Forum Menbership- 3.5m registered only 56k members survived?..... Why?

[Dunamisx]

I'm curious about the forum's membership reduction and what can be to blame. A community with 3.5 million registered users has 2.7 million banned/nuked accounts, 700k accounts are dormant, and just 56k individuals have been active for the past three months.

If we are to analyze it all there could be many reasons attributed to why this figures come to be, consider that the forum is such a platform that you can have a brief view on being a guest but the only restriction is that you can't post unless you're registered, out of the numbers that registered, many are spammer, scammers, trollers or any form or unserious category they could fit in, they would have registered to later discover the forum not to be as they have expected.

This is the main reasons some are leaving or getting banned, the forum is not like the social media they have freedom to misbehave, it not where they can plagiarize, neither are they permitted to make ponzi-like schemes on the forum, they never even thought about bitcointalk being regulated and moderated, so they will definitely leave for somewhere else, this is why the forum still maintain it's standard and reputation, the are to bed to the rules of the forum and not the forum to their own taste as they wish.

unfriendly environment for Newbies/users ?

No, the newbies are coming onboard each day and are progressing doing well as long as you can adhere strictly to the rules, you can check out on the low ranking statistics from here from LoyceV The future of Bitcointalk: Low Ranking Top Merit earners in the past 30 days

DT members oppression ? ( so much red than green these days)

That's not even a threat at all because most of the new members aren't yet familiar with DT or what it even means.

The merit system (high demands for quality)

A little part of this may contribute to the statistics when they discovered that getting merits is not by default but needs to be earned, they may not have that skill, time or knowledge and sacrifice to give in other for them to earn merit over time.

The moderation/rules ( using the ban button more often) ?

this is the highest portion of the forum threat to many people who cannot be law abiding or behalf in an unregulated manners and wouldn't want to be corrected, warned or restricted in doing some particular things.

Low Bitcoin adoption ?

bitcoin adoption is increasing everyday and the more are people putting interest on learning about bitcoin everywhere, but when they get to the forum like this, it appears to them that they meet the whole thing entirely different from the perspective of how how they're viewing ot before coming.

[1714508498]

1714508498

[1714508498]

1714508498

[1714508498]

1714508498

[1714508498]

1714508498

[Hispo]

My first assumption would be that people come and go with the bullruns and the huge altseasons, they sign up to talk about speculation and then never log in again, once the prices tremendously fall beyond expectation. It is something usual with shitcoins, as we all know.

On the other hand, I doubt the forum could disappear by 2030. Even with low traffic, still there will be people and users around here participating and providing quality commentary, because the administration has enough resources for forum maintenance.

We may become a smaller tree house club, but we will continue to be a comfortable one. 

[Lucius]

I'm curious about the forum's membership reduction and what can be to blame. A community with 3.5 million registered users has 2.7 million banned/nuked accounts, 700k accounts are dormant, and just 56k individuals have been active for the past three months.

I would never look at these numbers as something important, because as others have already written, it is not about unique users, but about numbers that largely result from the fact that many have created tens or even hundreds of btt accounts and then they abuse various signature/bounty campaigns. Many of these members tried to rank those accounts in such a way that they plagiarized everything that could be plagiarized, and then someone started a bot that did a big cleanup and a huge number of btt accounts were banned in a very short time.

After 2018 and the merit system, many people gave up on creating btt farm accounts, and more or less all the shitposters gave up on the forum because they no longer had the financial motivation to be here. In essence, those 56k btt accounts you mention are quite a realistic number for one forum, considering that forums are not something that attracts new generations.

[LoyceV]

users has 2.7 million banned/nuked accounts

I don't think those accounts (as counted by BPIP) are all banned, they could just have never created a post. And many are proxy banned because they're created by spammers from an evil IP. Not all bans are a bad thing

Since I started keeping track 4 years ago, 316k users have been banned.

just 56k individuals have been active for the past three months.

You could go a step further and exclude bounty spammers, which includes many people who use many accounts.

I did some analysis and there is a somewhat high chance that the forum will disappear before 2030 if the information on https://bpip.org/ is accurate. Since the forum is losing traffic each month, which is awful from a financial standpoint, I'm wondering what might be the issue.

The forum doesn't (need to) earn from traffic.

unfriendly environment for Newbies/users ?

Definitely! Bitcointalk is scary and unfriendly for many Newbies users. I've said it before: long-term, Bitcointalk can't survive without new users.

DT members oppression ? ( so much red than green these days)

Probably. I'd like to see less negative and more neutral tags in many cases.

The merit system (high demands for quality) ?

I don't think so. Any normal forum user who's not just here for quick money shouldn't really be limited by the Merit system. Besides, when the Merit system was introduced, there were many more posts while less Merit was distributed each week. Without looking up the data, I estimate the Merit-to-post-ratio went up by close to a factor 10.

The moderation/rules ( using the ban button more often) ?

Again: normal users barely get banned, and if it happens accidentally, it gets resolved quickly after pointing it out.

An unfriendly environment is the top reason for this that I've noticed. Newbies are reprimanded for not being very knowledgeable of forum issues, even though that's what's expected of newer members and if they do try to gain a bit of information before joining, they are suspected of being alts.

Lol. One way or another, (most) Newbies aren't welcomed. Luckily, there are some exceptions.

Low Bitcoin adoption ?

More likely: the social media generation doesn't like forums anymore, where there's no algorithm (designed to keep them hooked as long as possible) that decides what they read.

[fillippone]

I wasn’t particularly aware of the forum user base reduction, and thank you, OP, for this analysis, even if I am not sure it’s fully reliable.

Of course, user base reduction is easy to guess. It’s in human nature to get bored of things, and for sure, posting on a forum is one of those activities one can get bored of. I guess it’s pretty natural for users to stop logging in to the forum, and this is even more true for “historical users” who probably got into Bitcoin in the early days. Posting on an internet forum can be perceived as a dull activity when life can move on on the back of the intergenerational wealth accumulated in those early years.
So no wonder there are many early, inactive users.
I have been looking into this as I am on the brink of entering the top 1000 users regarding activity. I am currently slowly grinding activity surpassing long inactive users.
On the other hand, I have been shilling the forum to new users. Who, in theory, should replenish the inactive users in the big life cycle of events.

I have been quite unsuccessful in this task for a series of reasons:

• Forum Format: the forums are a legacy format for the internet. Today we have different mediums of interaction between users: Reddit, Telegram, and online chats. I am not saying those are worse or better than forums. I am saying that most users are not used to posting, waiting for hours for an answer, and having a “static” way of interacting with other users.
• No Mobile theme. Accessing bitcointalk.org via mobile is a nightmare (I can assure you this as I am writing 80% of my content through mobile). This is a problem when mobile users are ubiquitous. If a mobile user wants to try the forum, and it is welcomed by a mobile unfriendly theme, then i think he wouldn’t give it a second chance if ever he logs into a laptop.

On the Italian board, we have been playing with telegram channels, with @mendace and @babo, trying to mimic the forum threads and merit system. The results have been good, a few users registered and posted a few messages on the forum, but retention has also been difficult.

[Halab]

Oh boy. That's what I thought when I read the first lines of your topic.

A community with 3.5 million registered users has 2.7 million banned/nuked accounts, 700k accounts are dormant, and just 56k individuals have been active for the past three months.

LoyceV beat me to it, but there are not 2.7M banned or nuked accounts. Archived is a term used by BPIP to say inactive for more than 90 days.
If I take random accounts from this BPIP page: https://bpip.org/metalog.aspx?d=2023-05-22
RoadSideRomiyo is archived on BPIP, but I can guarantee you that he is not banned.
nemec is archived on BPIP, but I can guarantee you that he is not banned.
mertcanidig is archived on BPIP, but I can guarantee you that he is not banned.
And so on...

I did some analysis and there is a somewhat high chance that the forum will disappear before 2030 if the information on https://bpip.org/ is accurate.

You give a fairly precise date, it would have been nice to give the details.
I hope you didn't draw a line from 3 points like the person who predicted that Bitcoin would consume all the electricity in the world by 2020.
If you want to take a bet whether or not this forum will still be online at the end of 2030, I'm open .

Since the forum is losing traffic each month, which is awful from a financial standpoint

Theymos doesn't care about the financial standpoint. So much so that he cancelled the bidding for ads.
Oh, you were thinking from your financial standpoint ?

I'm curious about the forum's membership reduction and what can be to blame.
[...]
unfriendly environment for Newbies/users ?
DT members oppression ? ( so much red than green these days)
The merit system (high demands for quality) ?
The moderation/rules ( using the ban button more often) ?
Low Bitcoin adoption ?

Lets Talk...

I answered 'Others' in your poll and I will clarify by trying to generalize : human stupidity/cupidity are the causes of all this.
The question of why there are so few active accounts is a good one. But there are another questions : why are there so many inactive/banned accounts ? Why such a big difference ?

The first point is not to underestimate the number of multi-accounts. It's a national sport here. Many people have realized that they can easily make money with an account on a forum. Why not make 2 accounts, then 3... 5, 10... 100... It worked for airdrops where you had to leave an address in a topic, or twitbook campaigns where everything was easy. Now, there are no more airdrops or campaigns like that, or it doesn't pay any more. Thousands of accounts have been orphaned.
And yet Timelord's topic is still updated every day. Multi-accounting still exists and sometimes large farms of accounts are found. But it's the stupidest or laziest ones who get caught. There are probably some smarter ones who continue to do multi-accounts, but they end up stopping because of the amount of useless tokens they collect. 
Human cupidity.

And we can also count on the maliciousness of some who want to abuse others (malware, phishing, etc...). Some have reached an industrial level by using hundreds... thousands of hacked or recently created accounts. It ended up in a war between bots, I don't have the numbers but Mindless Electron (Mitchell's bot) must be the account that banned the most people on this forum.
Human stupidity.

And I remember when I was a newbie, I was young, pure and innocent (I didn't know what a signature campaign was). And my research on Bitcoin often brought me to Bitcointalk, and sometimes to the English section. I  clicked on a topic that seemed interesting, the first answers were interesting, then there was an answer that repeated the same thing, then another and another one. I remember thinking what the fuck is this ? A parrots forum ?
Before accusing the mods, the DTs, merit, or seeing the straw in the neighbor's eye, look at the beam in your own eye. Do you think a beginner in cryptos wants to read the tons of shitposts that are dumped daily ? Whether this forum has a phone version or not. Whether this forum has notifications or not...
I'm ready to get on the first plane and go suck the dick of the first CM (this is not a promise, it's just a way of speaking ) who adds this rule: "if your post doesn't add anything to what has already been said in the topic, it wille not be counted."

I don’t really have any data on the number of active users, but playing around with the way back machine we can retrieve some historical snapshots based on BPIP’s Active Profiles counter:

Code:

Date   ActiveUsers    Diff 2019-11
2021-04   324.800         -outlier

Comments:
-   2021-04s reading is odd, and doesn’t seem coherent. I’d discard the reading

Is the number for 2021-04 is not correct and you discard it?

Or it is a correct number but only unexplained by what happened on forum in April 2021?

2021 is a bull market after 2020 halving and the forum could possibly have more new users and more active users than in previous years with bear market.

Mmmmm April is the time for Theymos jokes. And 2021 was about the NFT thing and Theymos used all the buzz words. When I was talking about multi-accounting here... +200K people is really huge, and it's a theory out of my ass, I have no evidence to prove it. But when I see that tens...hundreds have put their real photos for the KYC joke, I must not be very far from the truth.
Human stupidity.

[Majestic-milf]

Most people come into the forum with the sole aim of making money out of bounty campaigns and as that's the only motivation, care for nothing else but to make sure they get the needed merits. Once this doesn't go according to plan, they lose interest. It becomes a passing fancy.
 Secondly, some leave as a result of not having to ability to stand criticism (both constructive and destructive).
I think the forum is better off without spammers, scammers and the like, and if these are what sum up that number, then it's better for it be reduced.

[Igebotz]

users has 2.7 million banned/nuked accounts

I don't think those accounts (as counted by BPIP) are all banned, they could just have never created a post. And many are proxy banned because they're created by spammers from an evil IP. Not all bans are a bad thing

Since I started keeping track 4 years ago, 316k users have been banned.

Is it possible to separate IP bans and accounts with no posts from the 2.7 million? When I think about it, it's still an insane number to ignore.

316k over the last 4 years is still an enormous sum, and if we drill down to from the forum's creation it may be about a million members, which is not far from the number in the OP.

Definitely! Bitcointalk is scary and unfriendly for many Newbies users. I've said it before: long-term, Bitcointalk can't survive without new users.

How do we convince these bullies that being thick skinned isn't enough and that these newbies deserve a break? The high level of bullying on the B & H is concerning. Sometimes you'll see high rank users with tonnes of merits putting pressure on a newbie simply because he got 1 merit from a friend. lol

Probably. I'd like to see less negative and more neutral tags in many cases.

The more red on the street, the lower the value - this will happen sooner or later, and we won't be able to tell the difference between scammers and shitposters because both are wearing red.

You give a fairly precise date, it would have been nice to give the details.
I hope you didn't draw a line from 3 points like the person who predicted that Bitcoin would consume all the electricity in the world by 2020.
If you want to take a bet whether or not this forum will still be online at the end of 2030, I'm open .

I'm not sure how old you are, but I'm guessing that by 2030, we/the most active users will be gone, and the forum will be run by our generational newbies. 2030 is SEVEN years away. Death, jail terms, life could happen to any of us.

Theymos doesn't care about the financial standpoint. So much so that he cancelled the bidding for ads.
Oh, you were thinking from your financial standpoint ?

From both neutral and financial standpoint  

I wasn’t particularly aware of the forum user base reduction, and thank you, OP, for this analysis, even if I am not sure it’s fully reliable.

Might not be 100% accurate but its close enough and big enough to raise eyes balls you know....

I have been quite unsuccessful in this task for a series of reasons:
cut

Is it okay if I categorize your opinion as unfriendly to discussion/users since you believe the reduction/small size has to do with how old fashioned the forum is and how difficult it is to navigate the forum with a mobile phone- its a bigger problem because the new generation newbies do not want to belong to a forum that looks like an ancient Egypt forum, where users need to zoom and scroll left and right on mobile to read a post and still have to wait until they reach a particular rank to be allowed to post an image when there are other places that give them this much privilege, I would think newbies restrictions play a role.

[OgNasty]

When you think about how many of those "survived" members are using multiple accounts here it surely would reduce the overall count far below 56K.  Bots, alts, newbies that will never come back...  I'd honestly be surprised if there were 20K real active members here.  Still, I think the poll seems like people are figuring out the issues here.  DT is no longer a reflection of activity and trust on these boards, but a showing of political posturing and dealmaking to protect each other's interests and punish those they disagree with (SHOCKER: mostly liberals trying to silence and discredit conservatives).  It's actually shameful that it is still around in it's current form, but the only people who seem to care are the ones who's obsession with gaining trust inclusions has caused this mess.

[Igebotz]

When you think about how many of those "survived" members are using multiple accounts here it surely would reduce the overall count far below 56K.  Bots, alts, newbies that will never come back...  I'd honestly be surprised if there were 20K real active members here.  Still, I think the poll seems like people are figuring out the issues here.  DT is no longer a reflection of activity and trust on these boards, but a showing of political posturing and dealmaking to protect each other's interests and punish those they disagree with (SHOCKER: mostly liberals trying to silence and discredit conservatives).  It's actually shameful that it is still around in it's current form, but the only people who seem to care are the ones who's obsession with gaining trust inclusions has caused this mess.

The forum have had a total of 7765 active members in the last 30 days and out of which 2725 active users are Bountie spammers which left us with only 5040 active members on the general board,  the reduction is real; we are now simply a little community recycling our shits over and over again; we are less than the typical crypto telegram group.

The community votes in the last 24 hours have shown that DT oppression is real and has caused to a significant drop in membership; the question now is how do we fix this?.

[Woodie]

I believe the forum has been more accommodating to everyone than it was a few years back. If we contemplate on the general forum traffic, today we have several local boards which should make non English speakers to stick around than what it was, so this can't be a language barrier causing the low turnout..But I think it has something  to do with the altcoin bubble  which we had years back, the ICOs , the generous bounty rewards that existed back then...today rewards arent attractive and most users might have given up on this as projects arent as honest as the first gens were.

[jokers10]

...
The community votes in the last 24 hours have shown that DT oppression is real and has caused to a significant drop in membership; the question now is how do we fix this?.

So we have 8 votes for 5 thousand active users you counted and we plan to make conclusions from that, right? I doubt that 31 voters for 5 thousand is a representative sample. To find a way to solve a problem we should be sure that a problem we found is what is a real problem. Otherwise we can face even bigger problems.

If there is a resentful user with multiple accounts who doesn't like that his shady activity was highlighted by DT he can easily corrupt all this voting with tens of votes. If you want to know what people really think it is better to read what they write and not how they anonymously vote. It can be also corrupted but you at least can guess it if you'll look at post history and trust reviews of users.

[Upgrade00]

Lol. One way or another, (most) Newbies aren't welcomed. Luckily, there are some exceptions.

Those exemptions are proof that if a new user is genuinely interested in understanding Bitcoin and learning more, they would find this forum very entertaining and with a little more effort even enjoy their time here.
Also, those users quickly rank up and would not be considered new members any more.

I hope the forum becomes more welcoming that even users who are not as dedicated would be able to enjoy their time here.

[JollyGood]

Thank you for starting the topic and inviting for an open discussion to take place. Since finding this thread I have been pondering what to write especially after reading many excellent opinions already posted. To some extent I am surprised it is being discussed now when it should already have been discussed in great detail such is the importance of question surrounding the actual number of real active users.

This is merely an opinion, I would say that DT oppression to some extent does take place yet it is only part of a wider DT related issue. Cliques, groups and gangs working in tandem also could be part of the issue.

I believe merits play a huge part in retention of newbies in the forum. I am not going to say whether the following is an appropriate course of action but I have seen frustrated members complain about why their regular/consistent efforts in the forum by virtue of medium to high quality posts have seen little or nothing in either recognition or merits whereas far too many merits have been given out for what a neutral observer would probably conclude did not deserve the merits received. That could also put off members especially when they create a thread about it and do not receive much sympathy.

As for Bitcoin low adoption (as you put it), would it be fair to say that stacked up against nation countries fiat based currencies Bitcoin has always been low adoption since the day it was created in 2009 and even though the numbers increase in adoption month on month it will always remain low adoption? I cannot see a valid reason a newbie to this forum would leave (just after signing up) on the basis there was low adoption.

I rarely use the BPIP website but when I do I have to say it is informative with all the scraping of data. Having said that I would advise to use multiple sources to try to ascertain statistics related to user and forum activity.

unfriendly environment for Newbies/users ?

DT members oppression ? ( so much red than green these days)

The merit system (high demands for quality) ?

The moderation/rules ( using the ban button more often) ?

Low Bitcoin adoption ?

Lets Talk...

[CryptSafe]

I see lack of patience as a major factor for the decline in participants here. Most of the newbies lack patience to working and doing the right thing. They want short cut to climbing up which is not possible here. Some hardly make post and do not contribute in any way to growing their reputation here and at the entire end they get frustrated and leave the platform as a result of not being able to meet up with their target. They blame forum policies and members being to harsh on them forgetting that there are laid down rules on every platform to go by if you must be a member.

Merit system can likely be another factor because it determines your forum rank after getting much activities to back it up. Without merit one remains in a particular spot which is not good. However, merit can only be awarded when a member sees your post or comment worthy of being merited. Of lately, it seems there are few merits source active which makes it looks like a million years to get a merit reward from a merit source as they can not go round the boards to check on posts and comments always.
If this could be looked into, I think it would increase activities too as many would be encouraged to do or show more working. It feels not alright after much efforts and yet still not merited. Maybe this scares them away.

[Findingnemo]

I don't believe that 3.5Million individuals actually registered on bitcointalk, in old days especially before the introduction of merit system people used the bitcointalk as money making forum, they simply post some garbage and gain activity and rank up then enter into campaign and just keep spamming then in 2018 theymos figured the spam is out of control so he introduced merit system which really made those accounts farmers to vanish from here. So I still think introduction of merit system reduced the rate of registration in bitcointalk.

Also I feel we don't have enough topics to discuss or that makes me too engaged, more people are just doing forum politics, merits hunting so they chase merits and purposely posting posts which is kind of annoying or atleast to me.

[NotATether]

I look in the back pages of the Bitcointalk boards, and I found a museum of archives, when most users actually wanted to improve Bitcoin and a very restricted set of alts. An Atlantis under water.

All of those users have since gone, and are now replaced with people who are only interested in making $10 out of some airdrop/pre-sale/bounty/whatever.

I do not think it is the trolls or DT who have done this, but rather, the insatiable attribute of greed. As people started to chase more easy money, more people stopped doing useful work on the networks, to the point where most of the development that *is* done in cryptocurrency is minting some coin or NFT (probably using a few clicks of a GUI, that is without even writing any code) or organizing a rugpull.

This can be seen across the entire industry, not just bitcointalk.

[JollyGood]

Currently we are at 34 votes in the poll and again it another unfair reflection as to addressing the subject title of the thread. Without a doubt there are innumerable factors that could contribute to members not participating in a vote but seriously such low numbers are indicative of a regular pattern.

Start a thread looking campaign participants and it will be flooded with hopefuls trying to get selected yet something such as important as this is virtually overlooked when using as a comparator.

---------

What could be the cause of the forum membership decreased

Unfriendly discussion enviromment    - 5 (14.7%)
DT Members opression    - 8 (23.5%)
The Merit system    - 7 (20.6%)
The moderation/Rules    - 0 (0%)
Low Bitcoin adoption    - 2 (5.9%)
Others    - 12 (35.3%)
   
Total Voters: 34

[Igebotz]

Only members who care about the forum read the Meta, so I wasn't expecting anything close to 100 votes, especially since only 364 of the 7765 active members in the last 30 days posted on the Meta, so I'm not surprised. We only have a bunch of signature/bounty spammers who are more active than the ones who care about the forum's welfare. 34 votes is a significant number on a Meta, in my opinion.

When something like this comes up, the bullies and DT oppressors avoid participating in the conversation.

These are the three vital issues......

Unfriendly discussion enviromment    - 5 (14.7%)
DT Members opression    - 8 (23.5%)
The Merit system    - 7 (20.6%)

So we have 8 votes for 5 thousand active users you counted and we plan to make conclusions from that, right? I doubt that 31 voters for 5 thousand is a representative sample. To find a way to solve a problem we should be sure that a problem we found is what is a real problem. Otherwise we can face even bigger problems.

Currently we are at 34 votes in the poll and again it another unfair reflection as to addressing the subject title of the thread. Without a doubt there are innumerable factors that could contribute to members not participating in a vote but seriously such low numbers are indicative of a regular pattern.

Start a thread looking campaign participants and it will be flooded with hopefuls trying to get selected yet something such as important as this is virtually overlooked when using as a comparator.

[jokers10]

...
34 votes is a significant number on a Meta, in my opinion.
...

You can make your own conclusions but it doesn't mean everyone will make the same conclusions.

...
These are the three vital issues......

Unfriendly discussion enviromment    - 5 (14.7%)

And you can nothing to do with that, except to show by example how to make a friendly discussion. You can't make a majority to change their habits. Of course it will be good if there will be more friendliness, it is good in any case, but it is not what we can demand.

DT Members opression    - 8 (23.5%)

Most cases I see are based on cheating and scamming. If you don't like how DT do in some exact case you can bring up the topic. DT is based on a consensus and consensus can be changed. No one in DT is forever so if anyone behaves bad you can exclude him from your trust list. If you see someone leaves good reviews and votes for flags correctly you can add him to your trust list. You can leave your own reviews, including green ones. I use that opportunity, do all those ones who don't like how DT works do the same?

The Merit system    - 7 (20.6%)

As I said, I came here when merit system was just implemented. First merit I've got rather fast, but others were very rare and I wasn't sure I'll get even member rank. But even then I saw multiple low quality posts, there were too many of them. So merit system is good for forum in general.

If you see that there are many good posts from newbies are without merits you can apply for merit source and then share more merits with those ones who deserve it. It is good and right. And it can make merit system work better. That's what can do everyone who thinks that a merit system is not friendly enough at the moment.