Topic: Why not tag all bounty hunters? (Read 609 times)

There are multiple ways to abuse the power of being on DT.  For example there are those who frivolously red-tag members for petty offenses, and there are those who include every newbie who's ever left them a good review into their trust list.  Both are equally damaging to the reputation and usefulness of the trust system.

Nice to see you're beginning to understand the problem.  You still have a ways to go, but I think you've reached the opinion I had in about 2016.  Maybe in another half a dozen years you'll start to see that you're actually contributing to the problem and begin working to fix the trust system instead of trying to empower those who are actively destroying it in order to maintain some form of control even though their lack of actual interaction trading and working with users makes them unfit to carry such responsibility.

But, tagging them helps bounty managers.

The funny thing is that most of the bounty tokens and coins end up scamming their community. All the bounty managers write a thing on their campaign that "They only handle the campaign, They are not involved with the team." So, If those token companies wipe out everything from the market, Bounty managers are not liable here. Forum members (except a few) catch bounty cheaters and expose them because it's a good source of earning merits. Most of the reporters (except a few) of known alt of anyone is hunting cheaters to earn merit. They left negative feedback on those newbie accounts so that they could get into the DT network (It's already happening and will happen in the future).

Because of the mentioned reason, Timelord was forced to create a self-moderated version for Known alts of anyone. A lot of newbie accounts were started reporting bounty cheaters to earn some easy merits.

So, If tagging those newbies doesn't help the forum, It's still helping some members to earn some merits and get into the DT network.

---

This is the best suggestion I have read from this thread. But, This will also reduce the work of some members and reduce the cycling of merits. Foxpup has to hire more members.

Despite the subjective judgment of the post, you are right on this point. Therefore, the tagging of cheating participants must be more objective. Because no matter how good their posts (including 1line posts), if the poster uses multiple accounts to join the bounty and can be proven, then that's a violation in this perspective. Unless you consider the post quality of cheating participants to be your point of consideration for tagging.

I remember that in the past chipmixer also had nice posters that joined with alts and they were tagged.

1xbit pays all participant with bitcoin and all participant are members who have get some negative tag, did you ignore them. LOL
Also on one or two occasions I've also seen signature campaign managers accept participant who have received negative tags and still keep them in the campaign until now ^{[it's all based on manager's personal policy].}

About tagging all newbie cheats, it might be worth it. It should be an important lesson for every user so that they never cheat on campaign or bounties. But It's useless because this is a free forum where cheaters can easily register dozens of other accounts if the old account has been tagged. Sometimes tagging them is meaningless, but it's still important to do so.

There should be a significant change in the management of the bounty campaign, and if that is possible then I hope there are no more newbies who are 100% here just for the money. In the end I also think that flagging a novice account won't have much impact as it will keep repeating itself without any rule changes or restrictions.

Been asking the same thing before: Should every newbie have a limit in the bounty of social media?

But but..

One can get such good amounts of attaboy points by “busting” lowlife bounty “cheaters” who break the rules of lowlife scammy bounty campaigns with alt accounts! Which is so helpful to the lowlife bounty “managers” who can’t be bothered to do it themselves, probably don’t even care, and are happy to make a buck contributing to spam promoting scams!

It’s such a great method to easily earning a bunch of merits, getting on DT, and getting positive DT trust feedback from the circle of all others doing it, because they are soooo “helpful to the forum”..

How dare anyone claim this to be useless and futile! It makes up like half of DT and the votes for DT!
So important!



Rep has been quite boring for some time now that a certain group have been gone..
More peaceful, but quite boring..
Ahem.. Lauda and gang..

Think I spotted good old nully under a new account lately though, so their may be some hope for entertainment..

Not fruitless at all because it discourage the spammers, it make some to become serious. If they are not tagged, it would be disastrous to this forum because this forum will be more lawless and more full of shit posters.

But bounty hunters are most after money that bounty managers wants to give them, I checked on paying bounty campaign that have a signature campaign paying in altcoin in the bounty section in the past, people that applied for it did not have a single merit in the last 120 days, some just have less than 3 to 5 merits. It was shit posters that were applying, that is how bounties are.

But you are not wrong, some are having many accounts, join single bounties with many accounts, their account got connected and tagged by their bounty manager. This will help reduce spam because the more the accounts bounty hunters are having the more their worthless posts.

The rules by bitcoin signature campaign managers are strictly utilized than bounty managers, bounty managers are less strict. I have seen people with negative trusted that got accepted into bounty campaigns but not signature campaigns, but what is just there is that if a campaign manager tagged someone by itself, it can be more difficult to be accepted into another campaign.

I believe that tagging spammers and bounty cheaters isn't a totally fruitless endeavor. From my perspective, there are a few positives associated with it.
Good bounty managers will avoid associating with such members, which means they'll give honest bounty hunters a better chance of earning fairly. Further, by tagging cheaters, we are tagging not only their bitcointalk profiles but also all their social media profiles, which will eventually make it harder for them to participate in campaigns with new accounts. As a result, some of them may decide it's not worthwhile to continue participating in campaigns with multiple accounts because they risk having all their accounts banned.

OP is actually in hindsight proposing the opposite, which is to ignore them, as long as they stay in their bounty section, as tagging them somewhat reduces the 'value' of the trust system.
I don't completely understand, but very hardly do any of these Bounty hunters ever stop spamming and start posting enough quality stuffs to earn them a good number of merits. But i am pretty sure users who tag bounty hunters would not mind revisiting their trust page to change it to neutral if such user changes and becomes very positive to the forum in the long run.
Quite a lot of these Bounty managers do not even care about negative feedbacks, good reputation or even merits. Many of these projects are run by newbies with no merit or any history of being helpful to the forum, so they do not care.
It doesn't or wouldn't change anything like i have said. By the way, they are already posting spam, and even if they want to trade merits or whatever they would struggle to rank up above Jr Member, or Member, tops. The thing is they stick to the bounty section, and it is all good.

And what business do we have if the hunters were paid for their services but the project turned out to be a complete sham in the end? There are perfect project scams out there that list their tokens/coins and then reveal themselves to be a scam project after 3-5 years. What I'm trying to say is that not every scam bounty is obvious or dumb to plagiarized whitepapers or uses a fake team, and there has been a bounty that has made so many bounty hunters some decent money in the past (I'm too lazy to start naming them here).


We were stuck on the reputation board for ages with Vob vs OGnasty drama, and just when we thought we were about to enjoy decent cases and discussion, boom!! Account connection threads from newbies and witch hunters began to arrive. Will we ever have a decent discussion on the reputation board? No, Is there no solution? No.

This reminds me of the corporate slogan I often hear thrown around; "The 80/20 rule."

The premise is that resolving 20% of the root causes of an issue will often eliminate 80% of the problems with a specific process.  The inverse can also be true; to eliminate the remaining 20% of the problems will require significantly more effort.  An assessment of risk, reward, and value of the time and resources required to resolve the remaining 20% of problems will often show the payback is not worth the investment.

I didn't saw any recent Bitcoin bounty that pays with stakes, maybe because you can't fool members so easy with some fixed future price of bitcoin, like you can do with fantasy tokens.
Some would even say that people participating in Bitcoin bounties are more intelligent than others, but that's a topic for different discussion

By doing only this there is always a danger that landfill will spread and bring more trash to every other part of the forum.
There isn't one universal solution for this problem, so people should do whatever they think it's best, and this is still better than doing nothing.
I am fine with trash being kept just in Altcoin or bounty section, but I think everyone noticed it's spreading to reputation, meta and bitcoin discussion.

If you propose to tag every newbie bounty hunter with "bounty abuse", what do you propose to do if these newbies start to gain merit? Will you remove bounty abuse tag then? Bounty managers wont accept participants with negative tag, but would gladly accept a participant, that gained several merits and is a Jr. Member with clear reputation now. Wont it trigger posting spam, as newbies will try to get this one merit? Followed by merit trade?

But if you only manage to clean up 2% of the dust and leaves in a certain area, there's really no point in even trying. Just give up on the place, and keep the rest of your house decent. That's why I still report the bounty spammers when they shitpost on the tech boards.

Wow. I didn't expect such numbers and I didn't also expect you count them (although I know that you have the data at hand).


I see it different, sorry.
I see it like cleaning the dust in the house, although knowing that more will come in.
I see it like cleaning the leaves, although knowing that, especially in the autumn, there will be the same mess again.
Making your surroundings more pleasant or at least bearable (not necessarily/not only for yourself) is not not really futile.
Should I start a career in poetry or such?


So yes, ignoring can help your mental health, but it can be done only per-user (maybe you can even make yourself a script based on certain "rules"). Reporting keeps the forum bearable. And we already have this. Overall, as I said, most probably nothing will change.

This is how much people differ from normal forum participants. Failure to understand your mistake is tantamount to the inability to have a normal account and participate in signature companies. One honest account would cover twenty alternative cheating accounts.

But these people are stupid and not ready to admit it.

I see LoyceV's annoyance and reason for creating this thread. Just look at the reputation branch. What discussions have there been lately? The account complains that it will not be able to "work" because it received a negative tag. And the section is full of such showdowns. If they were ignored, these accounts would never have made it out of the bounty reporting section.

But I can imagine with horror the picture if we start tagging all the hunters. This will turn into a natural disaster. All of them will come here with a document of their "honesty".

If the hunters are lazy and can't figure out how to keep them from being discovered, the only solution is to block all accounts.

If a person is found with an alt and gets banned from all accounts, then this gives him a chance to start to figure out what the mistake is.

It seems like fighting bots doing mindless tasks. I did a count in my posts archive. Facebook is mentioned 19.8 million times, Twitter 30.9 million times. This probably includes double counting the links, but even without that it's still staggering number considering the forum only has 60 million posts in total and I haven't included posts that were deleted in the first 10 years. And it's even allowed, so although useless, reporting is futile.
(counting the Facebook and Twitter posts took a lot longer than I expected, hence my late reply)

That doesn't sound like me

It always feels like a loophole on the low-quality posts, to spam the same "proof of authentication" posts in many different topics. Or the competely useless Facebook, Twitter and Telegram posts. Years ago, on-forum altcoin giveaways were banned for the exact same reason, and that's why they now use this even more useless system of linking to social media posts. I'm not buying the explanation that spamming Twitter is not a low-effort task.

I disagree. To me, 10 people spamming with 1 account each gives the same result as 1 person spamming with 10 accounts. But the future of most bounty projects is scamming gullible "investors". I'd say it's our business if Bitcointalk is being used to promote scams. They've earned billions from ICO-scams already and are no doubt still earning a lot of money. Meanwhile, we tag people for scams that are a million times smaller.

Eddie13 made some very good points:

The ones that pay in Bitcoin (or anything else with real value) are usually a bit better, but as long as they work with "stakes" instead of a fixed payment per bounty hunter, they still don't benefit from rejecting spammers. The more people join, the more advertising they get for the same money.

I've fallen for it a few times too. Sometimes it's not instantly clear it's a troll or shitposter, and sometimes I just can't help being sarcastic.

So you think the bounty spammers who can't be linked as alts are really different people? That's cute
I think most of them are good at hiding their alts, and only a few get busted.

Theymos posted about this 4 years ago (click for full context):

Forum is concern in dealing with sharing ideas and topic regarding bitcoin and its external and internal processes and uses. I dont think these are priority of forum to clean up such thing regarding bounty.

Some one liner post arent considered spam especially if they have sense. Why would you make a long response right if the answer needs a short one. There is an exception to that. Quota on signature can be counted for constructive one. A short post doesnt mean its not valid at least some manager consider it as long as the sentence is on point.

I have yet to witness these actions; the only ones I can recall that are still ongoing are those involved in the 1xbit signature campaign; perhaps I am misinterpreting something here.

Sometimes business comes first, and the forum's main source of revenue is dependent on its activities, so I understand why the bounties and off-topic sections are still important parts of the forum; the only assistance we can provide is reporting those shitposters and letting the mods deal with them. You can only make the forum more user-friendly; I doubt shitposters and spammers will stop. Twitter and Facebook have been fighting bots for years, but the problem is only getting worse. The fact remains that one in every twelve must be a Judah.

Most of them only know that they were banned, but they never look into why they were banned in the first place, and because they have hundreds of alts, they don't give a fck and just reactivate, use the same address, and get banned again. Then repeat step one.

I understand and you're correct, but do we really need a shitposter and spammer activities in this forum? Why should we protect an useless users instead of make the forum better with less good posters?

---

I have a question: if these newbies already get tagged and doesn't have anything to lose since they can create new accounts, why until now they never learn how to hide and not linked their alt accounts? Because I've expose many new alt accounts that related with the previous busted accounts. I think if they're know why the reason they got red tagged, they will know how to play clean, isn't? but the fact is opposite.

I'm confused here.  Are you talking to me?  Because if you are, I think you believe I don't think tagging bounty cheaters is a good idea--it is.  I'm referring to the mass-tagging of all bounty hunters simply because they participate in bounties.

I was agreeing with your post, so I don't know where the miscommunication is.

I think I've been guilty of this, but generally I don't reply to a shitpost unless it's to blast it for being idiotic or if there's actually something in it that's coherent and I want to respond to.  Everybody's got their own notion of what constitutes a shitpost, but some of them are so generic and cookie-cutter that nobody could reply to them even if they wanted to.  And sweet jeezus, going through a section like Bitcoin Discussion to report crapola posts is maddening.  I've done it, and it takes a toll on you.

I'm not sure I agree with this.  I don't care about bounty spammers in the Alts ANN board, because I rarely read that board.  If ever.  Like suchmoon said, as long as they stick to the bounty section to report their twitface telescam posts, I don't care.  But when they are caught with multiple alts participating in those bounties, that is a form of scamming.  Not only are they scamming the bounty manager, but they're also scamming other members of the forum who miss out on a spot in the bounty (if there's a quota.)  I know, I know, if they're applying for a bounty, they probably don't deserve my sympathy because they are also spamming newbies.  In the end who cares if it's one spammer with 20 alts, or 20 spammers with no alts?  But we were all newbies at one point, and we all had to learn in one way or another.  If the bounty manager stipulates that no alts are to be enrolled, then cheating that bounty should result in a tag.

On the other hand, I understand and share your concern.  There has been a lot of spamming the trust system recently with pointless tags, which concerns me too.  And any tag on a throwaway account is essentially a throwaway tag.  It doesn't help the forum, and reduces the value of red-tags.  I'm not sure what the solution is, but I don't think ignoring them is a good one.

The thing is, no matter the method one user thinks is right in handling the issue, it can't be applied by every single user, if we say 'completely ignore', trust me someone is definitely bringing a new case up in the reputation board sooner than later, it is what it is, and it would be nearly impossible for a general consensus to be reached on the matter. The only thing to do is for users to choose that which they consider most helpful for the forum, for users who feel it is best to ignore, then fine, for those who think tagging is the best option, then they can go ahead and do so, but mind you that tagging them indiscriminately would even be an incorrect use of the trust system, and in the long run could be counter-productive.

The forum should ban them (not just posts, ban the shitposters on sight) though, when they spill over to the rest of the forum. Ignoring sounds good in theory, but it requires compliance from everyone, otherwise it's pointless, and such compliance is never going to happen.

I was going through Bitcoin Discussion and other shitboards a few times and reporting all the shitposts (you know, the one-two paragraph garbage about nothing) and problem is not just shitposters themselves but also presumably smart and rational users - some of them with e.g. ChipMixer signatures if that means anything - responding to those shitposts. This perpetuates and legitimizes all the mundane and dumb shit posted by 0-merit copy-pasta Google Translate drones. Can everyone stop doing that? I don't think so.

I don't particularly care about someone who never leaves the Bounties board, they can all rot there.

ignoring bounty cheats with alt accounts won't get any better either.
my thinking, even though it is very likely that they will create a new account, at least they will think about the risks they will get again if they cheat.
they are marked not to be evicted from the forum. they have to realize what they are doing is wrong. if they come again to the forum, they must do it right.
most of the bounty hunters with 100% posts in the bounty thread don't know the forum rules.

I did not find a solution to this problem. but for now, negative tags help bounty managers (who care) to manage the campaigns they create. as well as bounty hunters who do it honestly.

I would in principle agree with you that red tagging everyone is counterproductive and waste of time, but in some cases it's not a bad idea to write neutral feedback if accounts are connected in some way.
Maybe this feedback should show link to topic with more information and connections other members found, and it will help managers and other members when they investigate their posting history.

I wouldn't put all bounties in one basket, and you should be more specific saying this applies mostly for worthless shitcoin bounties.
There could be bounties that pay in Bitcoins, maybe some puzzle solving, or completing other tasks unrelated to altcoins.
If you want to address issue of altcoin bounties than I think you should talk more with managers who organize them.

You can always ignore them, and I am using that ignore button for many members, but I can say the same thing for any spammers.
Why would you or anyone else engage in conversation with someone who is posting rinse repeated spam questions over and over again?
I asked other members to stop doing that in other sections, but I guess they prefer getting paid for conversing with spammers sometimes.

So, how would you classify a bounty hunter who uses alts to cheat? And taking more than he should? If that isn't an untrustworthy character, I'm not sure what is.

What do you propose we do about bounty cheaters, BTW? Because you believe tagging them isn't doing any good.

Meaning the Bounty manager doesn't trust members who cheat in their campaign, so they deserve red trust.

---

If i consider what @LoyceV said, Neutral is fair to members who cheat in Bounty campaign, but every manager should create a blacklist book for cheaters, archives for the upcoming Bounty campaign, just like @actmyname did.
Unfortunately most managers don't have a blacklist, maybe the reason is not enough time, trust red is easy to see and doesn't take much time.

Not for nothing, but tagging as many bounty hunters as humanly possible was essentially what actmyname (whatever happened to him) and I were doing just prior to the merit system being introduced, as a way to discourage shitposting.  You'll remember at the time that there weren't any effective tools for cleaning up the forum, so the trust system was all we had. 

Theymos has already given his opinion on how negative trust should be handed out, and I don't think he'd approve of gang-tagging bounty hunters indiscriminately.  Granted, I'd be more than happy to join in on such a tagging party, but 1) it goes against the guidance Theymos has given, and 2) as you said, it would probably be ineffective.  It might be a little bit effective, but I seriously doubt it would discourage many of these hardcore bounty participants, and it'd just be a pain in the ass for whoever decided to do the tagging.

Then there's that.  And it all comes down to how the trust system should be used.  You really shouldn't just give negative trust to a bounty hunter simply because that's what they're doing on the forum.  I get that they're spammers (not just on bitcointalk, as you pointed out), but red trust should be reserved for truly untrustworthy members.

Why tag everyone? There are still a few good people who follow the rules; nobody is a criminal until they are caught. If they spam Twitter and Facebook, that's none of our business; it's up to the social media companies to deal with them. Our only concern is keeping the forum clean and making sure no one is using multiple accounts to cheat, and whatever the projects turn out to be in the future is still none of our business.

Ignoring them completely is the same as saying the DT system shouldn't exist; honestly, if tagging and reporting them hadn't been effective, the forum would be in a much worse state than it is now; no system works perfectly, but as far as I know, tagging them has been helpful.

Not all one-liner replies are spam, and not all walls of text are of high quality; there are some questions that deserve a one-liner response, and you just drop and go; writing a wall of text isn't always necessary.

Theymos would never agree to that, because I believe the bounty board is the most active part of the forum (I could be wrong) and contributes more to forum activities.

Since forums are basically more concerned with fighting spammers than scammers, it would make more sense to just flag fraudulent participants from the signature bounty. I often see them littering the forum environment with one-line replies in some of their favorite sections (altcoins), if I'm right it's because they have to meet the post quota of all their accounts.

I don't know the answer to how we can effectively sort that section out. You could probably put ten moderators in there, and they wouldn't be able to sort out all the spam. I'm not sure how I feel about tagging every single bounty hunter, I'm sure there's legitimate cases among them, and it would be unfair to issue a blanket strategy which would effect them. Although, I will admit the vast majority are definitely abusing the system, and don't really offer the forum all that much. 

I've gotten a lot more strict as time passes in moderating my sections, although I must admit the bounty section in particular is a completely different kettle of fish. I'm basically trying to go through the entire section of the ones I moderate, and effectively try, and remove the backlog of spam we've had over the years. Unfortunately, I'm not sure that's even possible with the bounty section since bounty sections aren't really all that effected by the bumping changes theymos introduced, which actually did impact the announcement sections quite some bit. So, there's a ton more work to be done in that section.

I don't think it'll ever get implemented, as it's rather restrictive. However, I'd like to see some restrictions put in place where only x merit or activity can post in the bounty section. That way, you'd reduce the endless alt accounts, unless of course they build up over time.

The thing is with email verification it's easily bypassed. I mean, these users are doing the captcha's required to register/login so they don't mind creating a temporary email. If you're suggesting that we disallow temporary emails, that's a potential privacy concern, which effectively punishes the legitimate users, as well as those that might be malicious. Therefore, I don't think that's the best approach to this.

I agree with you here, even though you may have wanted to say this politically correct. I would say that the biggest blame here comes from bounty managers. They try to have as many participants as possible, but the quality is completely neglected. even ignoring the negative feedback on the profiles.
somewhere in the past (at the time of ICO), there were some mass campaigns that brought in good money and based on that, all managers took over the template. the same thing has been driving for five years, just different names for "projects".

so the question is if you are one of the top groups and start a business, would run a bounty program like these currently running?

I'd say red tag for bounty hunters is important when they're participating an ongoing campaign where the campaign doesn't accept red tagged accounts. For sure it will make their work useless since the manager wouldn't distribute the coin to them.

I have been thinking this for a while, why not all the managers hire all the scam busters to hunt the cheaters on their campaign. It can be a private group on telegram, so the hunters wouldn't know, after the bounty ended, those cheaters wouldn't get a bounty distribution and get red tagged too.

Instead of red tagging all bounty hunters, just remove the bounty section and all DTs wouldn't wasting their time to tag each accounts.

The only reason to discuss them here and tag some is in case the "break out" of newbie / no or almost no good posts and try to become a 'real' user.
If they decide to build one of their alts up a bit to get into a real signature campaign or do something else with it even if it's selling something it puts up a roadblock.
Cheating and multi-accounting in all the bounty crap does not really hurt anyone except the crap bounties. But, tagging them and hopefully getting them banned does keep them from crawling out of their swamp to drag the slime here.

-Dave

There was a suggestion I wanted to bring up but I saw no need to bring it up for people to discuss about it. I have noticed some people are just having alts, create new accounts, spam or having scam attempt, their account can be banned or their attempt scam thread is deleted, later you will see same thing again repeatedly. I was thinking why this forum do not make email mandatory because it will reduce this.

But I later realized that this forum is still good and better after email is not included, the IP evil fee and report to moderator is working and this forum is getting better with that.

Good reporters are tackling the issue of bounty spammers in an appropriate way, if alts are misused, they are tagged. If they are posting shit contents, they are deleted and can lead to warning like a week ban. These are good and I will want it to continue like that.


If they are ignored and nobody to watch what they are doing that would be disastrous. Also we should not be concerned about other social media but just this forum Bitcointalk.

At least their "work" on the forum can be limited by reporting the spam posts. I'm almost sure that they are not happy when they see their posts getting deleted. And we have to keep the forum clean (of course, between the limits on what's possible).
But I agree that too much drama goes on around that kind of accounts. On the other hand, it's not the same about all clickbait topics, no matter how many times the same thing was discussed or how useless it is?
So the reality is (as I see it)
* yes, it's too much drama around those accounts
* people seems to like drama, it gives them a reason to post (also keep in mind that most sig campaigns have a minimum quota, but it's not the only reason)
* it's known that the forum grows even with shitposts, as long as they are under a certain threshold

So yes, you're pretty much correct, but I don't think that anything is going to change.

I've said before that I think tagging Newbies for "bounty abuse" is futile. Accounts with high Activity and 0 Merit have nothing to lose, because they can easily create new accounts. Worse: it makes negative feedback very common instead of reserved for scammers, which leads to more and more people (including bounty/campaign managers) ignoring the warning. So I don't think tagging them makes the forum better.

The bounty scams don't even care about the duplicate accounts: they pay with made-up tokens created out of thin air, designed to make the creator rich. There's no way all of them are unique projects, and I'm pretty sure a couple of teams are behind most of the ICOs, Defi and other useless "disrupting" pump and dump BS that gives crypto such a bad name. They don't care: the more spam, the more they earn!

But if you do insist on tagging bounty spammers for bounty abuse, why not just tag them all? There's no way thouse bounty spammers all have thousands of real followers. All they do is spam Twitter and Facebook, and they exchange followers with other bounty spam accounts. So even if a bounty spammer uses only one account on Bitcointalk, they're still cheating with fake followers on social media!

The way I see this entire "business": there are a few multi-millionaires at the top, and there are a few (maybe hundreds or even thousands) of bounty spammers at the bottom. Together they produce millions of useless posts all over Bitcointalk and social media, hoping to convince more greedy gullible victims to hand over their money. It's a terrible concept and the entire business model is deceitful.

Yes, the topic title was clickbait, but I'm trying to make a point here. If tagging them doesn't work, if the forum doesn't ban their low-quality posts, and if they don't bring anything good at all, can't we just ignore them completely? Don't mention them in Reputation (sorry, I'm guilty too), don't mention them in Scam Accusations, don't look for "alts" as long as they have nothing to lose, don't tag them, but just ignore them completely?

No spam
Self-moderated against spam. Discussion is of course allowed.