Thoughts about the Merit System, from an "angry" Sr. Member - Giving mine away

[Bolt Brownie]

Personally for the second part, I think all of the sales of accounts and the campaign garbage should be banned. I see it about the same as a bum picking change up off the sidewalk. They are actively harming the user experience to make a few pennies. Instead of solving the problem, they make these complicated workarounds when you can just ban the people doing it in the first place.

I understand where you are going, but although banning campaigns could solve the problem regarding spam, because the only reason people spam and farm/sell accounts, is due to the profit that comes from campaigns. But there is nothing wrong in using part of the forum for advertising, and I think completely removing that feature would actually harm the forum and even the crypto ecosystem.

There are some good projects being advertised here, and I actually invested in some of them after I got to know them through this forum. That is a good thing, and there is no need for drastic measures.

I think that if there is a way to allow "adds" on this forum, and at the same time allow users to have good discussions without having to navigate through tons of spam, we should try it. I think mods are doing a good job here. We already have the serious discussion thread, where adds are "banned", so no reason to make it as a default "set up" for the hole forum.

As I said in this thread, I came to the forum to participate in a betting competition. How "off topic" can that be? The only relation to bitcoin was that the prizes were paid in bitcoin. I then started using sigs to try to make some bucks, that are quite important for me, but I've also learned a lot about bitcoin and crypto. So it could be said that I came for the "wrong reasons", but it ended up opening a lot of doors to me, in terms of acquiring crypto knowledge. I think that everything can be achieved in this forum, and things are getting better, and the merit system is a step in the right direction.

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[leowonderful]

Personally for the second part, I think all of the sales of accounts and the campaign garbage should be banned. I see it about the same as a bum picking change up off the sidewalk. They are actively harming the user experience to make a few pennies. Instead of solving the problem, they make these complicated workarounds when you can just ban the people doing it in the first place.

I understand where you are going, but although banning campaigns could solve the problem regarding spam, because the only reason people spam and farm/sell accounts, is due to the profit that comes from campaigns. But there is nothing wrong in using part of the forum for advertising, and I think completely removing that feature would actually harm the forum and even the crypto ecosystem.

There are some good projects being advertised here, and I actually invested in some of them after I got to know them through this forum. That is a good thing, and there is no need for drastic measures.

I think that if there is a way to allow "adds" on this forum, and at the same time allow users to have good discussions without having to navigate through tons of spam, we should try it. I think mods are doing a good job here. We already have the serious discussion thread, where adds are "banned", so no reason to make it as a default "set up" for the hole forum.

As I said in this thread, I came to the forum to participate in a betting competition. How "off topic" can that be? The only relation to bitcoin was that the prizes were paid in bitcoin. I then started using sigs to try to make some bucks, that are quite important for me, but I've also learned a lot about bitcoin and crypto. So it could be said that I came for the "wrong reasons", but it ended up opening a lot of doors to me, in terms of acquiring crypto knowledge. I think that everything can be achieved in this forum, and things are getting better, and the merit system is a step in the right direction.

Banner ads exist on the forum and people regularly bid for banner spots in the Auctions section. It's possible to block banner ads but they're still a form of advertising that dissuades people from spamming, and besides the serious discussion thread there's other threads where signatures are blocked like the well-known Wall Observer thread in Speculation.

We could also just disable signatures forum-wide temporarily and see which direction spam goes in as an experiment.

[Bolt Brownie]

We could also just disable signatures forum-wide temporarily and see which direction spam goes in as an experiment.

Well I guess that could be done, specially if anyone wanted to gather an exact number for statistic purposes or something like that, but I guess we all know that the spam would disappear, and probably a lot of users (mostly farmed accounts) would disappear as well. We can't deny signature campaigns are a huge business in this forum. Projects that run sig campaigns here, pay a lot to the users that are wearing their sigs. The payouts have decreased overall, but considering the number of users in each campaign, and the number of campaigns running, I would say it's a very big number.

If I go to the overview campaign thread, and look for the average legendary member payout, which I would say it's 0.01 per week, we are talking about an average of $360 a month for a few posts (considering BTC at $9k). This is not an over extended figure, so I would say it's really quite easy for a legendary member to get at least $360 for a few posts.

That's a really nice extra income, and in some countries that's actually quite a lot. If someone uses alts, they can probably win more here than they would on a normal job (again depending on the country they live). Given this, I would say it's easy to assume, that if this option would disappear, people would stop spamming.I still don't think this is the best way to solve the problem though, because advertising plays an important role in the crypto ecosystem.

Forum sections where it's not allowed to use sig are a good way to create good sections free of spam, and the merit system is a good way to promote good content and to prevent account farming. This is why I think we are going in the right direction here.

Don't know if more measures will be taken or not, but I would say these two alone, will help a lot.