How about locking some ANN threads that are from proven scammers?

[DaveF]

I think over the years many of us have come to Meta to complain about the scams and other obvious things going on, including virus / malware posting, obvious fake shilling, and other things. theymos / the mods have always refused to do anything about it. They don't really seem to care how badly it hurts the reputation of the forum or BTC / Crypros in general.

This is their house, we are just guests here so to speak. There are many other places on the internet where I spend time that are much better regulated, have better conversations and little to no scams. But, it's a top down situation and new users have to prove themselves. Some people feel that it makes entering the boards to do anything other then read much more difficult. On the other hand, if I needed help or advice as a newbie on something you would not have to deal with the fact that there are dozens of people sitting there waiting to rip me off. If you are in the support / help section you are there to help others.

With all that being said, and this is my opinion only, I think sooner or later there is going to be a mass exodus of people here because of it. Not that 100 people leave here and go to another board. But 10 people leave and go to board "A", another 25 leave and go to board "B", another 25 just leave the discussion board world entirely, some others spend more time on reddit, some of the more tech people just help others on github and so on.
They might come back and post here and there but for the most part it's going to change a lot.

As I said, just my opinion, I could be wrong. Showing my age a bit here but I have seen it happen since dial up BBS use during the early 1980's. Some of them with 10000+ users which was an INSANE amount back then died in a year, not because of any other reason then people got fed up with some section or thing and left, and then a few other people noticed that those people were gone and went and spent more time elsewhere too, and then poof ghost town.

-Dave

[The Sceptical Chymist]

You could be correct, you might be wrong--time will tell. 

Hate to say this, but I think even some of the best members here are motivated to post (or at least post more) because of signature campaigns.  That's a feature that's unique to bitcointalk as far as I know and it's a major driver of traffic here. 

In that link you sent me, you can see that forum traffic has dropped significantly in the past couple of years.  I happen to think that's at least partially the result of the merit system.  It used to be that someone could create his own farm of accounts and rank them up to Legendary status simply by posting enough and the passage of time--and then they could either sell the account(s) or earn the max in sig campaigns with the highest rank. 

Nowadays that isn't possible, and I think a lot of people have given up trying to make a living on bitcointalk.  Notice that you don't see many threads in Meta anymore bitching about how hard it is to earn merits.  Meta used to be full of them.  Part of me says good riddance, but I'd hate to see signature campaigns disappear entirely.  That would almost certainly happen if traffic to bitcointalk dropped so low that it no longer made sense for anyone to use members' signature space for advertising.

[DaveF]

You could be correct, you might be wrong--time will tell. 

Hate to say this, but I think even some of the best members here are motivated to post (or at least post more) because of signature campaigns.  That's a feature that's unique to bitcointalk as far as I know and it's a major driver of traffic here. 

In that link you sent me, you can see that forum traffic has dropped significantly in the past couple of years.  I happen to think that's at least partially the result of the merit system.  It used to be that someone could create his own farm of accounts and rank them up to Legendary status simply by posting enough and the passage of time--and then they could either sell the account(s) or earn the max in sig campaigns with the highest rank. 

Nowadays that isn't possible, and I think a lot of people have given up trying to make a living on bitcointalk.  Notice that you don't see many threads in Meta anymore bitching about how hard it is to earn merits.  Meta used to be full of them.  Part of me says good riddance, but I'd hate to see signature campaigns disappear entirely.  That would almost certainly happen if traffic to bitcointalk dropped so low that it no longer made sense for anyone to use members' signature space for advertising.

I started a thread about posting while wearing a sig:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5216979.msg53586174#msg53586174

But paid signatures are not new, I was wearing one on a Suzuki Bandit board before satoshi even thought of BTC
As of now I only know of 1 other place that still has one, and it's all about gambling / casinos so it's probably pulling from the same bunch.
They went invite only late 2019 due to some.....lets put it this way....legal issues due to promoting gambling... but I just looked in and the sigs are still there.
Not sure of the pay rate vs here.

-Dave

[libert19]

Whenever I come across any scummy threads, I report them and they get locked or deleted most of times. Did you experience otherwise?

[PrimeNumber7]

you can see that forum traffic has dropped significantly in the past couple of years.  I happen to think that's at least partially the result of the merit system.  It used to be that someone could create his own farm of accounts and rank them up to Legendary status simply by posting enough and the passage of time--and then they could either sell the account(s) or earn the max in sig campaigns with the highest rank. 

I think the merit system has most affected the altcoin subs. There are few (no?) merit sources that are active in the altcoin subs, so if you mostly post in those sections, you probably won't get much merit, even if you make good posts.

I also suspect that many altcoins, and token projects were using farmed accounts to generate fake interest in their projects, and the merit system makes this more difficult. For the reasons stated above, the merit system also makes it difficult for actual interest to be generated for projects because it looks like everyone posting has (near) zero merit.