 times)

META board is concerned with all forum related information, including inquiry, appeal, suggestions, complaint, and as such it directly concerns every member.
And rightly recieves most attention, the fact that it allows signatures and merits are giving out lots here is also a bonus.

Serious discussion hasn't caught up like I guess it was built to. Maybe cause the daily drama is all too alluring. And both rank limited boards doesn't allow any form of banter.

Neither is Ivory Tower or Serious Discussion. People are mostly discussing ways to better the forum, which obviously belongs in Meta. Discussion about that doesn't really belong in either of those two aforementioned boards. As others have mentioned, the fact that you can get paid to post in Meta is also another factor.

Older posters?  I think they've been the ones who've been posting the most in Meta for a long time now.  It's the newbies who've started posting here recently, and they're the ones who are doing so, probably to earn merit.

As for myself, I've always been interested in the drama and politics of bitcointalk (and of bitcoin in general), which is why I joined bitcointalk in the first place--in addition to the fact that there's very little censorship here in terms of language and ideas.  Many other forums have rules about what you can talk about and how you can express yourself, but bitcointalk is relatively free.  I'm aware of the profanity rule, but it doesn't get enforced (and should get repealed IMO).

Sometimes I post in IT or SD, but a lot of those threads don't interest me, or like suchmoon:
As I've said many times before, there are some brilliant people on bitcointalk who understand crypto, math, and other tech subjects at a level that I'm in awe of.  My contribution would be on the level of a bounty shitposter if I tried to comment in some of those threads.  I do have some economics education, and it's enough for me to make informed comments on some threads, but the Economics section is where I see most of the topics I'm interested in.

Plus, IT and SD are like P&S and Off-Topic for senior members, and I'm not into politics or discussing in most of that sort of stuff.

Following reasons:

1) Members with in-depth knowledge are less in number and thus they post less in serious discussion.

2) Meta is popular because it is an easy way to get merits for some.

I agree that Ivory tower is far to calm. However Serious Discussion has the right frequency of interesting stuff, mixed with some topics that are nice to read on a bear market. I cannot always make an intelligent comment, so I just remain silent and look stupid instead of saying something and confirming it.

I think a lot of people here are also interested in what is happening to the forum itself that is why they are interested in the meta board. I myself is entertained on how newbies are creating threads trying to recover their banned accounts and how other members complain that they got demoted back to newbie ranks and how merit destroyed their life. What JetCash said is true and many members especially the lower ranking ones are trying to make witty poss in the meta section in order to gain some merits which is somehow working for them.

Not only signatures were responsible for this because there are other concerns also that has to be published here. I have followed in this section and you can see most of the open topics were ban appeals and merit discussions threads. Others are doing statistics in the forum that were relevant also for the reference in the update of the forum. This section has wider range for topics to be discussed and that includes the technicals in the forum, forum guidelines and the direct source for admins new change and implementation of a system.

It does not conveys that this growing section is an indicator of something bad for the forum. I do believe that a user could learn so much here. So, in my opinion this is a good indicator that a growing numbers of users in this section will be a help especially to the admins to relay directly things that admin wants to happen. If users will not come to visit here then they will not know the probable mistakes they were doing and will just continue to do it in other sections especially in the SMT. So, for me growing fast in this section is not a problem unless we can sense that most of the replies of the user are just for spamming.

Yes it all comes down to merit and signatures. I can’t say much interesting has gone on around here recently either that’s worth writing about...

At least one of my threads have also started to go on walkies from serious discussion more recently too which is quite funny to think about .

I personally believe off topic should be trashed and we should get a new off topic that is signatureless like serious discussion and ivory tower. Those can then be sub boards of the new off topic board. There is a lack of adoption with serious discussion and Ivory tower which is a shame, because I would like to post there but then I’d end up in jet cash’s position where og claimed he was fishing for merits rather than doing anything productive in there which is a bit off.

TBH I feel quite intimidated by some of the stuff out there

I feel I'm much better off just quietly reading it rather than publicly showing off my stupidity by trying to comment on it.

Agree with Jet Cash. Merit and signature is responsible for that.

Probably because you can display signatures, and you have more chance of gaining merits.

Why have most of the older posters I recognise retreated here to meta and not moved to the ivory tower of serious discussion after being driven from the main discussion boards?

Discussing how the board works is not generally why people visit forums is it?