...
Or, we should make different merit requirements for creating a topic in various threads, e.g. if you want to open a topic in the Beginners's section (or in the OFF topic), you don't have to have any merits, but if you want to open an [ANN] thread, you should have at least 5 merits etc.
More reason for genuine new users to go to other forums. what will stop the genuine devs from going to other forums to post their projects due to the stringent measures on bitcointalk?
Am pretty certain that the altcoin section brings in almost half of the users in here, so imagine there are little or no more ANNS of projects in the Altcoin boards due to your strict rules but instead there are quite a number of them in other crypto forums... i guess you know what will happen next.
You may not see it short term, but long term, it has an effect.
This is true, I was aware of the possible effect.
But ANNs are bringing most of the bounty hunters who just don't care about bitcoin, won't ever post in the bitcoin section, so from bitcoin point of view, it's not quality traffic.
From the traffic point of view, I know that every user counts. (even bots, who are e.g. half of the traffic of the ANNs traffic I guess, but I don't have proof of course, it's just an educated guess
)
I'm also against of scaring off genuine devs but I have no idea how we can make a difference. I think that genuine devs are the ones who won't be able to get merits on the short run when they start their altcoin topic, because spammers scammers (who work together and sharing merit among themselves) seems more legit from the merit point of view than a genuine dev who has no connections with the forum to get merit quickly. I know that a genuine dev can also hire the bots to be able to stand out from the mass of shitcoins but that would cost heavy ETH for him and half of the bot farmers are also scammers, they won't just do anything but run away with the money...
So if you have a look at the ANN threads, from the point of view of a newbie (who came here to make some money with joining the bounty campaigns), what is the chance that they can select a legit ANN topic with a genuine dev? Really low... Even what is the chance that they will ever found that legit ANN topic, when all the scammy ANNs are bumped all the time and legit ANNs won't have a chance to get to the first page? Users are used to select from the first page (like in a google search) so chances are really low for genuine devs to get noticed at all.
So I think at the moment this is what scares off genuine devs, so if we make some restrictions, maybe (maybe) the legit ANNs would become more noticeable, so I'm not 100% sure that restrictions equals the loss of the quality traffic.
But this is just my opinion, I'm happy to discuss, I hope somehow sometime we'll be able to work out a solution for the current situation, it's badly needed...
