EXPRESS THOUGHTS ABOUT B&H AND RANK AND MERIT SYSTEM

[erikoy]

The beginners & help section had blasted with new threads lately on scam related threads. I have seen that many wanted to help as it is their intention is to keep everybody aware from the current events and news of scam topics. It was indeed helpful to us newbie or not newbie users as for the awareness of the information posted by these users.

This is good sign that the B&H section had started to become active to users especially the low ranks. We cannot expect higher ranks to help us always from their sharing of knowledge in regards to cryptocurrency. Low rank users are now also striving hard to learn and be educated sharing the same goals and intention and that is to help instead of shitposting to attain certain posts required from bounty while earning few merits to rank up. This is the design that the management wanted to happen for the forum in line of what a forum should be.

The transition of shitposting, copy and paste posts and bounty reports had minimized already. Seeing that joining bounty campaign does not really pay at all times then other bounty hunters strive to make a post to get merit to rank up. My guess is that this is not a problem in fact the shitposting activities had somehow stabilized to a minimum level and hopefully it will be completely eradicated. I am not sure that rank and merit system implemented is a hindrance to rank up but to what I observe is that it is indeed effective in the change of the way users behave. I was happy seeing this happen and I am also helping in little ways or things that I can do for the other users by actively participating in the discussions and learning the replies of other users. I am barely like to start a thread but this time I made this up for the gratitude that other users had been always helping each other.

In this post, I just wanted to express my thoughts regarding on rank and merit system and how effective it was and how it change a lot for the forum. I myself too wanted to rank up and this is why I had changed a little bit to earn merits but I am not begging in this posts just wanted to give feedback to management about the current system. The forum certainly headed towards an ideal forum plus with the new forum to be released soon that I am positive the management could attain great achievement to it. So Congratulations to the management. Job well done!

[mk4]

I'm pretty sure the consensus between non-spamming people here is that the new merit system has been an incredible success in making the Bitcointalk experience better. Like 95% of the negative complaints about the merit system has been mostly from people with 300+ activity with 1 or zero merits anyway lol.

Kudos to Theymos for making this move even if it means that forum traffic most likely decreased because of it.

[tranthidung]

The beginners & help section had blasted with new threads lately on scam related threads. I have seen that many wanted to help as it is their intention is to keep everybody aware from the current events and news of scam topics. It was indeed helpful to us newbie or not newbie users as for the awareness of the information posted by these users.

Good initiatives but such threads should be on Scam Accusations.

I think positively about such threads in Beginners & Help, it help newbies (who have not yet known and visited the Scam Accusations subboard to get warnings on phishing sites.

To imporve, in Beginners & Help, creators should make threads on general scam detective methods (guides) rather than report phishing sites or scam projects separately there.

Beginners & Help - All primitive questions (to pros like us Cool) like "what are ASICS", "who is satoshi" and "what is mining" should stay here.

Anyway, it is more good than harm.

I forgot to mention about topic title earlier.

"Express thoughts about B&H and rank and merit system" looks better.

Also please see: Bitcointalk posting etiquette

[pooya87]

i don't think that much has really changed about shitposting to be honest. we just don't see it anymore mainly because there hasn't been that many low quality but paying campaigns that hire these shitposters. with the death of ICOs they basically went away and even though we keep seeing some pop up every now and then under different names like DeFi but the ICO hype is effectively dead for now.
if similar hype began, we will surely see a surge of shitposters on bitcointalk again.
example is the yobit campaign a while ago which filled the forum with them within the short time it ran.

We cannot expect higher ranks to help us always from their sharing of knowledge in regards to cryptocurrency. Low rank users are now also striving hard to learn and be educated

well most of the "knowledge" is already out there and within reach. all it takes is using a search engine and typing in the question they have. it is also a lot faster and more accurate to gain the knowledge about basic things (how bitcoin works, what is mining, what happens when all bitcoins are mined,...) that way instead of asking on a forum.
most of the times the questions are asked so many times that people don't feel like repeating the same answer again.

[Coyster]

The beginners & help section had blasted with new threads lately on scam related threads. I have seen that many wanted to help as it is their intention is to keep everybody aware from the current events and news of scam topics. It was indeed helpful to us newbie or not newbie users as for the awareness of the information posted by these users.

The threads can help of course, but to an extent. I am still surprised how users fall for some of this scams, mostly giveaway related. Tbh i think scams are pretty easy to sidestep, I mean, users still use custodial/web wallets, they don't keep their seed phrase secret, users download and click random links, prefer to use Google search to get their wallets rather than go through the official website etc (and imo this instructions are pretty easy to adhere to). This is just a few of the follies users commit and lose their funds in the end, and somewhat makes the efforts of those who make awareness threads on different scammers modus operandi seem futile.

Anyway, it is more good than harm.

I think so too, and imo that's why the mods allow it in that section. I don't think the scam accusation board has much newbie traffic as beginners and help (do you have any statistics to back me up ) so many of them will likely miss or even never see the threads if it's only posted there.

[cryptoaddictchie]

The transition of shitposting, copy and paste posts and bounty reports had minimized already. Seeing that joining bounty campaign does not really pay at all times then other bounty hunters strive to make a post to get merit to rank up.

Its a matter of choice actually. If a user tend to focus on joining campaign and make his profile like a report based encyclopedia with dozen of links. Whom can give him such merits if someone ought to review. Though the quality post he share should value more. But we cant deny that there are users here who checked profile before landing a merit on them.

In this post, I just wanted to express my thoughts regarding on rank and merit system and how effective it was and how it change a lot for the forum. I myself too wanted to rank up and this is why I had changed a little bit to earn merits but I am not begging in this posts just wanted to give feedback to management about the current system.

So what do you think of the system? At first it was little annoying on my part but of course not until I grasp thr process and later on it become a routine for me and that resulted to a good one. Keep it up, just do what you think is right but always observed rules imposed here on forum.

[Peanutswar]

Some of the threads about the scam-related because what are the most common board does the newbie is going to? Of course, the beginners and help because some of them does not have enough idea, also there are a lot of threads right there you can learn like hashing, logic gates, phishing attacks, and more. This board gives a lot of awareness to other members.

Also about the scam threads again usually (some) members are often visiting the scam accusations board regarding it's included as the child board, so few of our members too are posting it on B&H but still appropriate In Scam Accusations still you can move your topic too.


Merit systems make more filtered the quality of posts of the members, if they think you deserve to have it why not? There are no benefits of holding a lot of merits, they have the rights too who is is the one to receive their smerit.

[DdmrDdmr]

<…>

There are currently around 16 out of 36 threads on the first page of Beginners & Help, that are of a negative connotation, essentially phishing or malware. The positive side to it is that it creates awareness on a popular entry-level board, but I figure the impression for a newcomer is that the cryptosphere is tremendously risk prone (which it is somewhat, until you become aware of the dos and don’ts, even if most of them are obvious from the get-go).

Perhaps it’s a passing phase, merit oriented (I just merited some of the kind, since they are informative and some with potential dangerous outcomes), or due to it being easier to find information on this sort of events than others, we’ll see, but there is a certain lack of genuine beginner questions, let alone positive inputs.  Maybe there are not that many new genuinely interested beginners right now (mark the term interested) to come up with their novice questions.

[Lucius]

Personally, I think that the B&H board is one of the very important parts of the forum, and where every beginner should get some basic guidelines on how the forum works, but also on how to start journey in the crypto world. There has already been discussion that some topics may not belong there, but although various scam projects can be moved to the appropriate board, topics like internet security actually have no alternative but to be moved to off-topic which sometimes happens.

The right balance needs to be found here, and an additional sub-board on internet security has already been proposed - and it would be really good to have it, because someone who is bad about IT/online security is at high risk of falling victim to various crypto scams.

[Insanerman]

I'm pretty sure the consensus between non-spamming people here is that the new merit system has been an incredible success in making the Bitcointalk experience better. Like 95% of the negative complaints about the merit system has been mostly from people with 300+ activity with 1 or zero merits anyway lol.

But it also comes with a disadvantage, in which the forum gained a huge decrease on traffic, on users per se. But somehow, the forum's active members can be counted by a single person in an hour and the good quality posters also decreased (as some of users also had lost hope in the forum after the implementation of Merits and the less signature campaigns that opened for their ranks) drastically which also indicates that the forum's quality (by far) are better compared to the era before merits. Hence, such disadvantages/outcome opened a lot of doors to a better improvement.

Kudos to Theymos for making this move even if it means that forum traffic most likely decreased because of it.

Well, the forum can earn by ads alone in the Auction, hence, it's impossible that the forum would be deceased, even after the implementation of upcoming Epochtalk

[friends1980]

You're making quite a few very interesting remarks, OP.

The Merit-ICO-bounty discussion is rather complicated, more complicated than you'd think at first glance: did ICOs disappear because most of them were scams? Did they disappear because of the Merit system, which decreased the number of (newbie/jr) participants, leading to less "naive" supporters? If so, then how do we explain the new DeFi scams? Etc.

The way I see it, the Merit system has limited the duration period of new spammers: spammers arrive and try to get a few Merits to be eligible for bounty campaigns and then start spamming for a few weeks or months, i.e. the duration of the campaign. After that, they receive their coins which are most of the time either of very low value, or scams, and sometimes they even don't get anything at all.

Thereafter, they realize they've wasted a lot of time for nothing and get out. Their only other option is to stop spamming to gain Merits (which is of course a good thing, but probably rather exceptional).

Conclusion is, I don't believe spamming will be completely eradicated, but spammers will give up eventually thanks to the Merit system. I do believe that it has already become virtually impossible to find post-2017 (post-Merit) high-ranked members spamming these boards.

[The Sceptical Chymist]

OP, length does not equal quality when it comes to posting.  I just wanted to mention that since the gist of your post could have been written much more succinctly, and frankly what you wrote in the OP was bloated (IMO).

Low rank users are now also striving hard to learn and be educated sharing the same goals and intention and that is to help instead of shitposting to attain certain posts required from bounty while earning few merits to rank up. This is the design that the management wanted to happen for the forum in line of what a forum should be.

Not sure I agree with any of this, nor can I even begin to guess how you'd know what lower-ranked members are striving for since very little on bitcointalk is as it seems.  What might look on the surface like simple helpful posts might be attempts to earn merit, might be plagiarized, might be written by a member in the same thread that one of his alt accounts has posted in--you never know.

There are currently around 16 out of 36 threads on the first page of Beginners & Help, that are of a negative connotation, essentially phishing or malware.

Lol, not surprising.  I've got B&H on ignore and have for years, because the times I've visited it, it seemed like most threads were wall-to-wall drivel.  Seems like it's a perfect section to target suckers for scams, too.

[OcTradism]

OP, length does not equal quality when it comes to posting.  I just wanted to mention that since the gist of your post could have been written much more succinctly, and frankly what you wrote in the OP was bloated (IMO).

It is a trend of latest topics I see. Lengthy topics. When I see those topics, I try to skim and scan them. Writing something succinctly help readers feel more comfortable to read and don't miss key points in wall of texts.

[Findingnemo]

I can see a lot of irrelevant and reluctant topics are discussed in the Beginners and help section, even I reported some of them for off-topic to the section mt report was marked as bad so I did stop reporting such posts/threads.We can clearly find which threads are creating for the purpose of earning some merits so members and merit sources don't encourage such activities or else in the future we may see constructively created on topic spam posts everywhere due to merit races.

[Steamtyme]

Good initiatives but such threads should be on Scam Accusations.

I would have to disagree. This should be one of the first boards a complete newbie winds up on. One of the best things they can see are the myriad of ways that people are trying to take your sats. Regardless that these methods can be very similar or even exact copies of older scams; the majority of the world isn't on the look out for these situations anyways.

Scam accusations is better suited when you can actually point to an individual/business/brand not necessarily a scam tactic.

The thing I would like to see more in B&H over an apparent attempt to improve post quality; is factual information. I try to drop into B&H as I genuinely like assisting people and it's one of the best places to find people in need. The last couple times though I've been seeing posts that are fairly well constructed but are so factually flawed you would think it was a joke. It's no help to anybody if the main improvement is quality of layout and appearance built on BS information.

[tranthidung]

Good initiatives but such threads should be on Scam Accusations.

I would have to disagree. This should be one of the first boards a complete newbie winds up on. One of the best things they can see are the myriad of ways that people are trying to take your sats. Regardless that these methods can be very similar or even exact copies of older scams; the majority of the world isn't on the look out for these situations anyways.

Scam accusations is better suited when you can actually point to an individual/business/brand not necessarily a scam tactic.

The thing I would like to see more in B&H over an apparent attempt to improve post quality; is factual information. I try to drop into B&H as I genuinely like assisting people and it's one of the best places to find people in need. The last couple times though I've been seeing posts that are fairly well constructed but are so factually flawed you would think it was a joke. It's no help to anybody if the main improvement is quality of layout and appearance built on BS information.

I guess you thought I was mentioning about OP. If it is so my bad when I expressed my idea into texts. It partially comes from the vague or general phrase in OP 'scam related threads', from which I took the part for scam reports (that I usually see recently) to discuss with. You are right because the phrase contains scam detective tactics as well.  

What I mentioned by 'good initiatives' are threads in Beginners & Help but to report scam or phishing apps / sites to newbies. I think such threads (you see, I used 'threads', not thread so it is not OP) should belong to Scam accusation sub-board.

For Beginners & Help, it needs more generalized threads, scam detective methods, guides (or in your words, scam tactic and scam detective tactic).

• Beginners & Help: tactics, guides, questions
• Scam accusation: specific scam reports

There are overlaps between scam report and scam detective tactic/ guides. In scam accusation/ report, there are some points that can be used for tactic so at the end it is up to moderators to leave such threads in B&H or move them to Scam accusation.

Guidelines, how to spot a scam ICO & report effectively is better

"Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime"

[mk4]

But somehow, the forum's active members can be counted by a single person in an hour

You're overly exaggerating.

and the good quality posters also decreased (as some of users also had lost hope in the forum after the implementation of Merits and the less signature campaigns that opened for their ranks)

If they were actually really "good quality posters", they wouldn't have lost hope or have any problems with earning merits.

[Pmalek]

...prefer to use Google search to get their wallets rather than go through the official website etc (and imo this instructions are pretty easy to adhere to).

If it is the first time someone uses a wallet, like Electrum, he has to rely on the results of a search engine because he is not familiar with the site. What is important is to not visit google ads and run the site through whois to get more info about it. If it was created recently, there is a big chance you are on a fake/phishing site. Once you visit the genuine site, bookmark and save the link, and visit it only from your bookmarks in the future. 

[erikoy]

<snip>

Thanks for the compliment. I know that many users here are already expressing their thoughts toward the effeciency and success of rank and merit system as shown in some statistical reports the decreased number of spam posts. Yet, it is not yet too late to express it.

My intention here also is to include my opinion on the development of the forum if compared before and after the rank and merit system implemented. As time pass t more users realize the importance of utilzation of the forum or what actually a forum should be where we could exchange ideas to a certain issues in regards to cryptocurrency or even off topic.

I am glad that it also change me as a user of the overview of the forum. The forum now is worth it for cryptocurrency related discussions which admin really created and intnded for. It may be a little bit late for to express here but at least I made it. I have great gratitude of bitcointalk forum. It change me not only a user but a person itself having a positive outlook in life.

[Welsh]

In regards to threads being posted in the Beginners & help section that are of negative connotation; The assumption is that newbies will be more prone to falling for these types of scams, and phishing attempts. Although, this isn't always the case, I guess there is some logic behind it. Therefore, depending on the actual information within the thread I would say it is OK depending on the content to be posted to the Beginners & help section. However, that's entirely depending on the perception of the moderator dealing with the report, because it could go both ways. My viewpoint is if the thread is quite obviously talking about basic concepts, and is aimed towards a newcomer to cryptocurrencies then it would likely be appropriate within that section.

I would say that guides to avoid scams, and tips about researching would be more appropriate than outright scam accusations. Scam accusations do not belong in Beginners & help, unless they're case studies included with a guide of some sort. As for complaints, and various other things it likely belongs in a different section e.g post about the forum belong in meta, a post about a exchange belongs in the exchange section, and a post about a user belongs in reputation most of the time.

If it is the first time someone uses a wallet, like Electrum, he has to rely on the results of a search engine because he is not familiar with the site. What is important is to not visit google ads and run the site through whois to get more info about it. If it was created recently, there is a big chance you are on a fake/phishing site. Once you visit the genuine site, bookmark and save the link, and visit it only from your bookmarks in the future.  

There's also a big chance that misinformation has been spread on this forum whether it was intentional or not. Its very rarely that someone has completely understood a concept, and not only that be able to convey it to someone else accurately. Things like best ways to avoid phishing can be informative, but can also be biased based on their perception, and may even be incomplete. Unfortunately, in every walk of life we can only offer guidance its up to the person to digest that, improve upon it, and find their way.

The Merit-ICO-bounty discussion is rather complicated, more complicated than you'd think at first glance: did ICOs disappear because most of them were scams? Did they disappear because of the Merit system, which decreased the number of (newbie/jr) participants, leading to less "naive" supporters? If so, then how do we explain the new DeFi scams? Etc.

I believe quite a few countries have updated their laws to become more strict on ICOs, and how they can operate. This may or may not have had a significant contribution to the reduction of ICOs. As well as anything, overtime people will become more aware of bad businesses, and the telltale signs. For example, many years ago scam phone calls were very successful, and although they can still be successful today the general population are far more aware of this than 20 years ago.