Bitcoin Forum

I have been in this forum for 1 year and I've noticed that the main motivation for making high quality posts is the fact that you can get paid out of it. While I'm a strong believer that signature campaigns enrich this forum's quality and that “it keeps it alive”, it is advisable to mention a downside of this procedure and specifically:  The “syndrome” of signature campaigns.

I'll speak out my personal view about this, it may not be true for everyone. Once I read the replies of a thread, I'll ignore most of the users that participate on a low-paying signature campaign, by the thought that they are shit posters. But, that may not be true. I observe a form of prejudice. I'll actually take a closer look to a post made by a high-quality signature campaign participant rather than a newbie.

A user may have thousands of merits, but he/she may create low quality posts. Someone with 4-digits post count and 2-digits merit count would be quickly rejected into your mind, either because he/she may have promoted failed/scam tokens or made shitty posts for pennies. But it's much more different with avatars/signatures. Most of the times, when I scroll a thread I'll skip those replies, without even looking at the merit/post count ratio. It just makes a splash! And that's because along with the avatars/signatures, I will have formed a bad picture of the ones that advertise it.

I wonder if this happens to you too, and if it does, do you hide avatars and signatures to prevent it? This poll may be a great feedback for the campaigns' owners too.

Imo, quality contribution cannot be forced or faked, those who try to do this will run into trouble eventually with the forum rules, and those who do contribute qualitatively have to be genuinely interested in discussions about Bitcoin. Signature campaigns help keep the forum active, but doesn't raise the quality.

No, I do not hide avatars or signatures. The company being advertised and the users profile details could slightly influence how I read a post, but I try to remain as open minded as possible.

You're right about what the "main motivation" for the majority of all posters is. Believe it or not there was actually a time when people used to sign up for the forum just to learn about Bitcoin, and some still do -- i see them in the Development & Tech section. But nowadays it's about getting as much coin for as little effort as possible. People don't think about using the forum to learn more about cryptocurrency, thereby using it to fundamentally better their own lives. They just read a thread title and post away. It's sad because a prosperous future is staring them in the face and they don't even realize it.

In this way the forum is largely over-run by mindless postbots, who may be human but whose function mirrors that of a bot. Occasionally there are some interesting or at least entertaining nuggets here or there.

I would actually disagree with this. Signature campaigns likely do raise the amount of quality posts being posted. Money is a motivating factor for most of the world. I've only ever met a few individuals who aren't motivated by money. We've all probably wanted to get a promotion or a better paid job at some point in our lives, usually to either feed our families, or simply to keep yourself running. Signature campaigns are similar in that they offer an incentive for users to take time with their posts, and actually put in the effort.

Which, to be honest I don't see a particular problem with. If they are taking the time, and making constructive posts, then I don't really care what their motivating factor is. I think we are focusing on the motivation, rather that the actual problem. The actual problem is; there's a number of low quality posts with or without signature campaigns. However, there's a certain demographic which participate in campaigns, which have a low quality threshold, and therefore get paid for spouting low quality posts.

I don't hide signatures and avatars but I do ignore other members if I see them repeat similar low quality posts and this can be members from all campaigns including higher paid.
My observation is there people sometimes fight who will answer first some stupid fake questions and that is not really helping forum in any way, and there are good topics that are dead and inactive.
More shallow and stupid topic are it produces more replies and shitposts, and that is the signature syndrome.

I do not hide signature or avatar
I do not ignor users
I like reading posts of high-paid campaign members
I have lists of some quality-posting users

I report shit posters but gain from good posters.

I have avatars and signatures blocked simply because I can't stand looking at them--and that's true for every forum I've ever been a part of.  They just take up space and are distracting to me.  It isn't because I've formed a prejudice against members of any particular signature campaign.  I've been here long enough that I'm well aware that some of the best posters might participate in some of the lousiest campaigns--and pretty much everyone here has some form of advertising in their sig space or avatar, so I don't hold that against anyone.

Generally I can tell whether a post is a shitpost within the first sentence or two, because they have a very similar "style" so to speak and it's easily detectable if you've read enough posts here. 
Why don't you ignore users?  Man, my ignore list runs a mile long and I could probably add at least 50 new members to it if I were of the mind to do so.  What do you do with your list of "quality-posting users"?  Just curious.

It feels weird wearing a signature and saying this, but sig campaigns definitely contribute to the forum's overall  spam problem. People wouldn't post meaningless nothing here that's already been said a thousand times on a daily basis if they didn't have the financial incentive to do so.

It is easy to spot posters are purely motivated by money because their posts generally suck. If someone can't even pretend to be the least bit interested in contributing something original, yet they post anyway, it can only be because they are being paid for it.

Furthermore, I've witnessed a few genuinely original thinkers / positive contributors join sig campaigns and then watch their posts turn to lifeless dronings because they fear not fitting the mold and being kicked out of their campaign.

The only problem I feel with signature campaigns is “must post xx number of posts in a week”. I wish if this limit was not there. This is the only reason that kills the quality. I haven’t found any campaign which have a soft corner on this and gives a choice to the user if he want to post 1, 10 or 50 posts in a week. But not forcing on certain number of “must have” posts.

We can see this on other social media platforms almost every other YouTube video includes a paid promotion or sponsored content but since the sponsors are not forcing the creators to post x number of videos in week. The quality of videos doesn’t drop significantly.

If we can some how convince the sponsors and campaign manager to don’t force this “x number of posts rules” or at least keep it bare minimum. I believe quality of posts may increase.

Signature campaigns are part of promotions, advertisements of companies in the forum. They together help to bring more traffics for the forum but without them, the forum won't be a dead one. There are times the forum does not have signature and/ or avatar and it still survives so well.

It is your bias and any of us can have too (at somewhat extent).

I disagree if you say the quality of specific posts is decided by the campaigns they are participating in. A user who are in low-paid signature campaign or bounty can still make good or outstanding posts. It can be expanded to ranks, a newbie can make outstanding post as same as or even better than a Legendary member.

Generally, the average quality of post would be different (significantly) between participants of high-paid and low-paid signature campaigns. It would be more accurate if you generalize it from a total sample size of participants.

It is related to posting style. If you spend 2 or 4 years to rank up, with due diligent efforts for your posts, your writing skills should be sharpened and better. Over years, it will become your habit to make good contributions with above-average quality posts. However, you always can make shit posts.

I have the habit of looking at the avatars more than the signatures, and I remember some of the members in that way.

I don't hide anything and I don't ignore anyone's post unless they are trolling continuously, I just let them to be on my ignore list. Money os everything in this world and everyone is trying to get merit because they can join in better paying signature campaign which is really a bad thing in my opinion but in general its accepted by the community as long as it benefits the forum with good quality of posts compared to the past.

50/50.

I think that signature campaign is one of the highlights here in bounty hunting except for those who have great talent in programming that could do something else aside from joining signature bounty.There are still many things to consider whether to look signature bounty positively or negatively.

I had agree in your case OP, there are many high paying signature as I check in the services section and most of the hired members are actually good or quality posters but not all.

Few reasons why members now turning to quality posting rather than shitposting.

First, is that bounty manager wanted to run all projects handled to become successful. These mean that a good bounty manager will hired quality posters by checking member's merits and posting habits. Good bounty manager can identify fake merits earn which are some likely earn it by their alt accounts or some friends supporting them that made immediate rank up even at low activity.

Second, A member itself wanting to earn strive to get some merits by sharing quality, informative posts that will someday help him to get hired in a high paying bounty projects.

Third, that members itself has high intellectual capacity in the field of cryptocurrency or any related activities that help him showcase in his posts.Some are related to their educational attainment that we can even called them an expert. I have seen some concrete presentation from the statitician here showing graph with gathered data and their analysis that could be a reference someday or to someone that might be needing it in the future.

Fourth, members wanting a change in the forum by reporting, busting and help stop fraud activities. These stop other members to do shitposting to avoid getting reported and getting ban temp or permanently.

Well, having a good forum is ideal but we can't take out those fraud members here and they are always coming back even after gets busted. For now, I enjoyed the stay here in the forum and would most likely to enjoy if fraud and  other related activities will be lessen.

The way I look at it:

I personally truly love communicating in forums such as Bitcointalk, and I have no problem doing it all day. But would I do it if I wasn't getting paid? No. Not because money is the main motivation, but simply because I need to cut a lot of my Bitcointalk time into doing other stuff. Just like even though I love gaming so much that I could do it all day, playing DOTA2/CSGO 24/7 won't be able to pay my bills.

I barely notice the signatures, since I’m used to visually skipping them when reading (I’d rather not use the hide feature though). The avatar is noticeable to me if unique to a user, by association over time, but are otherwise of no significance when reading a post.

What may happen is that I pay closer attention to some posts because of who wrote it, and that is probably based on the opinion one makes on the poster through having read a whole bunch of prior posts that I’ve considered interesting.

Woah. I'm here since 2014 and I've never done that!
I do ignore the badly formatted posts, I do ignore the posts that make no sense or they're badly translated, but I don't ignore/skip based on the signature campaign.

You imagine that if I would have done that I wold have ignored most of your posts?
Newer people may have potential. Newer people may do great posts before getting into the best signature campaigns?
An I'm sure you also don't do this 100%. Because that wold mean that you ignore the posts of gmaxwell or achow101  ;)   (sorry guys if I've triggered notification)

I like reporting poor posts, and most or nearly all the reported posts are posts of newbies and poor posters. Also because I do not read all posts during many replies, I focus most on reading the ones that people in high-paying campaigns do post.

A little mistake for not completing that accurately, not a list on a book that I meant, I do not write down usernames. I meant active members on this forum that will be very difficult for me to forget, I have their names off hand, which I like reading their post.

Can't blame the advertisers for setting such criteria. Having paying the participants on a weekly basis, surely they'd want to make the best of their budget. That's how business works.

I find that 25 a week is a sweet spot. Divided by 7 days, that averages to 3.5 a day. Not too demanding if you ask me.

If everyone simply posts like a few times per week, it's unfair for other participants due to the lack of rotation.

Even if signature campaign was a thing 7 years ago, it wasn't the same as it is today. It's much more intense in the last 3 years, it's been seen as a real business. Judging the marketplace section, I can gently concede that the majority of the participants of the low-paying signature campaigns/bounty programs/<anything_else> are lacking on the quality part.

As I said, I'll ignore most of those users, not all of them. I don't understand how these folks are related with the discussion. They aren't participants on any signature campaign last time I checked.

If you search a little bit more, you'll find them.

True, it's an ever growing business. And true, there are a lot of low quality posts, unfortunately.
But my point is that if you do this kind of ignore, you can easily miss out good (or great) posts just because somebody is not yet in a good/top campaign.
I prefer to put on ignore the 100% unrecoverable shitposters, for example, and just go on and read the rest.


My bad. I somehow thought that the classification could put those without signature even lower than those with cheap signatures, by the logic that the worse shitposters may not get accepted even in the most worthless bounties.


However, the overall situation is imho quite complicated and "generalizing" by the signature one wears can give "incorrect results".

I don't put signatures on ignore because I find it to be deceptive to participate in a signature campaign, and at the same time have those signatures on ignore. I don't mind seeing them. I don't have prejudices against participants, based on the signature campaigns they take part in. The campaigns are limited and sometimes you are just late or a decision has to be made between two equally good posters. What I don't like is looking at ads of scams and questionable exchanges like Yobit or HitBTC.

That's exactly how the ChipMixer campaign has been set up. There is no weekly minimum to get paid. You can make 1 post that qualifies for payment, and you will be paid for it. In fact, if you take a look at the spreadsheet for CM, you will notice plenty of users who haven't been active several weeks in a row, but they still remain participants in the campaign. Others post just a few posts per week and ask the manager to hold their payments until they gather something significant to withdraw to their wallets.

I am in this forum since starting of 2017. Never I ignored the signature or avatars. And to be honest I enjoy to see them. (Don't know how many people will agree to me. But I really enjoy it)

To my personal view signature campaign keep the forum active, But it also true that signature campaigns help to increase the spamming here. And this could be prevent atleast a little if the campaign manager make the rules that there is no minimum payment for week. So that people don't feel pressure and make spam.

That's one rare case. Doesn't that just leave the campaign with lots of "dead" members should they decide to become inactive? If I'm a marketer, I would definitely not want to operate on such model because my brand isn't being advertised frequently. Don't mind the rates, but there are times when you'd prefer to spread the message as broad as possible.

In the end, it's up to the owner's discretion.

I have a bit similar syndrome. I tend to pay less attention to posts made by users who participate in non-Bitcoin paying campaigns. Especially if it's made by users who isn't familiar for me. Maybe now it's not that big problem, but few years ago when bounties where bigger thing, reading posts by bounty participants was big waste of time.
And I don't hide signatures and avatars. I wear paid signature myself, so I would be hypocrite if I would do this.
My campaign requires 20 posts a week and I think that 20-25 is optimal number. Bigger requirements would significantly reduce quality of posts I think.
But still, when I have bussy week or I don't find interesting topics to post, sometimes reaching even 20 posts isn't that easy.

I have absolutely no idea which sig campaigns are low paying. I ignore all sigs that appear to be a part of a campaign, as I don't believe that the members use the products, and have no idea of their quality or benefits.

Some forum members still make 100 posts which are on topic and do some contribution to the forum even when their campaign needs 25 posts or less than that so it depends upon the user and how much time they got to spend with the crypto related activities.

25 posts per week is average number for most of the campaigns for very long time, but the pay rate of the campaign actually give an assumption about the quality of posts they are making? Nope for me!

Just for the record, I have both sigs and avatars off.
I know most of the nicknames of the old and the valuable members and it's easier for me that way. Avatars could be confusing sometimes.I was replaying toa post while looking only at the avatar and it turned out that I replay to a another person, because I didn't look at the nickname.

Reading the posts in most of the threads you can easily see who are posting only to fulfill the signature campaign requirements.

That's true some how from business perspective but from user perspective it depends yes 3.5 posts/day does not seem a lot but problem appears when you skip a day or two? Now pressure is on the user to complete 10+ posts in day or you gonna loose the whole week.

Yes many users can keep up with this pace without compromising the quality. But I'm looking at it from my own perspective, I know If I join any such campaign and I skip a day which gonna happen then I won't be able to complete the task with some "shitposts"... or posts just for the sake of completing my post count.


I never knew about those well to be honest I never searched for it, I automatically assumed that no such thing exist but yes now I agree they do exist but once in a blue moon :)


Thank you for highlighting, yes i knew ChipMixer is one of the very few and highly credible signature campaigns and i did not notice that they have relaxed rules on number of posts which indeed is a good sign and without any pressure on the participants. Thank you for sharing

In my experience, I find posts of people who are 'trying' to rank up more spammy than the ones who are participating already.

Most BMs prefer quality posting, so people who participate usually try to make better posts.

Also, I'm impressed with poll, despite most of the bitcointalk detesting signature campaigns they don't disable them.

True that. Ngl if the topics were to cover beyond just Bitcoin and Meta, things would be more interesting. Sadly Off-topic is not counted since that place is spammed to hell.

Serious Discussions and Ivory Tower are meanwhile, another level on their own.


It happened before (myself included), but I'll usually even out over the week. Not too long ago, I saw Hhampuz addressing the issue of members just barely reaching the minimum quota.

In the end, it's the attitude. If one has an extremely busy schedule at work, it's highly advised to not join unless he or she has very good time management because it's quite easy to overlook/ take things for granted.

The association of bad campaigns with spam posts is not necessarily a bad thing.

Take heed of the origin of such notoriety - the likely result of a low-input (economically and functionally) campaign should be prejudiced against considering the lack of oversight. Any newly-minted token/coin campaign requires even less consideration than ones offered in the Services section: with low expectations from the campaign participants, low risk from the managerial side, and an oversaturated market and board, you have chimeras of spam waiting to be created in the alt boards.

YoBit is an another example, serving as an exchange that you would almost certainly never recommend - certainly, if the campaigns were managed with such passivity then one wonders about the quality of the platform itself. There is some truth in price denoting quality: an advertiser that can pass the threshold to launch a larger campaign must certainly have a feasible product, and the capacity to increase the budget should have some relationship with their overall growth.

From the start I didn't hide my signature and avatar because it didn't bother me. Hiding signature and avatar will only make the monitor screen look like a white, colorless and possibly boring screen. Meanwhile, signature and avatar are advertisement that are distributed by various paid campaign participant and these ads will be useful if seen by everyone and that's what the project owner expected.

I also don't ignore users who currently look like users who aren't make quality post because it's still possible that one day they'll change and start posting useful. If indeed their post are not up to standard, reporting it to the moderator is the expected solution. I'm just going to ignore the trolls and those who don't want to change and keep publishing junk post all the time. This is just my perspective, and I've read that some of us have different points of view.

I bet you that those signatures do get clicked on, though I have no idea at what rate.  Somehow it's hard to imagine signature campaigns going on this long if there was no benefit to the businesses that ran them.  You'd think that if they were ineffective, that information would quickly be discovered and there wouldn't be so many of them over such a long period of time.  Doesn't that make sense?  And people come here because they're interested in crypto.  These signature advertisements probably don't look like the typical spam advertisements that you see all over the internet--they're specifically targeted toward the very people who would visit a forum like this, so my guess is that a lot of members (especially newbies) do click on them.  Whether that translates into revenue for the underlying business I've no idea.

Good to see you're still around, Jet Cash!  I rarely see you posting anymore.

The results do vary. While I didn't create an account for the campaigns I join, there was one casino (exception) which had like over 30 members that joined. However most of them were dead and only played with the free credits. Only had a handful of Satoshis and the screenshot below was just taken.

https://i.ibb.co/27VZ4Zw/7cas.png

Most of the time, traffic quality is somewhat below average unless the casino has lots of engaging promotions or you advertise in a more niche market, like a gambling forum.

Why that? You're advertising a product to other viewers. You're not obliged to be constantly advertised about that product.

Those signatures help A LOT with the search engine optimization (SEO). If your website is linked from another website, it'll increase its SEO performance. The more traffic (higher SEO) the site that links you has, the better it is for your business. Now imagine how good would it be if you'd be linked thousands of times on a place that is ranked #6,787 in global internet engagement. By wearing your signature you have to understand that besides those that will notice it, you're automatically bringing more clients/people to the product outside of bitcointalk.

I believe that's the main motivation of the long-term signature campaigns here. The others are most probably following your thought.

Signature bearers post > Non-Signature bearer posts
I think the signature campaign has done more good to the forum in terms of post quality than bad, I work in the gambling sub-board and I can boldly say 89% of users representing a brand are quality posters, most of the users on my ignore lists are mostly Newbies and Non-Signatures users who spam every post with two liners replies mostly off-topic. ^{Shit posters cannot represent a brand anyway.}

It is human nature that they need any kind of motivation to do some job. What is better motivation then money. So if someone is getting paid for creating quality posts and giving their opinion on matters, what's wrong with that?
Yes like any other things, signature campaigns too have cons but the pros out weigh them.
This forum has seen tremendous growth over the years and signature campaigns is also one of the reasons for it.

That entirely depends on your perspective, as I know a lot of older users would prefer the atmosphere back when there was a smaller, more tightly knitted group of users. So, doing more good isn't exactly a good measure, as what I might think is good for the  forum, you might think otherwise. Although, undoubtedly signature campaigns have helped with the growth of the user database, and has likely contributed to the amount of activity here.

I actually quite like we have a sort of sub economy here, even if that is advertising. Something which users usually want to get away from. Although, the difference is I actually do want to see Bitcoin services being advertised, as they are usually better than their centralized fiat alternatives.

In a perfect world, but some of the campaigns or bounties look like they actually actively target those that are low quality, so they can pay them peanuts, while also getting their brand out there through sheer volume.

i have sigs turned off forum wide. in fact most all forums im on i disable sigs as they just waste space and most of the time are actually annoying wit those ridiculous colors and fonts etc.

avatars are still on for now as theyre an easy way to find a particulars persons post when scrolling. but any animated avatar get the user ignored instantly.

if i want moving content in my monitor ill turn on the telly. when i read i want static images and sensible fonts etc.

45 posts a week is ridiculous and the signature bearer of this campaign are spamming on every posts on the forum to meet up the weekly posts counts.


I think bounties signature bearer are the ones making every other quality posters representing a brand looks like spammers, and the only solution lies in the hands of the managers and the moderators, the forum should have standard rules when it comes to weekly posts quota.

I have that same kind of attitude right now specially with 4 digits postings with 2 digit merits. I have been reading in the forum for the last 2 years and im skipping those newbies post without even scanning what they have to say. However, signature camps are making one member to be motivated enough to make good and quality posts.

Let's be honest, the majority of us here are in the forum because we want to make money, the main attraction is the signature campaign. Shit posters are everywhere, one can be a shitposter even a person not knowing he is, like they said, "beauty is in the eye of the beholder", I'm just citing an example though.

Being paid to post is really a motivation, I knew a lot of good posters who joined a high-paying signature campaign, but when they got removed, they lose their interest in posting in the forum, or they are less active.

Websites advertised in the signatures actually do not get better SEO rankings because theymos put the rel=nofollow tag in the Signature html box (in other words - this linked page should not be crawled by Google and so it has no effect on its ranking).

I remember reading a post by someone a long time ago who talked about the benefits of signature campaigns. He was advertising a company and had a referral link in his sig. After a while, he checked his stats and noticed only 1 or 2 clicks. Campaign-wide, it wasn't any better with the other participants. But the campaign still kept going.

Naturally, he started wondering how can that be beneficial to the company if they aren't getting any clicks? I don't remember exactly if someone told him or he came to the conclusion himself. But even though, many people don't click on the signatures, they remember them. Somewhere back in their mind, they'll memorize it. The next time they want to gamble (since that is the most advertised service here), they'll ask themselves what was the name of that casino I saw in that colorful signature on Bicointalk? And boom, they remember it and navigate to the site. That's one way that a signature can result in more traffic without actually increasing the clicks count.

I don't see the no-follow tag you are talking about. I'm not sure if the UGC (user-generated content) tag transfers link juice or not, but at least it's not no-follow :)

https://i.imgur.com/nTEeydH.png

More than 100k ^{(I manually checked 3-4 of them and they were do-follow, ahrefs says 60% of these 110k are do-follow and the rest are no-follow}) from around 150k overall backlinks that ChipMixer.com has are from Bitcointalk.

They actually do not care about that as long as they do not compete for their SERPs (but honestly they should, there are very valuable keywords out there like "crypto mixer", "bitcoin mixer", "best bitcoin mixer", etc. that are taken by some low authority sites. If ChipMixer had some more content (and a few hundred keyword anchor backlinks) or maybe a blog on their site, they could have easily ranked 1 by these keywords because of these 110k backlinks from Bttalk).

I am late here. However, I don't hide the signature of the forum. My personal view is, companies paying us for wearing signature, means they expecting few impressions from the forum where real crypto users engaging crypto-related discussions. So, if I hide signature mean other campaign's signature banner will not show to me and they wouldn't get impressions from me. But I am wearing one and I am expecting impressions as well. It's kind of selfish IMO.

During reading posts, it doesn't matter the poster wearing a high-paying campaign or low paying campaign. Low paying campaign always doesn't mean simply there is all spammer. Although I admit most of the spammer, but not at all. Their opinions would be valuable for the community. Once I feel this is a spam reply, then I just simply skip to the next reply. During reading a line enough to determine either post is good or spam. To be honest and a major part of signature participants do not read all the replies. I am not excluding myself, sometimes we reply based on the main post.

Taken as a don't bite the hand that feeds strategy perhaps. An economy of services requires multiple parties for an exchange, after all.

Though considering the number of guest users is a magnitude higher than that of the logged-in users and that you can expect a large chunk of the latter to be the sig-spam type, unless you are a prospective whale client, the impact of you hiding signatures is equivalent to simply skimming over the ad as most are apt to do. I'm sure you don't notice half of the signatures when you are reading through a thread: it should be analogous to forgetting passing faces on the street.

It is like a mood booster or motivation. That's also a reason to maintain the quality of our post. On some signature campaigns, you may be removed if your posts cannot fulfill the requirements or not quality enough. There are a lot of members who can replace you if you cannot maintain your quality posts. So, this becomes one of the reasons for you to always keep post quality. I think it is a good side impact for signature campaign participants.

I wasn't aware you could check on how many clicks you've had on your signature--not that I'd really check, because it doesn't really concern me.  I don't know what campaign that guy you were referring to was in, but I suppose some of them just don't generate a lot of clicks, whether that's because the project has a bad reputation or doesn't have an attractive banner or whatever.

I can't imagine sig campaigns are completely useless for the project/company that runs them, else they wouldn't do it, especially not the longer-running ones like Chipmixer, 777Coin, and Yobit and secondstrade some years ago.  If they're run by people with some actual business sense, they'd be analyzing how much revenue their advertising brings in and whether it's worth it to run a signature campaign.

That's a bad mentality, sorry don't mean to be personal but you cannot judge someone based on their signature and its payment.

I judge people based on what they post and then I see their signature (sometimes, not always) so I don't know how you judge before reading. But I can't blame you either because most of the low-paying campaigns are hiring shit posters.

You may read English and posting manner here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5338161.msg57033865#msg57033865

The guy represents ChipMixer, one of the highest paying campaigns and he doesn't even write in English that one would classify as a secondary language, let alone native.

NOTE: Make no mistake, I never judge people based on English because it's a language not the measure of one's ability. But to put things into perspective, not everyone from a top signature campaign represents quality.

Either he could have used some tracking parameter with the URL or a shortlink that leads to the same URL.

Results might vary though. When I joined 777campaign, my account accrued over 30 referrals, albeit dead ones. On the flipside, this campaign (Rollbit) I joined netted me zero referrals.

I feel that most advertisers are missing potential customers by not paying their earnings to their on-site accounts (rather just the BTC to any specified address). Plus the fact that the participants might have their preferred sites/ casinos to play on makes them less feasible in the long run, I somewhat agree sig campaigns tend to have lower CTR.

Thanks for this example.
I’ve actually always been interested in how effective these signature campaigns really are and how much they really help those companies that advertise in such way.
Personally, I don't remember ever clicking on a link in a signature campaign and I believe that most other members on this forum also don't click directly on those links in the signature.
Since all of these companies still pay members of the signature campaign and also have some costs they obviously benefit from such advertising otherwise they would not do it.
Your explanation makes sense to me, although I'm not sure if this kind of advertising is really the best.
Wouldn't it be better to give bonuses to members who bring their friends or to advertise on social networks and in telegram groups?
I think most members on this forum understand campaign signatures as business and don’t really care at all what they advertise in their signature, or what is advertised in other signatures.  ;D
If nothing else, thanks to the signature campaigns we have more activity on the forum, which does not necessarily mean that we got a higher quality  :D
I agree with the OP in that.

Yeah, those sites have referral links which players could promote and earn commissions from their invitees.

I don't hide signatures. I've definitely been influenced by signatures here on the forum in the past, and I'm sure that's true for everyone that doesn't hide them. Being influenced even by a advertisement isn't always a bad thing. I've discovered some quite cool projects over time, and I'm sure there's been instances that people have found services that appeal for them, well its a given really.

Depends on the type of participants that they had as a data set. However, a referral link isn't a catch all. Advertising doesn't always work for direct links, however getting the product in the mind of a potential customer is what you want to do. I tend to be quite good at blocking out advertisements on TV etc, but I've even noticed that Sponsored videos on Youtube, while I haven't used the infulencers direct coupon code, they got the product in my mind, and when I needed something like that, it was that company I thought of.

So, there's direct advertising, and indirect. We know advertising works, because I bet the majority of this forum are aware of the companies that regularly advertise through signature campaigns. In fact, the very lure of getting paid to post, is an advertisement, because it creates brand loyalty. If x company pays you to post, and you use them, you're more likely to actually use their service over a competitors.

Therefore, even if you don't get direct referral link clicks, the advertisement itself is still working. I've even had messages asking me about the advertisement in my signature in the past. So, people are definitely noticing them even if they aren't clicking them directly. We have to remember as well, not everyone will know that the links are clickable.

This might just be because none of them interest you. We know advertisements work, since TradeFortress built their entire online wallet out of the advertisements. It become widely used, and I would assume that this was majority built on his signature campaign they were running at the time.

I've not clicked on many, but I have. Especially, more personal projects. I'm visited quite a few personal websites of users here. A few years ago, it was more common to use the signature for either personal projects or personal interests. For example, I used to have a Slackware link, because at the time I was tinkering around with it, and enjoying it.

So, for a advertisement to work it needs to hit the right audience, and the number of clicks a referral link gets doesn't necessarily indicate how good the advertisement is working. Its an indication, but because most people would likely digest that advertisement subconsciously or indirectly look it up, then it only catches a few, and isn't a catch all.

We know advertisements work. Edward Bernays taught us that the human mind is very susceptible to information, even if its completely wrong propaganda. If anyone hasn't read his book, I recommend it to get some insight on how governments control its people. However, going back to if advertisements work; they work very similarly to propaganda, and both are used to influence the population. Just think of it, anywhere you go on the internet, real life, or just anywhere you will see probably 100s of advertisements a day. You might not register all of them consciously, but you've seen them subconsciously. So, the next time you want something related to that advertisement, you'll remember it.

There isn't an argument to be found when arguing against the effectiveness of advertisements. We know advertisements work, in fact we are now more aware they work, since our platforms like TV, and even Youtube are becoming more, and more advertisement friendly. Youtubers have found out that, they can earn more money, and companies can earn more money by putting a sponsored video by the infulencer inside the actual video, instead of via Youtube ad breaks, because its more personalized, and the followers of that person are more likely to take note of the advertisement. This is the same for this forum, if you particularly like someone or someone's content on here, you are probably more likely to be interested in what they are advertising.

Take theymos talking about Grin coin, now he was very cautious about clearly defining that he doesn't necessarily recommend investing into Grin coin, but was more excited by the technology behind it, while clearly defining his opinion on the rather big short comings. However, take a look at how many people rushed to the announcement thread once Grin coin was officially accepted on Bitcointalk for Copper membership. Now, most of them would have likely never heard of it or at least it would have taken years for them to even take a whiff of the name GrinCoin. However, that announcement thread was flooded with all kinds of users, even those that probably don't even visit the altcoin section.

Just to be clear, I don't think theymos was advertising GrinCoin (at least not directly), but you can see the impact that someone who is maybe looked up too, can have on others. So, advertisements in signatures work in the same way.

Bitcointalk has many members who participated in the low paying signature at the beginning of their journey and later got a chance in the high paying signature campaign. If he/she participates in a high paying signature in the future, he/she must have posted good quality posts from the beginning.

So if someone participates in a low paying signature, it does not mean that the member does not have the ability to post good quality posts. So if someone is in a low paying signature campaign and writes good quality posts, then there is no point in ignoring him/her. But everyone has their own way of thinking, so everyone can share their personal opinions. You share your opinion, but it's not always right.

In fact, it’s hard to expect newbie members to write quality posts on this forum from the very beginning.
Newbie members usually do not have enough knowledge and experience to be able to write such quality posts, which can help other members.
Therefore, I advise new members not to write much on the forum at the beginning, but to read other posts more, get informed and learn.
Over time, they will gain the necessary experience and knowledge to be able to write better and to benefit from it through signature campaigns.
Clearly many members can’t or don’t want to wait and they join in signature campaigns that are lower paid initially, and that’s ok, they have to start somewhere.
I always give such members a chance, even if they do not write well on the forum in the beginning.
I believe that everyone deserves their chance and to prove themselves as good members of this forum, those who contribute to the forum.

Damnn, I've been registered for a short time, but long-time reader and I really noticed often times, that e.g. someone needs help and even though the question has been answered or issue resolved, people with often very low knowledge base and very low effort try to 'help', sometimes even spreading false information. I didn't understand why they'd do that - especially seeing that many have tons of posts and activity, yet no clue about Bitcoin. Now I understand, since they all have some casino signature or similar....

I'm wondering when I see these very low-effort, low-quality, clueless 'helping' replies, if it's correct to report them to clean the threads a little? Because they're technically not 'abusive or wrongly posted messages'.

And it gets worse. If someone actually wants to help the OP, he'll choose not to, because the thread will have filled with tons of meaningless posts and his post won't be even read by the OP. The OP will have already ignored his own thread, due to this meaninglessness that will prevail. And still, while no one wants these people, there're managers who'll pay them for doin' it.

I've proposed (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5355808.msg57750420#msg57750420) a solution, but it doesn't seem to be liked from both the users' and the admins' side.

Read my proposal.

That's funny--I was in the same position back in 2014 when I was lurking and just starting to get interested in bitcoin.  I was reading all of these really crappy posts by members who obviously couldn't write English very well, and they were basically just writing garbage posts anyway.  I had no idea what a signature campaign was or what would motivate someone to write those kinds of posts.  Only after I registered and started to get a feel for the forum did I become familiar with the reasons behind the plague of shitposting.

Also, it's great that you lurked before becoming a member.  Not many people do that anymore; they just come here to participate in campaigns or bounties and their contributions are usually net negative to the forum overall.

I don't know about that, because I've started a few threads in which I was asking for help or information, and while there were inevitably crap posts made, I did usually get my answers.  One thing members can do is create self-moderated threads to eliminate nonsense replies (though some members don't like them and will choose not to post in self-modded threads).

I believe this prejudice cuts across. I do that too, though I get disappointed on a few occasions where participants of reputable campaigns don't live up to expectations by the standard of posts they make. It's worse for me once a poster is promoting a fraudulent enterprise, I don't bother to read them even if they were once people I read and enjoyed their posts. I don't read comments because those who wrote them have enough merits. No, that will be getting deceived because I know giving merit is subjective and doesn't in most cases reveal in truth the quality of post(s). Besides, having enough merit could even come from merit trading.

Funny indeed, seems I experienced the exact same thing as you did, right now :) I'm actually honestly wondering how those people even know about the signature campaigns and just sign up for those and not for the forum itself. Since I knew nothing about those so far until after becoming member (like you).

I'll keep this feature in mind! If I understood correctly, in a self-moderated thread I can delete any reply, correct?

That's correct. You have the power to remove anything you please ;)

By all means you can report posts you deem to be low quality and low effort, they contribute to spam which makes may boards on the form virtually unreadable.
Do not however be bothered much if no action is taken as the mods would not always agree with your reply, this shouldn't bother you much though.

Alright, I will then do that when I come across very bad occurences of this issue. Wasn't sure since it's usually not an abusive or wrongly posted message - they 'attempt' to reply something that vaguely fits the topic and in 'benefit of the doubt' scenario, they could argue they legitimately wanted to help (even though they lack the knowledge etc).

I was also a little worried since I once already reported a scam spammer and it now says '100% report accuracy', but I'm not sure if it's bad to have a low accuracy or not.

On the report page, you will see the message: Do not worry about your accuracy too much; one accurate report is worth many inaccurate reports..
There's no benefit in having a high accuracy, what matters is making the effort to keep the community clean. However, a good knowledge of the forum rules woukd help, as it allows one report more accurately (saving their time and the mods'), but when in doubt even after reading the rules, report and let the mods decide.

As it's explained in that report window, "Do not worry about your accuracy too much; one accurate report is worth many inaccurate reports." It's only natural though to want to have report accuracy as high as possible (preferably 100%) but you have to be really unreasonable when reporting to get that percentage low as mods will delete low value/redundant posts and topic more often than not. So feel free to report what you think is shitpost and it will probably be deleted. Few percentage lower accuracy is worth removing the crap. And if you really want to build up %, head over to altcoin section and pick one of the threads that are using shilling services.

I had 100% for a very long time, and then once I went into bad streak (combination of bad admin judgment :D and series of multiple reports during one reporting session which can count as bad) and it went down couple of %.

edit:Upgrade00 beat me to it.

I've observed that there's two sides of the argument here. Either, users here preemptively assume signature campaigners are posting just because they earn, when that isn't true for all cases. Besides, I've said this numerous times, I don't personally care their motive for posting, as long as it's of decent quality.

Unless, you're abusing the report feature your accuracy should never be the difference of you reporting the post or not. We appreciate all reports, it gives us something to do, and in the majority of the cases the report is handled good. Honestly, the majority of users are pretty accurate at reporting, however it's not a big deal if you get a few bad reports. I have over 200 bad reports for instance.

I partly wish the percentage was removed, and only good, and bad reports were displayed. Sure, users could still work out their percentage manually, but if it's not right there in front of them they'll likely not care as much.

My reporting accuracy rate so far doesn't seem very good at only 96% but that's not a big deal as I've gone to great lengths to report spam for removal based on my observation and ratings. Maybe we have some users whose reporting accuracy is up to 100% here and it seems they can report hundreds to thousands of posts for deletion every month. I'd like to get some tips on how to improve report accuracy for the better. Anyone willing to help, I really appreciate it.

I found a good reason from your post, it save moderators time to follow up on reports which is why accuracy is needed. I don't want to report posts that I shouldn't report blindly without regard for accuracy even though in fact in the same thread I can find a lot of spammers.

96% is very good. Also, remember that percentage isn't a great indicator. If you've reported 1000s of posts then 96% is fantastic. If you've only reported <100 posts then the percentage is rather meaningless. What I'm trying to say is the percentage can be influenced more when you haven't reported a lot of posts. By the time that you've got into the habit of reporting a lot of posts then you would have already likely learned what is suitable, and not suitable to report.

If you ever have any questions regarding improving reporting you can always message me, and I'll try to explain to the best of my ability. You can also check out my guide where I went into reporting in a little more depth. Though, I've been meaning to add a few things to that, and generally clean it up a bit. 

Thanks for this offer Welsh, I will do it soon. Because I wanted to increase the intensity of the report, I should have learned some good tips and tricks based on the experiences of many other users here. Actually I'm almost 1/3 out of 1000 if all reports are handled. Still a very small amount, but better than nothing. LOL