Bitcoin Pizza Day - Why old members are no longer active here

[siddartha1492]

Hi All

So yesterday, I was reading about this Bitcoin Pizza day on Cointelegraph and then I saw this link. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=137.msg1195#msg1195

I am aware about this Pizza Day for past 2 years, but only yesterday I came to know that Laszlo had posted this legendary offer on Bitcointalk. I always thought he posted it on either his social media page or some random forum.

Anyways, while reading through comments made on this topic, I noticed a strange thing. Most members who posted at that time are no longer active on Bitcointalk. Many were last seen years ago. Even Laszlo isn't, even though he has somewhat of a celebrity status in Bitcoin community. Many even credit his sacrifice of Bitcoins as the main reason for Bitcoin's current price.
 
And it's not that he has gone anonymous or so, because recently ledger launched limited edition Nano S, themed on Bitcoin Pizza Day and Laszlo gave the permission to do so. https://www.ledger.fr/2018/05/22/bitcoin-pizza-day-ledger-nano-s-limited-edition/
**Does anyone know what happened of the guy (jercos) who actually provided the pizzas for Bitcoin? He/she was equally important in this milestone.

But what I am curious about, especially from the old members here; that why the early adopters of Bitcoin and then active members of Bitcointalk have gone inactive now. Is it because they are bitter about not holding to their Bitcoins and selling it for a few Dollars or because they have found better platforms to discuss Bitcoin. Or maybe that they made quite a fortune and don't care anymore. I read that even Vitalik was an active user here, but again he has also become totally inactive on Bitcointalk. So why this trend?

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[LoyceV]

But what I am curious about, especially from the old members here; that why the early adopters of Bitcoin and then active members of Bitcointalk have gone inactive now.

Many people left because the forum is overrun by spammers.

Let me take a random look at the latest post on the forum:

looks like interestin project with experienced team
Need some time to make an assesment of your project also

It's already deleted by the bumpbot who posted it, and replaced by the next one.

[OgNasty]

Many people left because the forum is overrun by spammers.

Being fair, I think the exodus of talent happened before the spammers moved in.  It was more related to the overall attitude of members here fostering negativity.  It became clear the goal of the average member was not to help or learn from the Bitcoin community any longer.

[Jet Cash]

Many people left because the forum is overrun by spammers.

This is the obvious answer. It's hard to get a decent discussion going here. Either it gets overrun with spammers, or those desperate to gain rank with negligible value posting, or it gets moved to off topic by a mod, and then it falls off the first index page before your mouse can get its clicker out.

[siddartha1492]

But what I am curious about, especially from the old members here; that why the early adopters of Bitcoin and then active members of Bitcointalk have gone inactive now.

Many people left because the forum is overrun by spammers.

Let me take a random look at the latest post on the forum:

looks like interestin project with experienced team
Need some time to make an assesment of your project also

It's already deleted by the bumpbot who posted it, and replaced by the next one.

It is true that this place has become infested with spammers and scammers. And frankly speaking, when around 2 years ago I came to Bitcointalk, I came for the sole reason of spamming my referral link, because I saw thousands of views on every topic!! My old account was then banned.
As for your reasoning about old members leaving because of this spam pond, I think it would be only partially true. Because after all, you guys are also here, Themyos is here and obviously you are no less than those early adopters. But still, if this is true, then which is the new hangout they have found. Is there really any place better than Bitcointalk to discuss about Bitcoin and cryptos in general? P.S. I have still not explored any other options beside Bitcointalk, so I have little knowledge about alternative platforms.

Many people left because the forum is overrun by spammers.

Being fair, I think the exodus of talent happened before the spammers moved in.  It was more related to the overall attitude of members here fostering negativity.  It became clear the goal of the average member was not to help or learn from the Bitcoin community any longer.

Negativity? As in negative trusts or more like preference to the hype side of cryptos rather than their social and technological side.

[vlad230]

I've also created a post about the BTC Pizza day in the Bitcoin Discussion forum but it was instantly buried by shit posters / spammers.

I've found some interesting facts about it, take a look here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4143199.0  

[espresso18]

When bitcoin pizza day, bounty and signature campaign still not exist yet

[Alone055]

Reading just a few replies of some pages in that thread makes you realize how nice and clean the forum was at that time. No spam, no useless posts/posters. Everyone had a valid reason to write something in a thread unlike today where people merely find a solid reason to post something. It is pretty fair to predict the reason for the oldies to leave the forum was the excessive spam in the forum.

[xIIImaL]

Many people left because the forum is overrun by spammers.

This is the obvious answer. It's hard to get a decent discussion going here. Either it gets overrun with spammers, or those desperate to gain rank with negligible value posting, or it gets moved to off topic by a mod, and then it falls off the first index page before your mouse can get its clicker out.

Still spammers are here and there in the forum and elsewhere. But otherside there are some helping to take the forum with good value. I see after merit system came in by last January. After that to now.
There is gradual downfall of spammers over the forum. We can ask admin to implement the more regulation act against spammers.

[mdayonliner]

From yesterday I promoted to post on Ivory Tower, I made some replies there by the way. Believe me, I felt a peace inside while exploring the section. I even encountered a topic where the OP was concerning about the forum, if they remove signature campaign. The spammers will dramatically drop and the forum will also lose massive amount of visitors.

It's a hard decision to make. I imagine the forum was not this much crowded before when those legends were here.

[shahzadafzal]

Many people left because the forum is overrun by spammers.

We agree on the major reason is spam that is number 1 reason why old member feel it's a waste of time being here and it has been discussed gazillion times.

But there are many other small reasons which are causing seniors to leave this forum:

1. Lack of innovation
It's been 8/9 years and bitcointalk.org did not evolve. It's still an old forum, old design, old fashioned, single point of failure (password), no notifications whatsoever, etc. I'm sure many of you may disagree with me but I'm a computer engineer and people get bored of seeing same thing after few years. All software companies have been updating their product on regular basic in span of 2-3 years. If you can't change anything... change the design. Give some new look and new feel to the users.

If we look around  linkedin, stackoverflow and quora how they have evolved in last few years. Responsive design, mobile apps.

What I'm missing most on bitcointalk is notifications. I should get notified when someone replies to my Topic, ok there is email but it's so damn difficult to track. Give me some notification bar or counter to let me know that there is something new going on. I want to know if someone tags/quote me, that's what healthy discussion is supposed to be "engagement".

Yes this was all ok back in 2010, but today no this can't work, bitcointalk has to change from it's old school. BTW where is the new software for the forum?

2. Lack of Management Involvement
Yes harsh but truth again. See the recent example of howeycoins, people were so happy to see Theymos is here. We are missing this so much. Why bitcointalk succeed back in days? Because Satoshi himself was here he was engaged in discussions with people. Yes I understand Theymos, Cycrus you guys are very busy. But buys in what? Please let us know in your busy schedule there is some space for bitcointalk also. Please keep us updated at least what is going on in the background for bitcointalk.

If Thyemos and Cycrus keep old and seniors members involved, I guess many of the old members would still be here and they will come back too.

3. Focus of discussion is diverted
Back in days bitcointalk was about "bitcoin", but today no its f*cking damn about Bounties and ANN that's all.
Let's accept this is also part of evolving, Bitcoin can live with it. Still BTC market Dominance is 38.9% not bad. So what did we do here? Nothing just sit and watch them spam bitcointalk.

There should be strict checks on Bounties and ANN threads, bitcointalk should help to minimize the scam and only legit announcement and Bounties should be allowed to stay. Let the bounties and ANN thread should be created by company's account only. As soon as someone realizes something fishy or scam going on it should be "nuked" immediately (I like this term "nuke" used by hilariousandco so often).

Yes it need time and investment but come on owners this is your baby. How can you allow someone to scam here? Yes we can't control but as soon it becomes clear why not nuke and stop it.

4. bitcointalk is money making platform
No it's not!!! It's platform to discussion your ideas of making money, to get honest opinions on your thoughts and ideas. PoS was coined here on bitcointalk, yes ethereum also started from here. So bitcointalk is not all about just ranking up and started earning free money by shitposting.


Yes you might ask me how I'm I suppose to say this being junior member, yes I'm newbie and I'm sorry if I said something wrong, but this what I feel you can ignore it happily.

Also I'm not paying for bitcointalk so I'm not suppose to question any thing, you own it and you know better how to run it. But being Bitcoin enthusiast I don't want o see bitcointalk die in cold.

[Alone055]

if they remove signature campaign. The spammers will dramatically drop and the forum will also lose massive amount of visitors.

Signature campaigns are not the cause of spam, but the recklessness of their managers is. There are signature campaigns running successfully without generating any spam out of their participants, Chipmixer for example. So the solution is not always to cut-off the roots, sometimes the branches are to be managed as well.

[Joel_Jantsen]

Many people left because the forum is overrun by spammers.

Not quite true.

This is the obvious answer. It's hard to get a decent discussion going here. Either it gets overrun with spammers, or those desperate to gain rank with negligible value posting, or it gets moved to off topic by a mod, and then it falls off the first index page before your mouse can get its clicker out.

Well, you can always start a self moderated thread and if the thread in it's appropriate board, it never gets moved by the mods.(I have never experienced at least).The thread falling off the first index is very true and you can't help it.

[Tszunami98]

When bitcoin pizza day, bounty and signature campaign still not exist yet

This man has a point...when bounty campaign for bitcoin pizza day?

[Theb]

I do believe that they have left the forum due to personal reasons and we can't speak for themselves as to why they have left. And even if we want to know, we can't, as tracking them down and asking them one by one seems to be impossible not to mention they went cold for a couple of years now. We don't know if they became bitter of the forum because they didn't hold BTC to this present date or if they just quite being active as they became millionaires because of holding Bitcoin, most importantly we can't blame the forum for their inactivity.

[John (John K.)]

I'd say a lot of the old members are still around, but probably are busy with their day to day lives.

[The Sceptical Chymist]

Many people left because the forum is overrun by spammers.

This is the very first thing I think of when I consider why old-timers left--and I've thought about this before.  Some of the most interesting threads are from around 2010-2011, and last month I stumbled across what had to be the beginning of signature campaigns.  Somebody came up with the idea of renting out his signature space, and people were all saying it was a novel idea.  I don't know why I didn't bookmark that thread, but I didn't.

The other reason is that some of these people might have gotten really burned with Mt. Gox and gotten out completely.  It's not just legendaries who don't post here anymore.  There are tons of abandoned accounts that are low-ranked, who left well before I got here in March of 2015.  Mt. Gox was huge, and I can see how it could leave an extremely bitter taste in one's mouth if MG ran off with all your money.  That's my theory anyway.

One very interesting thing is how well people wrote in the early days of bitcointalk.  Comparing post quality in 2010 to today is astounding.  As clever a moneymaking mechanism as the signature campaign is, it was definitely a quality-killer for posts here once it sucked in the poor, non-English speaking folks (sorry, but it's true).  Anyway, for people who really like bitcointalk, reading posts from way back when is almost addicting.  It was like a different world.

[Welsh]

One very interesting thing is how well people wrote in the early days of bitcointalk.  Comparing post quality in 2010 to today is astounding.  As clever a moneymaking mechanism as the signature campaign is, it was definitely a quality-killer for posts here once it sucked in the poor, non-English speaking folks (sorry, but it's true).  Anyway, for people who really like bitcointalk, reading posts from way back when is almost addicting.  It was like a different world.

It really depends though. Often times people like to look back on things, and think how good it was back then. Especially, when it's new content to them. Old posts which have been unread are always the most interesting, especially when relating to the history of the forum, and Bitcoin itself.

In reality there was complaints back in 2011, 2012, and so on about the decline of quality posts on the forum. Thus, you would think that this is because, of the wider adoption of Bitcoin bringing in all kinds of different people, cultures, and ideas. This would of been seen as a good thing a few years ago, but unfortunately with widespread adoption/awareness comes the cons of people not being able/willing to speak good English or learn about Bitcoin, and it's related technologies.

Here's a post back in 2011 which has a small, but interesting discussion about the progression of the forum, and the cons of it: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=9147.0

I'd say a lot of the old members are still around, but probably are busy with their day to day lives.

Like that Johnthedong guy?

[The Sceptical Chymist]

<snip>

How the HELL did you locate a thread like that so quickly?  I'm impressed.  And this post was extremely interesting to me:

You WERE in a niche forum with many like-minded people.  Now, more and more people of diverse cultures, different intelligence and education levels, different age groups, different financial class groups, are all joining up.  There's going to be a lot of "stupid questions", a lot of repeated answers, a lot of facepalming.  Just deal with it and move on.  It's the nature of an open-ended forum.

This is basically what I was saying, except I attributed the "diverse cultures" part of it to signature campaigns, and SgtSpike here obviously did not mean that the influx of those cultures was due to campaigns--they didn't exist then, or at least not in the same way they do now.

The good thing I see is that the posts he called out (facepalming and the like) aren't tolerated here.  You can't just post an emoticon or "+1" or whatever, because those will get deleted.  That kind of crap is tolerated to no end on other forums, and usually people who write those replies also quote a huge block of text.

I'm so tempted to give SgtSpike a merit....but I won't.

[Welsh]

How the HELL did you locate a thread like that so quickly?  I'm impressed.  And this post was extremely interesting to me:

Magic! Nah, I've read that thread multiple times before, and like you find myself looking back at the old threads in all kinds of different sections from time to time. It just so happens I remembered the name of that thread pretty well, and knew it was pretty early on in the forum.

The good thing I see is that the posts he called out (facepalming and the like) aren't tolerated here.  You can't just post an emoticon or "+1" or whatever, because those will get deleted.  That kind of crap is tolerated to no end on other forums, and usually people who write those replies also quote a huge block of text.

I would agree. Even though this forum is plastered in spam right now I still think it's got a pretty good moderation policy, and only interferes when needed. I used to disagree with a few things, but soon came to realize that it's probably the best way to go about it.

I'm so tempted to give SgtSpike a merit....but I won't.

It's a pity I don't see him around anymore as some of his posts were an interesting read.