Forum activity by year - Chart 2009-2022

[pawel7777]

source: ninjastic.space

I was compiling the forum activity stats for my own amusement and thought I may just as well share them here (as couldn't find any similar topic).

What strikes me the most here is the enormous levels of activity in 2017 and most of all, 2018. This cannot be a coincidence and there's got to be a reason behind it. I reckon the simplest explanation would be the 2017 rally to almost $20k region (in December 2017) sparking massive interest in BTC and by extent - this forum. But it doesn't really add up, as for most of 2018 the price was free falling and the enthusiasm couldn't be too high. Also, we didn't see any significant increase with the 2021 pump.

Any theories?

[1675622031]

1675622031

[1675622031]

1675622031

[Bitcoin_Arena]

Bitcoin's all-time high at that time happened around 17th December 2017, Ethereum would achieve it's all-time high in that bull run in early 2018. I think it was January. It sparked off a massive altcoin rally and ICOs, bounties, airdrops, spamming, account farming and scam were the thing of the time

Airdrops and bounties were so profitable to bounty hunters at that time, and it's probably a period where there was a very high account registration rate ever. It took a lot of time in 2018 for so many to realize that the bear market had set in after the rally.


The spamming went on for a long time, and it led to the introduction of the merit system later on in 2018

What you see afterward are a result of ;

- Death of ICO hype,
- Less profitability of bounties and Airdrops,
- The long crypto winter from 2018 to 2020,
- Less account farming and spamming due to the introduction of the merit system,
- much improved moderation where one-liners that were a thing back then will get deleted in no time etc

[pawel7777]

...
Airdrops and bounties were so profitable to bounty hunters at that time, and it's probably a period where there was a very high account registration rate ever. It took a lot of time in 2018 for so many to realize that the bear market had set in after the rally.
...

Heh, I completely forgot about that. You're probably spot on here.
Those were the golden times when you could just quickly put together a lousy website, create a token, and then use it to pay desperate 3rd worlders to hype it up, creating value at zero cost.

[Vyeon11]

almost 90% of bitcointalk users are inactive on forums in 2022, will they ever be active again?
or they completely quit the forum.

maybe people who are active on the forum in 2018 are just following along with what's trending, they just want to know what's interesting in this forum, and after they get bored, then slowly stop again from the forum.
Don't take it seriously, I'm just assuming.

[EFS]

Bitcoin_Arena pretty much summed it up. 2018 was the year when Bitcoin peaked both in price movements and in interest. If you check Google search statistics for Bitcoin you probably see similar pattern. Many people met Bitcoin at that time and started researching it. New ICO's are always introduced here. Most of the messages sent back then were also unnecessary spam posts. Even after 5 years, we clean them when they are reported.

Even if the Bitcoin price rises to new ATH's, the forum won't be that active again. Most of the attention has shifted to other platforms on social media. Bitcointalk will no longer be the platform where cryptocurrencies are discussed most actively, but it will remain a boutique venue.

[Edwardard]

almost 90% of bitcointalk users are inactive on forums in 2022, will they ever be active again?
or they completely quit the forum.

Most likely not. Also the spammers' incentives to post anything sh*t and rank up is now out of their league. You got to earn merits now (after 2018) and that is pretty demotivating to them
But hey, there is strength in loyalty not numbers, we still got many informative ppl on here.

Bitcointalk will no longer be the platform where cryptocurrencies are discussed most actively.

But the most technical questions are/will be still asked only on bitcointalk forum (mostly in development & technical discussion section and bitcoin technical support board). I dont find ppl discussing on some of those topics (posted in those boards) in other social medias such as tg or twitter. So, bitcointalk is still the hub for tech geeks

[Plaguedeath]

almost 90% of bitcointalk users are inactive on forums in 2022, will they ever be active again?
or they completely quit the forum.

It depends on how you define active

What does @OP show here is total number of posts, but there are also users login and exploring this forum but didn't create any post because they don't have to. Sometime I search about old thread and check of few old accounts, actually they're login for few times only but their last post mostly on 2017/2018.

Although total posts are greatly decreased after 2018, but I'm just curious does it's really good for the forum? a lot traffic will boost the site rank, but it's full of low value post, it's really annoying for many users. But if the total post is small but it do have a higher quality, Bitcointalk wouldn't developed/improved a lot.

[Awaklara]

Although total posts are greatly decreased after 2018, but I'm just curious does it's really good for the forum? a lot traffic will boost the site rank, but it's full of low value post, it's really annoying for many users. But if the total post is small but it do have a higher quality, Bitcointalk wouldn't developed/improved a lot.

forums have tried to fight back against the hard times when forums were full of spammers. But I'm sure the Merit system that was implemented was quite successful in reducing the old spam accounts, only increasing activity to be able to rank up. however things don't work anymore, and that leaves quite a few accounts in 2017 inactive.
I'm sure now everything looks better, even if not with a large number of posts, forums with useful and quality posts will look better.

[BitcoinGirl.Club]

Any theories?

It all started from 2017 ICO season and then when BTC and ALT started to deny the market after early 2018 then everything started to slow. ICO investors lost their money and the teams were becoming millionaires. Crypto for individuals at it's worse time I think was in between 2017 - 2018. But overall the publicity and media coverage increased as a result many people heard about it. From 2019 to until now it seems things are stable. Even last ATH did not make any major impact 

[pawel7777]

almost 90% of bitcointalk users are inactive on forums in 2022, will they ever be active again?
or they completely quit the forum.

This metric (true or not) doesn't really say anything. Number of accounts doesn't represent number of actual users. In the "pre-merit" era, account farming was a big thing. And it's quite normal that a lot of people would just quickly create an account only for one-time use purpose and never come back, this is not unique to bitcointalk.

maybe people who are active on the forum in 2018 are just following along with what's trending, they just want to know what's interesting in this forum, and after they get bored, then slowly stop again from the forum.
Don't take it seriously, I'm just assuming.

That's also a normal cycle, very few people would have consistent level of activity throughout their lives. People join, leave, come back again etc. Normal thing.

Although total posts are greatly decreased after 2018, but I'm just curious does it's really good for the forum?

Not really, iirc the level of spam was becoming unbearable. That's what you get when when you provide incentive to posting (bounty campaigns etc) without any quality expectations. It was not uncommon to see i.e. someone just copying someone else's reply from the middle of the thread and posting as their own. Many such cases.

As mentioned above, ICO dying natural death helped the most, I would imagine implementing the merit system played a good part, but it was introduced at the beginning of 2018 so if it had any effect, it was delayed in time.

[dkbit98]

Any theories?

There is nothing unusual about big spike of activity we had back in 2017 and 2018, most of the people heard about Bitcoin at that time and simple search would lead them to bitcointalk forum.
This was all connected with big increase of Bitcoin price, creation of many new shitcoins and ICO projects, everyone was mining the ''new bitcoin'' with GPU's and hoping to start early earning various tokens.
I remember days new projects started to pop up all the time, and we couldn't manage to report all the scams that played mostly on greed of people.
It's perfectly normal that this house of cards was going to collapse at some point and activity to get back in normal.   

[Husires]

If there is something strange, it is the number of activities in the year 2021. If we compare what happened in the year 2014, 2017 and 2018, we will notice that the price increased at the same pace in the year 2021. However, we did not witness an increase in the number of activities, and the reason for that is either the lack of paid campaigns in the forum or because of The influence of the merit system made creating armies of new accounts a waste of time.

This data will not give us a complete picture except with more data such as the number of notifications, blocked accounts, bitcoin price, paid campaigns.