Decreasing number of forum users

[Veleor]

In Meta, tables with the merit & trust statistics are often discussing, but other important information is overlooked.

Bitcointalk has a summary where periodically published the data on how many visitors on the forum: https://bitcointalk.org/adrotate.php?adstats

When you compare with previous years, then you can see that the amount of traffic on Bitcointalk fell to a breaking point.

Code:

December 2016
Unique logged-in users: 16022
Unique IPs: 133968

December 2017
Unique logged-in users: 90295
Unique IPs: 1093015

December 2018
Unique logged-in users: 32680
Unique IPs from logged-out users: 161435

December 2019
Unique logged-in users: 13727
Unique IPs from logged-out users: 94181

For the most part, I connect this fact that users are switching to much more modern, convenient and mobile platforms for communication and the Bitcointalk site needs urgent updating.

[1713933388]

1713933388

[1713933388]

1713933388

[1713933388]

1713933388

[1713933388]

1713933388

[mindrust]

I used to think about that too but clearly It is all about the bitcoin price.

If there is one thing I learned from this forum, it is best to buy when nobody is interested in bitcoin which is now.

Forum? It will do just fine.

[eddie13]

I used to think about that too but clearly It is all about the bitcoin price.

I think it's the bear market too..
More like the spike in new users back then was due to the crazy bull market we were in at the time.. Including ETH/ICOs..

[DireWolfM14]

For the most part, I connect this fact that users are switching to much more modern, convenient and mobile platforms for communication and the Bitcointalk site needs urgent updating.

The new forum will be more modern, and perhaps more compatible with mobile devices, but it's still a forum.  I don't know that the "modern" aspect is such a big factor that it will turn things around.  If you look at the traffic rates, they seem to coincide with the price of bitcoin.  The more BTC is talked about the in the news the more traffic the forum receives.

The other point one should consider, is an increase in traffic something the forum should be pursuing?  

[suchmoon]

I think you could reduce the number of users by 80% and not see a difference. Start with the bounty board.

Come to think of it, that's what most likely happened since December 2017.

[DdmrDdmr]

I like @ Coin-1’s thread that displays some nice charts derived from the same data source: [Chart] Bitcointalk statistics on impression counts for ads. The last update was made a couple of months ago, but the charts cover from 2017 onwards.

[Coyster]

For the most part, I connect this fact that users are switching to much more modern, convenient and mobile platforms for communication...

I doubt they are switching, maybe they are just not communicating now that the market is down, they want a bull market, that's what the interest is about, if they are interested in a platform to simply just communicate, it'll definitely be this forum.

And it's all good, because without the stats you wouldn't even notice anything is wrong, if there is actually

[The Sceptical Chymist]

I think it's the bear market too..
<snip>
Including ETH/ICOs..

Yep and yep. 

If bitcoin starts shooting to the moon again and we get a market like 2017, you can be sure people will be flocking to bitcointalk for various reasons.  I think the relative dearth of signature campaigns in 2018-19 might also be a factor.  It seemed for a time that they might even die off, but I've seen some new ones get started this year.  When bitcoin spikes, people start wanting to earn it through those campaigns again.

And the ICO market had to have had an effect on traffic here.  I've heard the whole scene is almost dead, but I'm not sure about that.  But it's definitely not like it was in 2017 where bounty hunters were seemingly everywhere and those stupid ICOs were coming out almost daily.  Bitcointalk is still going strong, and I'm not concerned that it's in jeopardy or anything.

I also don't think the site's design has anything to do with it.  It's old, simple, yet very effective.

[LFC_Bitcoin]

The bitcoin price is kind of boring at the moment, it’s not exciting & there aren’t a lot of genuine noobs coming into crypto atm so this is reflected in the number of genuine new people finding this place & starting an account.

When the price begins to move significantly upwards after the halving bitcoin will be exciting again & lots of average joe’s will flood here after reading/seeing about bitcoin via mainstream media outlets.

Activity here is always lower mid cycle, don’t worry about it. The noobs will come in their masses when the price heats up again.

[DooMAD]

I think suchmoon is onto something.  If the number is decreasing, it's likely because all the ban evaders and bounty abusers are gradually being weeded out.  Some of them probably had dozens of sockpuppets.  A small number of genuine users will naturally be far more engaging in a discussion than most of the accounts that have been purged would be.

Quality > Quantity

[Welsh]

Its true in general that forums are becoming a thing of the past. A lot of users are moving onto more point based systems such as Reddit. However, forums will always have a place within a niche for worthy more in depth conversations. Reddit has a community of karma whores with mostly low value content. However, that's by design. Reddit wasn't created for good conversations which can be read back throughout the years. No doubt that both Twitter, and Reddit have their own little community within their sub reddits none have a community like a forum can have.

However, this is the forum that everyone will know about, why? Because it has a history, and a good one at that. Satoshi created the forum when he was looking to launch Bitcoin, and for that reason alone people will want to become part of its history. I like to think we've moved past being reliant on Satoshi's name though, and have made a name for ourselves. Bitcointalk is where you come to discuss anything Bitcoin uncensored. I can't name another forum which treats freedom of speech how this forum treats it. Its a very rare thing to find these days.

The introduction of the merit system definitely played a part in weeding out the plethora of alternate account farms that were going on at the time. This forum has become a place where you have to work hard to be among the higher ranks. This isn't a place like Reddit or Twitter where you can get your followers, and upvotes from nothing. The forum has its own ecosystem, and its own little community.

The majority of regular posters on the forum I can name, and I quite like that. However, as others have suggested when Bitcoin hits new peaks Bitcointalk.org will always gather more temporary traffic. This is obvious by the amount of registrations, posts and reports the moderators have. This is testament enough that Bitcointalk will forever be relevant, and the place to come. If new users of Bitcoin are getting interested in Bitcoin then you can bet your buck they'll come to Bitcointalk at some point.

[LTU_btc]

I agree with users above that decreasing number of users is related with current situation in crypto and bear market. But I think there is one more reason related with merit system. Before merit system huge number of people were signing up here just to rank up quickly and earn good money here. There was huge farms of accounts, people had 10, 20 or 30 accounts each. Now when we have merit system it become almost impossible for them to rank up and most of them just gave up.
And @Welsh have good point. Now many people prefer social networks, chatting platforms like Telegram, Discord over forums. Forums becomes into a bit outdated things. But these new platforms don't have historic value. It's good to discuss cureent things. but just after few weeks or months nobody will not remember what your wrote. While on Bitcointalk forum we are still discussing what satoshi, Hal or other historical Bitcoin personality wrote 10 or 8 years ago.

[TECSHARE]

As others have already stated, there is a high level of correlation between general market interest and forum activity. This has happened before in past bear markets, perhaps not to the same degree, but the trend is clear.

[acroman08]

For the most part, I connect this fact that users are switching to much more modern, convenient and mobile platforms for communication and the Bitcointalk site needs urgent updating.

The new forum will be more modern, and perhaps more compatible with Mobil devices, but it's still a forum.  I don't know that the "modern" aspect is such a big factor that it will turn things around.  If you look at the traffic rates, they seem to coincide with the price of bitcoin.  The more BTC is talked about the in the news the more traffic the forum receives.

The other point one should consider, is an increase in traffic something the forum should be pursuing?  

a question about the new forum: are we going to be able to migrate our account when the new forum is released or our account will be automatically moved there or do we have to start from the at the beginning again?

[notblox1]

I see a lot of users are now reporting cheaters and scammers.
Even farm accounts are reported and banned.
Not so easy to register on the forum, as many ip addresses are flagged as evil now.
All this is a factor on reducing number of members.

Quality is important, Not quantity.

[logfiles]

Remember that the introduction of merit system must have also had a great impact...especially from 2018 onwards.... that coupled with the bear market are the most likely contributing factors.

With the introduction of merit system, the account farmers slowly started to leave the scene.
To make matters wosre for them... there was introduction of the new bump rule. I think such things have a significant effect too, thou most accounts that stop logging in are usually alts and farmed accounts.

I also remember around may this year, lots of members were banned much more than any other time i have been in this forum.

Personally, i think Bitcointalk is still going strong.

[tranthidung]

I quoted my post and I am sorry for the big quote.

As I promised yesterday, I made some quick descriptive analysis today.

Notes:
It's not exact intra-month registered accounts over years due to days on which theymos scrapped data.
However, we can assumed those figures are for intra-month data.

ABSTRACT
(1) 50% of observed months have intra-month registered account range from 2311 to 27790 (the interquartile range);
(2) 50% of observed months have intra-month registered account above or below 10432 (the median);
(3) The intra-month registered account fell 91.6% from its all time high in 2017 at 238400 to 20046; whilst the bitcoin decreased nearly 83.9%.
(4) The demotion on Junior Members in September 2018 probably caused intra-month registered accounts fell considerbaly later months.
(5) The difference in means of before and after periods (cut-off timepoint is Sept. 2018) is -63.6%.

Time-series plot

< ... >
As the chart shown, total monthly registered accounts in recent months dropped dramatically to the median and mean of the year 2015.
I believe that it is right time to say "Thanks theymos, merit system works and actually effective control spammers!"

Basic statistics:
- Mean +/- standard deviation: 22200 +/- 34774
- Median (interquartile range): 10432 (2311 - 27790)
- Min - max: 3 - 238433.

Interquartile range (from p25 to p75 in raw result table)
Data interpretation:
- 50% of observed total monthly registered accounts (just assumed the dataset is for exactly monthly data) ranges from 2311 to 27790 (the interquartile range);
- 50% of observed months have total registered accounts above 10432 (the median), whilst the rest 50% of months have figures below 10432.

Code:

    variable |         N      mean        sd       p50       p25       p75       min       max
-------------+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
      regacc |       112  22199.58  34773.29     10432    2310.5     27790         3    238433
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Data source was dumped by theymos there:

We're at a local minimum, but registrations jump around a lot:

Code:

+---------------------+---------------+
| 30day starting      | registrations |
+---------------------+---------------+
| 2009-11-02 00:00:00 |             3 |
| 2009-12-02 00:00:00 |             8 |
| 2010-01-01 00:00:00 |             8 |
| 2010-01-31 00:00:00 |            22 |
| 2010-03-02 00:00:00 |             5 |
| 2010-04-01 00:00:00 |            22 |
| 2010-05-01 00:00:00 |            15 |
| 2010-05-31 00:00:00 |            33 |
| 2010-06-30 00:00:00 |           325 |
| 2010-07-30 00:00:00 |           159 |
| 2010-08-29 00:00:00 |           148 |
| 2010-09-28 00:00:00 |           190 |
| 2010-10-28 00:00:00 |           204 |
| 2010-11-27 00:00:00 |           383 |
| 2010-12-27 00:00:00 |           384 |
| 2011-01-26 00:00:00 |           938 |
| 2011-02-25 00:00:00 |          2202 |
| 2011-03-27 00:00:00 |          2737 |
| 2011-04-26 00:00:00 |          4936 |
| 2011-05-26 00:00:00 |         14048 |
| 2011-06-25 00:00:00 |          6250 |
| 2011-07-25 00:00:00 |          3903 |
| 2011-08-24 00:00:00 |          2938 |
| 2011-09-23 00:00:00 |          1983 |
| 2011-10-23 00:00:00 |          1965 |
| 2011-11-22 00:00:00 |          1835 |
| 2011-12-22 00:00:00 |          1812 |
| 2012-01-21 00:00:00 |          2082 |
| 2012-02-20 00:00:00 |          1901 |
| 2012-03-21 00:00:00 |          2158 |
| 2012-04-20 00:00:00 |          1969 |
| 2012-05-20 00:00:00 |          2057 |
| 2012-06-19 00:00:00 |          2040 |
| 2012-07-19 00:00:00 |          2145 |
| 2012-08-18 00:00:00 |          2419 |
| 2012-09-17 00:00:00 |          2661 |
| 2012-10-17 00:00:00 |          2958 |
| 2012-11-16 00:00:00 |          2763 |
| 2012-12-16 00:00:00 |          2611 |
| 2013-01-15 00:00:00 |          3320 |
| 2013-02-14 00:00:00 |          4933 |
| 2013-03-16 00:00:00 |         13816 |
| 2013-04-15 00:00:00 |         18162 |
| 2013-05-15 00:00:00 |         11318 |
| 2013-06-14 00:00:00 |          8095 |
| 2013-07-14 00:00:00 |          6703 |
| 2013-08-13 00:00:00 |          5505 |
| 2013-09-12 00:00:00 |          4137 |
| 2013-10-12 00:00:00 |          5632 |
| 2013-11-11 00:00:00 |         26804 |
| 2013-12-11 00:00:00 |         28776 |
| 2014-01-10 00:00:00 |         29576 |
| 2014-02-09 00:00:00 |         29839 |
| 2014-03-11 00:00:00 |         22534 |
| 2014-04-10 00:00:00 |         18065 |
| 2014-05-10 00:00:00 |         13071 |
| 2014-06-09 00:00:00 |         12180 |
| 2014-07-09 00:00:00 |         10561 |
| 2014-08-08 00:00:00 |         10925 |
| 2014-09-07 00:00:00 |          9418 |
| 2014-10-07 00:00:00 |          8218 |
| 2014-11-06 00:00:00 |          7974 |
| 2014-12-06 00:00:00 |          8136 |
| 2015-01-05 00:00:00 |         23256 |
| 2015-02-04 00:00:00 |         36913 |
| 2015-03-06 00:00:00 |         33500 |
| 2015-04-05 00:00:00 |          8450 |
| 2015-05-05 00:00:00 |          8577 |
| 2015-06-04 00:00:00 |         10303 |
| 2015-07-04 00:00:00 |         11773 |
| 2015-08-03 00:00:00 |          9725 |
| 2015-09-02 00:00:00 |          7644 |
| 2015-10-02 00:00:00 |         68601 |
| 2015-11-01 00:00:00 |         44059 |
| 2015-12-01 00:00:00 |         39244 |
| 2015-12-31 00:00:00 |         37106 |
| 2016-01-30 00:00:00 |         42233 |
| 2016-02-29 00:00:00 |         24213 |
| 2016-03-30 00:00:00 |         19336 |
| 2016-04-29 00:00:00 |         16031 |
| 2016-05-29 00:00:00 |         19935 |
| 2016-06-28 00:00:00 |         12582 |
| 2016-07-28 00:00:00 |         10646 |
| 2016-08-27 00:00:00 |          9986 |
| 2016-09-26 00:00:00 |          9844 |
| 2016-10-26 00:00:00 |         10718 |
| 2016-11-25 00:00:00 |         10691 |
| 2016-12-25 00:00:00 |         12429 |
| 2017-01-24 00:00:00 |         13664 |
| 2017-02-23 00:00:00 |         13893 |
| 2017-03-25 00:00:00 |         15276 |
| 2017-04-24 00:00:00 |         20585 |
| 2017-05-24 00:00:00 |         31381 |
| 2017-06-23 00:00:00 |         35866 |
| 2017-07-23 00:00:00 |         40726 |
| 2017-08-22 00:00:00 |         45026 |
| 2017-09-21 00:00:00 |         70477 |
| 2017-10-21 00:00:00 |         95568 |
| 2017-11-20 00:00:00 |        144762 |
| 2017-12-20 00:00:00 |        238433 |
| 2018-01-19 00:00:00 |        136872 |
| 2018-02-18 00:00:00 |        107237 |
| 2018-03-20 00:00:00 |         87087 |
| 2018-04-19 00:00:00 |         89659 |
| 2018-05-19 00:00:00 |         83999 |
| 2018-06-18 00:00:00 |         72430 |
| 2018-07-18 00:00:00 |         61360 |
| 2018-08-17 00:00:00 |         43451 |
| 2018-09-16 00:00:00 |         43516 |
| 2018-10-16 00:00:00 |         35335 |
| 2018-11-15 00:00:00 |         31502 |
| 2018-12-15 00:00:00 |         20733 |
| 2019-01-14 00:00:00 |         20046 |
| 2019-02-13 00:00:00 |          2763 | [PARTIAL PERIOD]
+---------------------+---------------+

Statistics over years
In both medians and means, the year of 2018 has been the highest year with its median and mean of monthly registered accounts are 66895 and 64782, respectively.

- The median means that 50% of months in 2018 have total registered accounts above 66895 or below 66895.
- The interquartile range for 2018 is 38393 to 88373. It means 50% of months in 2018 have figures in range from 38393 to 88373.
I always use median and interquartile range for descriptive statistics because they automatically exclude effects of outliers data points.

Code:

    variable |         N      mean        sd       p50       p25       p75       min       max
-------------+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
      regacc |       112  22199.58  34773.29     10432    2310.5     27790         3    238433
      year10 |        13       146  144.3185       148        22       204         5       384
      year11 |        12  3795.583  3560.192    2469.5      1900    4419.5       938     14048
      year12 |        12  2313.667    353.35    2151.5    2048.5      2636      1901      2958
      year13 |        12  11433.42   8798.91      7399      5219     15989      3320     28776
      year14 |        12  15041.42  8092.689   11552.5      8818   20299.5      7974     29839
      year15 |        12  24992.25  19299.52   17514.5      9151   37009.5      7644     68601
      year16 |        12  16553.67  9350.784   12505.5   10668.5   19635.5      9844     42233
      year17 |        12  63804.75  67452.29     38296   17930.5   83022.5     13664    238433
      year18 |        12  67431.75  34995.66     66895     38393     88373     20733    136872
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Percent changes of intra-month registered account:
The figures decreased 91.6% when bitcoin fell 83.9%.
It gives us a potential causal inference that implementation of merit system and new rank requirements have bigger effects than the falls of bitcoin.
One more finding, the intra-month figures after September of 2018 (Junior Member demotions) fell significantly than the before period. I think it make sense.

Detail calculation presented below.

Code:

* BTC price
. di (19800-3190)*100/19800
83.888889
* Intra-month registered accounts
. di (238400-20046)*100/238400
91.591443

The means of before and after Sept. 2018 are 80179 and 29190 (respectively)
The percent of difference is 63.6%

Code:

    variable |         N      mean        sd       p50       p25       p75       min       max
-------------+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
      before |         9     80179  30633.52     83999     61360     89659     41451    136872
       after |         3     29190  7570.575     31502     20733     35335     20733     35335
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Code:

. di (80179-29190)*100/80179
63.593959

Some information is here too Assumed monthly statistics on registered accounts of bitcointalk.org (2009-2019)

Honestly, I have idea to do this just two or three days ago, but I have not yet imported data so please wait for one or two weeks.

Coin-1 has that one: [Chart] Bitcointalk statistics on impression counts for ads. I know it months ago, but as I said I am going give you a different statistical thread on this aspect.

I gonna back when I finish my works. Stay tuned!

[Danydee]

 I also noticed this, the diminution is clearly visible. For the cause, my think go to that users are discouraged by the merit system, the older members  no longer find what's interesting to do, so they come less frequently to the forum..    !  What else ?

[DdmrDdmr]

<…> new forum: are we going to be able to migrate our account when the new forum is released or our account will be automatically moved there or do we have to start from the at the beginning again?

If the data structure for the new forum-to-be is aligned with that of Bitcointalk, which it seems to be, then the logical move is to migrate the accounts (and posts/threads/etc.). I mean, the idea is to migrate to a new forum, not to create a new forum per-se, which would be a pointless move.

That does not mean that, in the process, some considerations may be made from a logical point of view (i.e. decide whether to migrate or not all nuked accounts, freeing-up those usernames in the process), and some technical ones (i.e., avatar may or may not be migratable, depending on the acceptable formats on the new platform – although I figure they will be).

[Maslate]

The numbers have decrease but if its the quality members that are here, that stats would be alright, the forum will survive even with more market struggle.
I think the main reason is the market itself, once this market turn into bullish, for sure we will see some surge of visitors in this forum.