@Admins: Merit not working as configured, trolls just don't care (no surprise)

[Jet Cash]

Bitcointalk works because of the bounty campaigns and that will never change whatever system (merit or else) you put in place.

What part of " Bitcoin Talk" don't you understand?
Bitcoin Talk isn't working, and that's why all these threads are appearing. Some of us don't want to be associated with a spammer and scammer forum. and we are trying to repair the damage that the bounty hunters have done.

[1715044282]

1715044282

[1715044282]

1715044282

[1715044282]

1715044282

[1715044282]

1715044282

[1715044282]

1715044282

[LFC_Bitcoin]

Not in favour of this at all to be honest, I learnt a lot from this forum & people like achow saved my ass from losing dozens of bitcoin with personal help. I don’t think paying to post here is a good idea, sorry.

[Karisma Black]

Bitcointalk works because of the bounty campaigns and that will never change whatever system (merit or else) you put in place.

What part of " Bitcoin Talk" don't you understand?

Maybe the bitcoin part which is about...making money. 
Like I said, just do it, delete bounty campaigns and let's see how it goes.

Bitcointalk isn't working because the people in charge don't care about this place anymore.
If they did, there would be more mods, better mods, scammers and spammers would be banned ,alt accounts would be checked and forbidden, the merit system would work or be replaced by a better one... meaning there would be changes,well there would have been changes a long time ago.
Too little too late if you ask me. Merit system clearly doesn't work, it didn't change a thing, it only pissed people off because they can't move up, it only gave more power to high ranked members (didn't they have enough already ?) and increased the number of ass kissers. Quality of posts is still terrible.

Anyway I swore I would't debate about the merit system, no point in that. Everything has been said already.
Just saying that having people pay when they post is ridiculous.

[Carlton Banks]

Not in favour of this at all to be honest, I learnt a lot from this forum & people like achow saved my ass from losing dozens of bitcoin with personal help. I don’t think paying to post here is a good idea, sorry.

You're happy getting paid to post though, right?


Interesting that the people with advertising in the sigs or avatars are 100% against the idea (thus far anyway).

[athanz88]

I still dont get a lot about your idea. If, i use if, if i have a valuable information about technology of bitcoin or anything valuable about bitcoin price analytics, why would i share to other people while i must pay? Doesnt it works the other way, people pay you when you have something valuable? I say this because i see people share their analytics about bitcoin price and what will happen if they are charged to post in here?

I dont support spammer, but we need to see this idea in a whole perspective.

[Carlton Banks]

How about this modification then.

All money collected from posts is divided as follows:

• 30% goes to Bitcointalk.org
• Newbies get nothing
• Jr. get given 1%
• Members get given 2%
• Full members get 4%
• Seniors get 8%
• Heroes get 16%
• Legendaries get 39%

Note that I'd currently be a Full Member, not a Legendary, under this system.

So, any money you lose while ranking up gets paid back to you in future by any trolls that just refuse to leave

I actually like that alot, getting paid to write sincere posts by trolls

[Samum]

this is some absolutely not a sensible idea. Are your messages so valuable that you agree to pay for them? Publish in magazines. At your own expense.This option does not solve the issue of spam and account farms. The one who could buy himself a ,dozen or two accounts, will find a few satoshi in order to bring the messages. As this will bring more profit. And then it's absolutely not clear who and from what you want to save.
You read the form a year before writing this. It seems, that you did not read it carefully.
Exclusively my opinion.

[LeGaulois]

Not in favour of this at all to be honest, I learnt a lot from this forum & people like achow saved my ass from losing dozens of bitcoin with personal help. I don’t think paying to post here is a good idea, sorry.

You're happy getting paid to post though, right?


Interesting that the people with advertising in the sigs or avatars are 100% against the idea (thus far anyway).

Even If I was not wearing a signature my version would be the same as follow...

Imagine your friends telling you: wanna talk to me? Paid me first..

The forum is a community, you can't ask people to pay to be part of a community. Forums are supposed to be used to talk, to share, to learn, to teach, to meet people. Why not paying your friends so, for each sentence you want to say
Imagine someone learning cryptos and having some questions, what then? Oh no, need to pay to learn, fuck this.

You have a total wrong way to think about others, think about others and remember this is a community. Your solution will only create more damages than anything else (and not only for the forum)

[legendster]

OP is constantly missing the point, to the point where making a comeback statement here is useless because he is not ready to see the invalidity of his suggestion.

He thinks the rest of humanity has free money to burn just like he does.
He is assuming this forum is only made to share information when someone has something important to say. It's not, its supposed to be a community where enthusiasts, newbies and vested parties in crypto come together to discuss.

A discussion in a community should always be free. Irrespective of the depths of the community member's pockets.


Instead of expecting other people to pay for their convenience, why don't the rich snobs like OP with deep pockets put in their own money to hire a few dozen more moderators who would keep this place clean?

I actually like that alot, getting paid...

How about you get nothing? How about you get charged everytime you visit this place, because there'll be people here to clean up the place for you. Like the sound of that?

[The Sceptical Chymist]

Carlton Banks's suggestion sounds like something an academic economist would suggest--or something overly complicated that Theymos would have thought of.  Either way, I'm in favor of the wait-and-see approach to the merit solution, and part of that is because I don't think Theymos needs to be charging people to use the forum, even if it's a super-small fee.  I don't think people would leave in droves, but an idea like that amounts to gouging people, and I'm against that.

It's not quite been three whole months yet.  I've run out of sMerit, and I'm sure a lot of others have, too, so shitposters have less chance now than they ever did of ranking up--and I can see very clearly that people are having a hard time doing so in general, so the spammers aren't going to advance.  That's a victory in itself, and I'll take it.  Gladly.

[1Referee]

I certainly understand and somewhat find it to be a potential meaingful way to tackle the drivel, but I just don't agree with how people here lose the rank they have been building up throughout the years, and also have to pay in order to post. It's quite a drastic change for something that can easily be solved anyway, which is by completely getting rid of any sort of paid incentive to be active here. In other words, get rid of signature campaigns and all related roots that make this forum what it is today. That very likely won't happen, which means that I think it's safe to say that the Merit implementation is the best possible way to tackle spam in the most friendly possible way. DarkStar, Lauda and Yahoo are doing a pretty good job in accepting only the best candidates according to their opinion and judgement, and thus far the campaign participants managed by these managers, per ratio mostly deliver one of the highest quality posts on this forum. I wouldn't be against an 'unofficial' rule that signature campaigns and other related roots should only be managed by a select group of managers with a proven track record.

[Raja_MBZ]

I'm sorry Carlton that I've to speak like this, but paying for posting is something so damn hilarious to even think of. I didn't expect to see such an idea from someone so senior. Bitcointalk is the best and largest forums of crypto-currencies, we all are well aware of it. I've been a part of two big forums (blackhatworld & emoneyspace) before, and have seen them getting dead within a few months just because of their bad policies, I don't wanna see bitcointalk suffer the same fate as them. Bitcointalk is currently almost in the top 1000 websites of the world (according to Alexa ranking), and I think each and every policy should be thought of a hundred times before being implemented, along with community giving out their inputs. And never mind, but this suggestion of yours, if implemented, would be enough for an instant death of this forums IMO.

Merit might not have been something super-effective, but now we all have to admit that, to at least some extent, it has worked out pretty good. I think considering the following options can be good for bitcointalk:

-increasing number of moderators
-creating more awareness of "report" button

I consider this forums my second home, and I'm sure many others think the same way as well. I don't want to pay for just speaking up (and mostly, just for helping others) right in my home, and I don't want to see it die either (like a few deaths of forums I've seen in past).

[digaran]

Either pay per post. or post for free per accurate report.

[figmentofmyass]

sorry in advance for the length....

Lightning payments would be necessary, of course. Maybe I'm taking too hard a line, but if I have to pay even 500 satoshis per post, that would be a small price to pay to improve quality again.

you might find---for the most part---the only people willing to pay per post are advertisers.

Look at the inverse situation: 1000's of accounts are posting meaningless, obvious, copy-pasta or troll content, only in order to get paid per post by sig campaigns or trolls-in-chief.

regarding the sig campaigns, it seems like a more obvious solution is to restrict or prohibit them or address negligent managers. or just disable the signatures.

regarding trolls, traditional moderation should be enough. i guess it becomes problematic when we have high-volume spam though.

Price discovery can solve this problem, it's a geniune "tragedy of the commons" issue after all.

what if the price people are willing to pay to freely discuss things tends towards ~$0? there's a spectrum between zero activity and endless spam, and your proposition might land near zero activity.

Nobody is going to pay for every post they make

I would. You're not reading these posts, are you?

but as you say, you are a contrarian. how much forum activity do you realistically expect if we had to pay per post? i'm sure theymos has to find some balance if the extreme means a 99%+ drop in traffic.

if you want a forum that's just a circle jerk among a few dozen people---if an informative one---you can make a private forum elsewhere. why don't you do that?

I think something like that could work also. I don't think it would deter the outright trolls though.

i don't think anything will deter outright trolls. that's what moderation is for.

maybe the forum should hire more moderators. are there people with high report rates who are willing to do the job? i saw the recent posting about the politics board (and someone was hired), but that's it.

Ok, do that... delete signatures as well and let's see how many people stay and what quality you'll get out of it.
Zero !The place will be a desert.

i'd much rather they delete signatures than requiring pay per post. i'd stay if signatures were disabled.

but i'd probably never post again if i had to pay for the privilege. maybe a small one-time fee to unlock forum-wide posting as MagicSmoker mentioned, but otherwise hell no. there are plenty of other places to waste lots of my time.

How about this modification then.

All money collected from posts is divided as follows:

how do you keep the system from devolving into nepotism? consider the merit system and how merit is handed out among friends and social circles. merit is not objective.

Even If I was not wearing a signature my version would be the same as follow...

Imagine your friends telling you: wanna talk to me? Paid me first..

it's like a walled garden.

it's like the bitbounce or earn.com models---spammers (and everyone else) need to pay to get your attention. the problem here is, there is no way to target and incentivize the quality posters to post in the first place. advertisers are still willing to pay for your attention. but what about genuine forum posters?

the only solution offered is rewarding based on the merit system, which i think is highly subjective, flawed, and prone to rewarding groupthink rather than useful and merit-worthy discussion.

[The Sceptical Chymist]

The place will be a desert.

Why stay here when you can find info on cryptos on social networks and so many other places ?

I fully agree with the first part here--bitcointalk would indeed dry up.

The second part I vehemently disagree with.  We need people like Jet Cash much more than the bounty participants.  Desperately.  Can you imagine if bitcointalk turned into simply an advertising machine?  It would cease to exist as a forum for discussion, and all we'd have left would be the shitposters.  I don't want that, and I don't think anyone else does either.  Not even Theymos.  If this forum stops being a place where intelligent discourse happens, it becomes useless.

Jet Cash is a good guy, too.  Don't drive him to a intellectual ghetto like reddit, where intelligent chat goes to die.  No offense to the fine folk at bitcointalk who happen to frequent there.   

[Carlton Banks]

Well the results are interesting.

Most of the people who dislike the idea are -

1. sig campaigners
2. not picking up many merit points
3. high ranks as a result of the activity based ranking system



Whereas JetCash, who has much more earned merit than me (or anyone else in the thread) was kind of neutral.

And 3 straight Members with relatively high merit (Magic Smoke, nebuch & bitperson) were kind of positive. Interesting  

[Carlton Banks]

Oh, and @Pharmacist

You might be right that Merit hasn't been in place long enough to do what it's capable of. I'm just reacting to the fact that there's far too many 0-10 Merit accounts (seemingly more than ever) who seem oblivious to the idea that ranking up is in their interest (some come across like bots). Spambots cannot think rationally about ranking, but the owners of the spambots can watch the whole strategy disappear, spraying the walls of the boards with 100's of annoying bots would suddenly become very expensive under this proposal.

[KingScorpio]

This might be somewhat unpopular, but is popularity the goal? A good resource should be the goal IMO, I exclusively read this forum for about 1 year before I felt knowledgeable enough to post at all.


Getting the signal:noise ratio up can probably only be achieved using real resources. I'd be very happy if a BTC cost was introduced for posting:

• Nuke the old rank status for all members, re-adjust according to merit only
• Charge BTC for every post, low rank = highest fee
• Set the charges incredibly low to begin with, slowly increase to tweak the quality level

Lightning payments would be necessary, of course. Maybe I'm taking too hard a line, but if I have to pay even 500 satoshis per post, that would be a small price to pay to improve quality again.

Look at the inverse situation: 1000's of accounts are posting meaningless, obvious, copy-pasta or troll content, only in order to get paid per post by sig campaigns or trolls-in-chief.

Price discovery can solve this problem, it's a geniune "tragedy of the commons" issue after all.

i have observed gay lobby groups giving each other merit. not because an article was well written but because it suited their interest. and out of "love" and "support" for each other

this fractioning and party creation will happen, anyway. i have a clear point when i think about merit:

i ignore merit, if someone has a lot of merit, for me this is just someone who is longer in this community than those with less, its not a more trustworthy person just because he has more merit, you cant trust anyone in cryptoeconomics, no one has any idea whats going on all run their agenda or are driven by someones.

there are very view players that know what they are doing.

[figmentofmyass]

Well the results are interesting.

Most of the people who dislike the idea are -

1. sig campaigners
2. not picking up many merit points
3. high ranks as a result of the activity based ranking system

you should expect people to be rational.

but it's probably more accurate to shorten this to:

Most people dislike the idea

like i said:

regarding the sig campaigns, it seems like a more obvious solution is to restrict or prohibit them or address negligent managers. or just disable the signatures.

how do you keep the system from devolving into nepotism? consider the merit system and how merit is handed out among friends and social circles. merit is not objective.

but i know it's more compelling to talk shit about people rather than address arguments, so carry on.

Whereas JetCash, who has much more earned merit than me (or anyone else in the thread) was kind of neutral.

calling this neutral is a bit of a stretch:

It's not the posters who should have to pay

[bitart]

Oh, and @Pharmacist

You might be right that Merit hasn't been in place long enough to do what it's capable of. I'm just reacting to the fact that there's far too many 0-10 Merit accounts (seemingly more than ever) who seem oblivious to the idea that ranking up is in their interest (some come across like bots). Spambots cannot think rationally about ranking, but the owners of the spambots can watch the whole strategy disappear, spraying the walls of the boards with 100's of annoying bots would suddenly become very expensive under this proposal.

I would consider to pay a really small fee (like dust) per post if it would help the forum on the long run, but I think this won't help a lot in the current situation.
According to my understanding, spammers are here to earn money with sig.campaigns. Sig.campaigns and bounty campaigns are usually for advertising ICOs, services or something similar, so someone, who is interested in being visible on the forum pays the members (bots) to post and to wear the signature.
What if we implement the payment system for posts? If I try to oversimplify it, these guys, who runs the signature and bounty campaigns will pay the fee per post instead of the members and they will deduct if from the members (bots) campaing payment at the end of the week.
This pay per post would only prevent trolls (who are not in any signature/bounty campaings) to spam the forum.
I was shocked when a few weeks ago I thought that I found the solution against copy-pasters, but someone enlightened me that if we give merit for reporting a bunch of copy pasters, the merit abusers would create even more copy-paster accounts for themselves and will report them with their original account, to earn merit. That time I have realized that spammers are not only a few undereducated poor folks from worldwide but groups hunting for the profit they can earn here. (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3275350.msg34148476#msg34148476)
Also, a few hours ago, I have wrote a small post about trashing spam megathreads, which makes the spammers lose post count and this can be really bad for them, even worse if they don't rank up because the lack of merits. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3335348.msg35031143#msg35031143
So I agree that something has to be done, but we need think about a really effective solution, and this is not easy at the moment... I can imagine that the merit system, combining with trashing low quality post and topics will help, but there's also a need to somehow force bounty campaign managers to stop the one liner spammers, and I don't have an idea how we can force them...
I know TLDR