I read this terrible article and I'd like to comment it.
The only way to get rid of “newbie” status and become a more senior member is to get Merit from other users. A user can give Merit to others only if he has received Merit himself first. Merit is produced by the founding users of Bitcointalk and their close circle, who distribute it to the users they like so-called “The Bitcointalk Elite”. The problem is that this “Bitcointalk Elite” will never give Merit to a new user, and neither does other established users. It will require a very long chain of users until the Merit will reach a new user, so this happens very rarely. Established users give Merit only to each other, which boosts their ranking, while new users stay as newbies for a long time since no one gives them Merit.
Merits are the incentive for users to make high quality posts. The merit count on each member's profile page shows how much he/she has helped. Anyone that finds someone's post useful, helpful or even funny can send merits to it and this is how I justify it. If the new user's posts are one of the above for the community, then they'll be merited.
The Merit system is the reason and cause for all unfairness on Bitcoitalk forum. It’s the tool that is used to separate users based on their “authority” and to give them different privileges.
Why unfairness? Because some trustworthy members are chosen to distribute their sMerits objectively?
On the paper, the Trust system sounds like a good idea. People give positive trust as good feedback for a successful transaction and negative trust if someone scammed or tried to scam them. However, in reality, it doesn’t work like that.
First of all, Trust feedback from the senior member has more weight than Trust feedback from a junior member, especially a newbie.
OF COURSE IT DOES. How can you convince me that the newbie isn't a scammer? I don't know about you, but I would surely prefer to read someone's feedback that has been here for more than 2 years, than a newbie that can be one of the thousands spamming accounts that are created every day.
Another problem is that senior members usually give negative Trust not because of scam, but because they simply didn’t like that the new member did or say.
Sorry for giving negative trust to one out of one thousand newbies that is not a scammer. Although, I don't believe that there is a high-ranked user that'll send negative feedback for no reason.
These reasons completely ruin the idea of the Trust score and turn it into another tool for bullying new members.
Let's assume that newbies' negative feedback was equal with Senior's negative feedback. Anyone would be able to create a new account and threaten anyone for a negative feedback. Who's the bully now? I personally don't believe that someone would create an account, reach its rank to Senior after 8.5 months and then start doing BS for no reason. (Not to mention that he/she has to reach 250 merits first)
Newbies cannot send personal messages to other users unless those users have particularly allowed newbies to write to them. Most don’t allow, since that’s the default setting. This often creates silly situations where two new members cannot message each other, since they both have that limitation set up.
You know what? I believe that you have confused this forum's purpose. This is bitcointalk, a serious forum with an innovative and world-chaning project, not a colorful-funny-rpg-forum with few members and a disappointing moderation team. Bitcointalk's private messaging system could be easily abused if some people decide to spam on everyone's PMs with advertisements. Even with all these restrictions, there are still newbies creating new topics with their links to improve their SEO.
This is not such an important feature, as the post signature is mainly used for advertising. But it’s still unfair that new members cannot ad links, or images to their signature like more senior users can.
No one can insert images. Exactly because of the reason I explained above. This is not a forum to wear signatures like:
In some cases, if you try to sign-up from an IP that a suspended account has used before, you must pay a ransom to register. The fee is usually a few dollars, but in one case a user found it to be 3640453 satoshis, which is around $1300 at today’s rate; quite a large fee to use a “free” forum.
If that IP was really used for spam, why should the new user pay the fine, for something he didn’t do? This certainly does not sound fair and is a terrible way to welcome a new member.
I believe that you haven't understood how many spammers are registering an account everyday here. I guess that this is a solution to reduce their attempts. Even if this means that no one can use Tor or some VPNs.
While some Bitcointalk members help new users and answer questions, all opinion, either right or wrong are met with bullying, laughs and even rude replies. Thus it’s hard to have any meaningful discussion or promote your new website or service. Bitcointalk.org possibly has the most toxic cryptocurrency community.
I don't know about you, but I have never seen a newbie asking for help and getting bullying and rude replies. I only see friendly posts containing useful answers to their problems. As for the "toxic", you clearly haven't been on another forum again.
It’s better to avoid Bitcointalk. There are a lot other Bitcoin and cryptocurrency forums as well as other platforms where you can write and discuss about cryptocurrencies. Thus there’s no need to go to Bitcointalk.org when you are obviously not welcome there.
You're clearly not welcomed.
