Interesting to see a (reddit) account seller trying to improve the forum.

I think a lot of your stated problems can be traced back to problems with the trust system, specifically from the way trust is displayed by default (DT). My suspicion is that theymos wants to have DT setup in a way that he avoids being labeled a "publisher" in regards to liability for libel. If theymos tinkers with the DT system too much, or if it is moderated too heavily, the courts might rule he is not merely hosting content, but is "publishing" content. This matters because if someone is labeled a scammer via the DT system when they are not a scammer, they could sue theymos for libel, and would do so because he is easier to find, and has more assets than most people on DT (and in the forum).

No one obviously intentionally gets scammed, but there are improvements that can be made upon the marketplace. For starters, there could be merit/rank/activity requirements in order to either start a thread, to unlock a thread (more than x times), or to create a thread with self moderation. This would at least increase the effort a scammer would need to put into trying to scam.

I don't see signature campaigns going away anytime soon -- they bring in the page views that generate revenue for the forum. Signature campaigns ultimately are market based, and advertisers pay as little as they can to get the best deal for them. I would point out that when someone pays to have their ad displayed, they are paying to have their ad displayed to potentially 20 other ads on the same page.

Except for "Lack of new upgrades" everything you are complaining about can be traced back to the trust system.

Ah, I was under the impression you would only share the private key with theymos.

Theymos (presumably) has paraipan's dox, as I assume it was given to him so theymos could file tax forms in relation to paraipan's payment he would receive for holding the forum's money. Unless you have information to suggest paraipan had multiple IRL identities, or that he faked his death, I am not sure how much value this would be.

theymos also does not appear to be especially interested in playing an active role in recovering the money, perhaps out of fear of violating debt collection (and similar) laws.

One thing the merit system is supposed to do is highlight good posts. If someone asks a question, there are several bad/poor answers/explanations given, and someone with a lot of existing merit gives a correct/good answer, their post may be deserving of merit. 

The OP of a thread can create "local rules" when they create a thread. A local rule must be simple enough so that a moderator responding to a report can quickly tell if a rule was broken or not. The local rules are enforced only if the moderator wishes to, and there are certain types of local rules that will not be enforced, such as "no calling me a scammer" "no saying I am wrong" etc.

Most threads do not get that many pages of replies.

In my experience, most threads that are titled with a question, especially those that can be answered "yes or no" will not have a lot of meaningful discussion. Looking at the other threads you (I assume 0xmiau is you) posted in, I am not especially surprised you didn't receive a response. 
Ahh, that is my bad -- I only assumed this was related to the yobit spammers because that is what most threads are about right now.

I looked more closely at the posts you replied to, and they are especially bad.

My experience with shitposters more closely resembles what happened here by "brewins". I have seen other signature spammers act similarly in that they would ask a series of questions in a marketplace thread for something they had not interest in.

I had always assumed most signature spammers have at least a very basic understanding of bitcoin, but this is perhaps not true (anymore). Ever since I saw this thread, I have suspected some of the bounty hunter spammers are being paid by a third party, and the same forum account may not even be used by the same spammer from day to day. If someone does not even have a basic understanding of bitcoin/crypto currencies, they are not going to be able to engage in a conversation with you -- if they try they will look (more) stupid.

Many exchanges take payments to list certain coins, and while I don't know the specifics of these types of agreements, it is possible one clause in the agreements state that yobit will continue listing the coin for x time, or "forever".

Exchanges have a vested interest in tracking the type of information necessary to determine if two accounts belong to the same person so they can do things like prevent suspicious withdrawals and block hacking attempts.

Yahoo62278 claims to have been contacted by yobit to manage their campaign, however I somewhat suspect most exchanges have more staff than necessary for ongoing operations. This is based on the declining trading volumes on major exchanges, and the ~95%+ decline in trading volumes from the ATH (measured in USD). I would suspect that yobit has someone on their staff with sufficient time and skills to manage their campaign.

Do you know that everyone is getting paid? From what I can tell payments are being made to participants yobit accounts off the blockchain.

The negative trust rule appears to have been implemented after the campaign started. I suspect most of the data is being retrieved via automation so that management can more easily audit payments and track the efficiency of the campaign. They might not be pulling the data from an account that is logged in. Also they will need to write code (and audit code) before they put it into production.

I can also promise you that anyone who trades above certain thresholds, is active/well known in their chatbox (if they have one), or otherwise has generated a lot of revenue for them (perhaps via referrals) is going to be allowed to participate, regardless of any negative trust.

I can assure you that the "shitposters" very much care if someone replies to one of their posts. The reason they care is because if you reply to their posts, they can respond to what you said for another easy/quick post.

I think there may be a couple of reasons you received so few replies:
1 - you posted in fairly large threads in which it is difficult to even a "normal" person to find a response to what you say. These "shitposters" want to spend as little time writing each post as possible, and going back multiple pages to look for a response takes time. I suspect you would get different results if you replied to these users in a smaller thread.
2 - There is a 20 post per day limit as to how many posts each account will be paid for. I don't think many in this campaign will make much more than 20 per day, or even look at the forum from that account once they make 20 posts that day. If you wait a day or two, you may see a couple more responses

What address is the private key to? Can you sign a message from it? I would think that would be harmless.

Are you sure GitHub did not auto "update" all profiles around the time it is showing as being last updated? Are you able to rule out something changing that would not be caused by someone logging into the account? The API response does show it being updated in 2017, but there are no "contributions" in years. I see it lists the email as "null" -- perhaps github removed the email when it got a "bounceback" when his email account was closed due to inactivity (this is of course speculation).

Obviously his private key is somewhere in the public domain. If you cannot post the address, was it the private key he held the forum bitcoin in?

He said he quit [the forum]. Regardless of what his rights are, it appears he will no longer participate here.

He spent money on buying his account, presumably to be able to participate in a signature campaign to earn money, and a newbie account (possiblyprobably the person who sold him the account) nearly immidiately opened a thread claiming the account was hacked. He now can no longer use that account to earn from a signature campaign.

The newbie account said the account was sold for $60 but was never paid, and the person posting from Vesperion says he actually paid $200 for it. IMO the price that Vesperion provided sounds more reasonable considering he can earn a little more than $100/week in the yobit campaign. Neither has provided any kind of signed message, nor evidence a payment for the account was made one way or another.

I am still able to conduct the amount of business I wish to conduct, under the circumstances that are acceptable to me, and as such, I continue to participate. Someone else who is unable to conduct business with their negative trust is not going to continue to participate.

How did you find his private key?

You can create multiple Yobit accounts trivially (I presume), however this does not mean Yobit does not know when you have two accounts. They can look at your IP address, and browser fingerprint (including cookies they leave in your browser) to detect if you have multiple accounts, and the identities of the multiple accounts.

You generally have to know what you are doing to truly appear to only have one account when you have two. Based on the quality of posts being made by several people within the yobit campaign, I am going to assume they don't have the required knowledge to do this.

It is fairly easy for Yobit to detect multi accounts in their campaign because they need to sign up via their yobit account.

Obviously this is all their words and until it is clear these people are not getting paid, it will be difficult to verify.

I would anticipate the negative trust rule will not be enforced if their participants start getting negative trust in masse 

Another person seems to have left the forum because their reputation was ruined for something unrelated to scamming.

Nearly every military conflict during the Cold War was effectively a proxy war between the West and the Communist countries. The Communists were doing the same thing the US was doing (intervening) via the North.

She is taking credit for doing something that will save the world, but the world is not "going to end in 12 years" and what she is proposing is not going to save anything.

I think the above describes AOC pretty well.

I had calculated it from the merit stats page, most generous senders - all time when I wrote that post, and I just recalculated it to ~19.35% from the same page just now (perhaps I made a calculation error when I made my previous post). I don't think the ~1.5% discrepancy changes my point.

This would be less of a concern if the merit system was used solely to decide who gets to rank up.

I agree that implementing the current DT system without merit consideration would not be a step in the right direction, but I also think the DT changes implemented early this year was not a step in the right direction either.

The DT system has never been perfect, but I think every change in how it was implemented has been a step in the wrong direction ever since it was originally implemented. 
There is a lot of data available, but that does not mean this is all the consideration people use, and it does not mean people do not use coercion to get people to chance their inputs to the data, so that the underlying data is changed.

You mentioned that someone with a lot of sockpuppets without the consideration of merit, however that is only the most glaring conflict of interest in which someone can get themselves added to DT. There have been instances in which people have sent trust/merit to close business associates, to people they have traded with many times (and most probably wish to continue trading with), and to their friends, all without anyone batting an eye.

There may be some cases in which it may be appropriate to give merit and/or trust and/or a trust inclusion to people with the above relationships, but if this happens enough, the data does not reflect that a given person has (or doesn't have) judgement valued by many people, or that the person can be reasonably trusted (or cannot be reasonably trusted) with your money -- it is more a reflection of how many of the above types of relationships you have engaged in, particularly with the right people. Further, as you are well aware, many people are confused as to the difference between a trust rating and a trust list, and as such, someone who has traded with many people over time are likely to be reflected as having many trust inclusions.

Also if someone were to speak truth to power, you may see your various scores be negatively affected.

Doing this would be very harmful to the forum. You should let the moderators do their job.

She is a narcissist.

The GND is a fantasy that would crash the US economy, remove its status as a economic and military superpower and do absolutely nothing for the environment or global warming

Out of curiosity, how many accounts are you posting from with their signature?

$30 or $60 an hour is actually pretty good in first world countries. In third world countries, this is enough for a days expenses.

I’ve already started to see posts that clearly don’t know what they are talking about and/or clearly haven’t read much more than the thread title.