Reduced forum activity

[Lucius]

I would have thought that the lock downs would have increased activity, but maybe people are playing games and watching Netflix instead.

I think that during the lockdown a lot of people spent too much time online and because of that they changed their behavior a bit, and probably now enjoying some offline activities because the weather is ideal for it. Winter is approaching (they say that this year will come in mid-autumn in Europe), so people will be inside again, and it is likely that some measures will be intensified in order to combat the spread of the virus.

I don't know what happened.  Are there fewer bounties/signature campaigns these days?  Maybe members find ranking up too hard and thus can't earn much in sig campaigns? 

I can't say how many bounty campaigns there are compared to a few years ago - although we recently saw that Altocins boards are the most active part of the forum, but I can say that there are quite enough signature campaigns that pay directly in BTC, although most of them only ask for Senior members and above. I think there’s something about bounty no longer being that cost-effective, and at the same time reaching Senior rank is a mission impossible for most.

I would just add one more thing, many were left disappointed after the halving which was largely misinterpreted as something followed by a big bull run. As people mostly look at BTC as a source of profit, it is logical that they are not here if the current price is only slightly higher than it was a year ago.

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[Jet Cash]

I'm not sure whether to start this merit awarding project, or to revive the Fit to Talk English project. I've just updated the software, and cleared out all the spam, so maybe that could be the first project. It would be interesting to discover how things are improving ( if they are ) in other countries around the world.

[notblox1]

What is merit awarding project Jet Cash?
I am not sure any other forum attracts people attention at the moment, and I would rather be smart and make some important changes in bitcointalk.

Maybe having some social media promotion would not be a bad idea.
Does Bitcointalk have active twitter account?
Maybe someone can post best posts of the day and week in twitter.

[The Sceptical Chymist]

I think there’s something about bounty no longer being that cost-effective, and at the same time reaching Senior rank is a mission impossible for most.

Yeah, I think bounties were always a risky proposition for the participants, as sometimes they wouldn't get paid at the end, or the token would be worthless, or they'd get hit with a KYC requirement right at the end.  I have a question, though:  what are the current bounties promoting?  Up until 2019 (I think) it was primarily ICOs, but are there any of those still being created?  Is it mostly DeFi bounties now?

I would just add one more thing, many were left disappointed after the halving which was largely misinterpreted as something followed by a big bull run. As people mostly look at BTC as a source of profit, it is logical that they are not here if the current price is only slightly higher than it was a year ago.

I'm not sure how much the halving affected forum activity.  If I remember correctly, the halving and the start of the COVID-19 pandemic were around the same time, and not only didn't bitcoin rise significantly post-halving but it dropped off a cliff for a short period of time when the lockdowns started.  Now bitcoin is back above $10k, but the forum just seems kinda bleh even with that.

I'm not sure whether to start this merit awarding project, or to revive the Fit to Talk English project.

I wouldn't bother with the Fit to Talk English thing, since it doesn't seem like ranking up is a priority for many new members and therefore they don't need to make good posts in English in order to earn merit--and so they probably wouldn't have much enthusiasm for an English-as-a-bitcointalk-language program. 

I don't know what you're planning with the merit-awarding thing, but you've had a lot of good ideas in the past so I'd say go for it.

[NavI_027]

Maybe having some social media promotion would not be a bad idea.
Does Bitcointalk have active twitter account?
Maybe someone can post best posts of the day and week in twitter.

Yeah! Not a bad idea. Actually it was a nice way to promote our forum in a broader sea of audience. However, I am just not sure if it will boom like on the pages/accounts of celebrities or great content creators. Let me give you an example.

I still remember that one of the members of our local board decided to create an FB group dedicated for the btctalk members in our country way back 2018 AFAIR. Unfortunately, it became inactive eventually. Sometimes I saw posts from it but more of referral links that's why I get annoyed and ignore it already . (Sorry if I can no longer find the group, I guess it was renamed already). That's why I thought it will be pointless to create one.

[Jet Cash]

I've never joined twitter, just the very name put me off. In English, a "twit" is a stupid unintelligent person, and "twitter" is a susurration of mindless chatter. The recent woke issue of bags of hard boiled eggs on sale in Morrison's supermarket bears this out. It seems that Morrison's put out bags of hard boiled eggs that weren't being used in their salad preparations. There were about a dozen in a bag, and they had labelled them a 5 eggs. Well that caused some stupid girl to kick off because of inaccurate labelling, She also though it was disgusting that bags of a dozen eggs were being sold. I'm with Morrison's in this matter, their comment ws that shoppers should see them as a chance of a bargain, and it is better to sell them at a low price, than to throw away perfectly good food. This seems to be the level of conversation on twitter - please keep them away from Bitcoin Talk.

I think I will run the 4x25 merit rewards project, and I'll work out some rules for eligibility. It won't be based on rank, ethnicity, religion or sexual preference. Even those with their dangly bits cut off will be eligible, I'd like to include politics, but not things like Trump's hairstyle - the impact of sanctions on Huawei id much more interesting to me. Also I think that virus panicdemics (sic) have been done to death now, and bounty and ICOs are so last decade.

[Lucius]

It would be interesting to discover how things are improving ( if they are ) in other countries around the world.

I guess you mean the state of the pandemic in the world, and I will say that it is enough to look at the daily number of infected people so that some things become much clearer - what is currently happening seems to me personally to be the beginning of the second wave, at least in the EU. The second image shows the total number of new infections in the world on a daily basis.

 

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

I have a question, though:  what are the current bounties promoting?  Up until 2019 (I think) it was primarily ICOs, but are there any of those still being created?  Is it mostly DeFi bounties now?

What they always promote, some new tokens that are always better than the previous ones, have some revolutionary solutions that will change the world or something like that. I know you have altcoin boards to ignore so you can not check, but I can confirm that many of them are focused on DeFi projects, or some stablecoins backed with gold.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=238.0

I'm not sure how much the halving affected forum activity.  If I remember correctly, the halving and the start of the COVID-19 pandemic were around the same time, and not only didn't bitcoin rise significantly post-halving but it dropped off a cliff for a short period of time when the lockdowns started.  Now bitcoin is back above $10k, but the forum just seems kinda bleh even with that.

The pandemic was declared March 11/12, while halving occurred 2 months later (11 May, 2020). and that day the lowest price was $ 8,374.32, which is actually the lowest price from halving to date according to data from CMC. What many expected (and if I'm not mistaken you have a Bitcoin discussion to ignore) is that the price will immediately magically jump to some values close to ATH - but there was only a recovery to pre-pandemic values, which by the way are equal to those values of exactly a year ago. From the point of view of those who look at everything through the prism of price and profit, Bitcoin is interesting only when a bull run takes place - which means that most are still waiting for a replay of what happened at the end of 2017.

[Jet Cash]

I didn't really want to get into discussing the current panicdemic. Infection rates are nit relevant with a minor epidemic like this, as eventually everybody will be infected. What is more important is the speed of the spreading of immunity, and the ICU admissions and deaths resulting from co-morbidities. So many people seem to accept the Pharma and banking narratives without question, that it is no longer possible to maintain sensible discussions, and that is why I wanted to exclude related topics.

I have often hoped to encourage discussions about domain names here, but there doesn't seem to be much interest. Domain names are to property as Bitcoin is to banking, so they should sit well together. It is one of my ambitions to encourage the use of Bitcoin as a payment method for domain names, but I don't seem to get any support for it in this forum.

[Lucius]

I didn't really want to get into discussing the current panicdemic. Infection rates are nit relevant with a minor epidemic like this, as eventually everybody will be infected.

I just answered your question, if you really thought about the situation in the world regarding the pandemic in connection with the reduction of activity in this and other forums based on your first post. Without going into any further discussion, it is my opinion that this is not something that can be called "minor epidemic", unless you think the data on the number of infected/dead people are fake. If the total population were infected, and if only 1% died, that would mean 78 million deaths - and for comparison, World War II. had between 50-80 million dead/killed.

I have often hoped to encourage discussions about domain names here, but there doesn't seem to be much interest. Domain names are to property as Bitcoin is to banking, so they should sit well together. It is one of my ambitions to encourage the use of Bitcoin as a payment method for domain names, but I don't seem to get any support for it in this forum.

I have nothing against paying for domains with BTC, I have been doing this for years, and I always pay for hosting and domains in crypto, and I promote a company that makes it possible.

[Jet Cash]

it is my opinion that this is not something that can be called "minor epidemic", unless you think the data on the number of infected/dead people are fake.

Of course I believe that the evidence is manipulated, and that is why I no longer wish to discuss it. It has become almost a religion to believe in the evil virus monster, that hasn't yet managed to kill any healthy people. It is now being called a casedenic, as the number of cases has to be used to frighten people, as the death rate is non-existent.

With regard to domain names and Bitcoin - I am sure there are several members who are active in such sales, but my point is that they don't discuss them in this forum, and I think it would be beneficial to the forum if they did so.

[Welsh]

Think it entirely depends on the sort of jobs that people have here on the forum. For example, our industry was considered essential right through the pandemic, and therefore we've had an insane workload throughout it. We did initially have a few people furloughed, but the essential workers within the company were still running around all over the place. I'm only now starting to see a reduction in our workload, and it seems its just in time for a 2nd full scale lockdown, so we'll see how the next few weeks pan out, but in our industry its largely being run by a few individuals that have to take a lot of work on, while others are completely without work on furlough. Thus, my time personally has been reduced recently, as well as being exhausted half the time.

I can't speak for everyone, but that's a little insight into one of the industries which the country relies on. Of course, not everyone works in essential jobs, and I don't think the vast majority do as I would probably take a guess that a lot of users here work within the IT industry, and even if that does involve what is deemed as essential work it can usually be carried out from home.

Also, it seems that a lot of people took advantage of furlough, and started having BBQs, parties, and all sorts of random stuff that they usually wouldn't do. It was treated as a holiday by many. I won't get into the numbers being manipulated as I think its pretty evident the government, and news sources have been picking, and choosing their headlines, and statistics to push a certain narrative. Right through this pandemic there's been several contradictions.

It's probably worth noting that generally forum software in this sort of forum has been declining for years, and social media is starting to take over. Reddit, for example despite how much I hate the upvote system that seems to be the rising way of discussing all sorts of things. Personally, I like this sort of software, and won't be making the transition to other social medias in a hurry.

[bitcoinsvrocks]

This is most likely because Bitcointalk users are not interested in Bitcoin anymore,
I remember this forum long time ago, i used to have an account here, i forgot what my username was, but i do remember there was little activity in the altcoin section until the day that Dogecoin thread started then it was all altcoin and every hour there was a new one, then it was the HYIP section and shady casinos, now it seems like the most active threads are about internal politics inside Bitcointalk what most users don't find interesting to read, all those coins that launched here are not popular anymore, new coins and projects are using Twitter, Telegram and Discord to communicate with their community so Bitcointalk has no use for those people.
I was looking at the Alexa of Bitcointalk.org
https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/bitcointalk.org#trafficstats
and i can see that the global ranking is high
and other sites like Coingeko or Cryptocompare are ranked higher
and looking at the keywords searches for visitors accessing Bitcointalk is not related to Crypto or Bitcoin.

[notblox1]

Oh please don't start one more pandemic talk here please... instead let's think of the ways how we can improve forum with some changes and attract new people.
It is true that people in general are shifting from old to new style forums, and that should be considered for change with new design, maybe something similar to Discourse would be more popular this days.

I still don't think there is any other crypto forum more popular and more active than Bitcointalk, except maybe 4chan, but I consider that website unusable trash, even if people are using it.

We are still ranked high at 11th place:
https://www.forumrankings.net/

[Jet Cash]

Maybe I'm too old, but I like this sryle of forum. I don't like the so-called modern styles, which seem to be jumbles to me.

I'm doing my bit to try to attract new sellers to this forum. I have a thread about it on Rag St = https://ragst.com/index.php?topic=3.0
Maybe other members with suitable web sites could promote the forum and the use of Bitcoin.

[bitcoinsvrocks]

I think loyal readers of Bitcointalk like it here because the conversation goes slow,
New projects are using Discord or Telegram only and is very hard to get all the news because one week in crypto is like one year in real life and the conversation trough those channels goes really fast.
The spam i think is reduced in Telegram and Discord, here in Bitcointalk is much more, for example here in this tread i seen advertising about Chipmixer like 7 times, and i don't have BTC so is totally irrelevant to me, i am not going to use Chipmixer, and also i am starting to hate Chipmixer because all this spam, in Discord and Telegram the spam is diferent, you get a few users per week sending you spam but you can just block them and the spam ends, and also is not the same spam all the time, like Chipmixer  
At least Chipmixer can use random advertising to make their spam less painful to watch, because it really hurt my eyes.

[Jet Cash]

Well you really should look to getting some Bitcoin for savings. I don't use Chipmixer as I am a Bitcoin maximalist and HODLer, but I no longer notice their banners, so it doesn't really affect me. One good thing about Chipmixer is that they seem to select some of the better members into their programme, and id they can earn a bit of income from helping members of this forum, then I see that as a positive benefit.

[Lucius]

i am not going to use Chipmixer, and also i am starting to hate Chipmixer because all this spam, in Discord and Telegram the spam is diferent, you get a few users per week sending you spam but you can just block them and the spam ends, and also is not the same spam all the time, like Chipmixer  
At least Chipmixer can use random advertising to make their spam less painful to watch, because it really hurt my eyes.

I'm not sure if newbie members have any restrictions when it comes to certain settings in their profiles - but if signatures bother you so much, here's a simple solution -> Click Profile -> Look and Layout Preferences -> Select Don't show users' signatures + you can also block users avatars in same way.

Now that we have a very simple solution to block signatures and avatars, can we conclude that some things stem from the fact that some users of this and other forums do not really know how to use the forum, or adjust it to their needs?

[KaneVWE]

Well you really should look to getting some Bitcoin for savings. I don't use Chipmixer as I am a Bitcoin maximalist and HODLer, but I no longer notice their banners, so it doesn't really affect me. One good thing about Chipmixer is that they seem to select some of the better members into their programme, and id they can earn a bit of income from helping members of this forum, then I see that as a positive benefit.

No. Wrong.

They selected some of the least successful morons spreading misinformation and crushing the free speech on this forum.
Why else would people that have been here all of these years need to spam chipmixer?
They are broke down bums that are crap at trading and have very poor judgement in general. Some of the biggest failures here in terms of why most people honestly join this forum. To make money. That is why the forum explodes every BTC high. The gold rush.

It is very simple why the traffic has left bitcointalk.

1. This lull always takes places after a bull has run out of steam and we wait the next period of time for an all time high where the mass media slathers bitcoin over the news 24/7 and people think bingo... here is now the next gold rush opportunity. People even some long term holders really start to capitulate on long bears or stagnation well below last ATH.


2. Other mediums have picked up heavily on crypto. Not all projects are released here. A lot of people get there crypto news and opportunities else where than a pow announced release on here now.

3.  Merit, trust and campaign managers have ensured that there is no more easy access to quick coin or token grabs in any worthwhile amount. Along with the crash in interest due to the long stagnant for bear cycle we've been through. Alts have killed themselves off generally due to dilution death. There are few that " appear" to have some life aka liquidity, volume and cap. These are mostly fake. The distribution is narrow and everything about them is artificial. A handful of exceptions.

4. Even when we hit the next btc ATH I am not expecting this forum to hit levels it did in the last gold rush here .
The word is out now that not just anyone knowing nothing whatsoever can turn up and spam and get their paws on some coins to dump into USD.

5. Although it was annoying for some people on the forum who primarily enjoyed the alt forum , having all of those people filling the forum with crap or gambling their 50 or 100 bucks to try to make 100x more over night breathed a lot of activity  and life and action into the forum. Most were really compulsive gamblers and even their  50 bucks  spamming bounties were gambled on other alts etc.
The answer was not really to kick them all off. The answer was to separate them from those that wanted serious discussion.  You should have kept all the traffic gambling and tons of small steaks and them all spamming the shit out of twitter facebook and all other social media linking back to projects on here for their " bounties" . Smarter folks were simply suggesting junior  (noob jails) for several boards. 

Most of the fools wasting their money on those far out new projects or spamming the shit out of their social media accounts that all linked back to projects here for bounties  were noobs who would never make it off the junior boards but that didnt matter since the only fools that bought into those projects were others of the same type who would be locked there also.

All of that initial WOM traffic , free SM advertising,  free SE traffic  and tons of small steak gambling shares from either them of projects seed money they got a tiny bit of from spamming and advertising for them GONE.
If you take away the small and unskilled peoples ability to grab a tiny slice or their belief they can gain a nice big slice you take away all the effort and drive they bring that is both negative and positive to the forum with a poor design.  But could all converted to mostly positive if the design was changed. Also you could change a negative environment of reporting snitching and punishing.  To mostly recognition and rewarding. The crapsters would just remain in noob jail and have no negative effect on the senior boards.

This is irrelevant until the next bull and BTC ATH.
A couple of people trying to jump start the forum at this point is pointless. People come for MONEY
Better start redesigning the forum to capture all the wind it can next time at ATH to drive it forward.

[erikoy]

The forum may need a little bit of change until such it will achieve something great to which it will be presentable to most users will going to like. Yet, it does not mean changing the forum into unnoticeable where we can't distinguish the old and new forum. The improve should be done gradually so that user can get into adaptation and of course can comment something that it can add to the bitcointalk forum beautification. However, most forum I see like this is usually are text and there could be audio and video but seldom it will be use and that only depend on the user. But this is one added feature to a forum I have been into. This is just my thought and nothing should be taken seriously.

[mindrust]

Not many signature campaigns as they used to be. That's the  #1 reason.

#2 reason, even though most of you don't want to believe it, bitcoin is not as popular as it once was.

#3 reason is a general one. Forums died long time ago.

#4 reason, it became impossible for most people to rank up unless they really put their time and effort in their posts and that was actually intended.
(good news for the good posters, bad news for the account farmers.) Action > Reaction.