The forum is now lucrative, even users make money here.
It's been lucrative for years now, but it's become much harder for members to max out their earnings through sig campaigns, since payment increases with rank, and it's now much harder for people to get to even the Sr. Member rank. They're not the ones doing most of the very loud and annoying complaining, however.
The biggest bitchers are the ones who want to get onto DT so bad that all of their ramblings taken together could make a book the size of War and Peace. All of that is based on jealousy, power lust, and good ol' meanspirited hatred of what they perceive as authority. And meanwhile they do nothing that actually helps the forum.
But OP, I don't think any of the complainers don't like the forum. If that was the case, they'd just leave. I think they do appreciate that it's a fantastic place and are probably grateful it exists, but they're unhappy that they're not included on DT and/or aren't earning enough merits. There's always been grumblings about that stuff, but lately it's become so pervasive that it distracts people from reading decent threads that aren't about DT corruption, complaints against individual members, the merit system, and whatever else. But don't worry. These idiots will burn themselves out eventually or get banned for trolling or some other offense.
Apart from the issue with ranking, there isn't as many companies which do forum campaigns as it used to be anymore. Most of them are are either paying too low or the requirements are too high. Even though ICO's are pretty much dead, there are still too many ICO campaigners spamming the forum and their forum rank are usually newbie or member.
The BTC adoption isn't growing fast enough. After all those years there are barely a few companies which use this forum for advertising.
Even the popularity of the forum is going down.
https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/bitcointalk.orgLook at this one, down down and down.
Even when bitcoin goes up in price, the popularity of the forum still goes down. This is alarming. Crypto companies aren't seeing this forum as a legit place for their advertisements anymore and the ones which does are here to spam their scam projects.
The merit system on the other hand was a necessity. The spam was getting out of hand. It didn't stop it completely but still slowed it down.
This is not a Job forum, its a crypto discussion forum, so if the campaigns are not paying much BTC that's not something to be concerned. I think there are enough BTC campaigns at the moment and all the ICO bounties are run through this forum which is also a healthy sign.
Yes, the number of Spammers are reduced and so the traffic to the forum may be on a low numbers but do Alexa ranking is based only on the basis of traffic and no. of hits on the site ?
