Is it worth coming back?

[OgNasty]

Is it worth coming back?

How's the spam been? The forum basically became virtually unusable at a certain point. The noise to signal ratio was 100:1 at best.

Also, remember that 'new forum' that was supposed to happen? Lol, did that idea die again? It can't be that hard to develop a forum

Spam is an issue that can’t really be solved as a whole, but as an individual you can use the ignore button to keep the issue in check.

I think the solution is to increase the signal. The problem is that those with the signal keep getting chased off the site by scammers and trolls. So long as this is an environment where retards can harass creators without penalty, the signal will continue to diminish while the noise gets louder.

[fillippone]

How's the spam been? The forum basically became virtually unusable at a certain point. The noise to signal ratio was 100:1 at best.

If you claim such a ratio in the past, I would put the current one at 1000:1 or even at 10000:1. The only solution is to follow specific users and specific discussions. For example, you could follow this user around. If you just browse boards and open random threads, you will have a very bad time.

A real user who is interested in bitcoin and it's possibilities/uses will always believe there is use for this forum. Spam has nothing to do with a person's interest in this forum or bitcoin. Click the ignore button or scroll past what you believe is a spammer and don't let them ruin your experience here.

Would you want to read a book with 500 pages that is divided like this: there are 499 pages that are complete trash and there is valuable content summing up to a single page? To make matters worse this content is scattered around in fragments throughout the 500 pages. That's the situation here. One has to waste a lot of time trying to find valuable content to read, and even more time to find something valuable to respond to.

As long as user will have the privilege of monetization opportunity, there will be spam for sure. No matter how hard the mods act.

The moderation against low quality posts here is as good as a well oiled HR department.  

lol, if your depiction of this community is the one that just posted, I don’t understand how you are still willing to be part of it, actually posting.
I have a different experience, but maybe my threshold on some matter may be lower than yours.

[Lillominato89]

Spam is mostly confined to certain boards and child boards, certainly not the entire forum.
There are long-standing members of this forum who participate in signature campaigns but do not produce spam, rather posts of high or very high quality.
We must not lump everyone together, but rather distinguish between those who only create spam and those who produce quality posts.

[lovesmayfamilis]

How's the spam been? The forum basically became virtually unusable at a certain point. The noise to signal ratio was 100:1 at best.

If you claim such a ratio in the past, I would put the current one at 1000:1 or even at 10000:1. The only solution is to follow specific users and specific discussions. For example, you could follow this user around. If you just browse boards and open random threads, you will have a very bad time.

A real user who is interested in bitcoin and it's possibilities/uses will always believe there is use for this forum. Spam has nothing to do with a person's interest in this forum or bitcoin. Click the ignore button or scroll past what you believe is a spammer and don't let them ruin your experience here.

Would you want to read a book with 500 pages that is divided like this: there are 499 pages that are complete trash and there is valuable content summing up to a single page? To make matters worse this content is scattered around in fragments throughout the 500 pages. That's the situation here. One has to waste a lot of time trying to find valuable content to read, and even more time to find something valuable to respond to.

As long as user will have the privilege of monetization opportunity, there will be spam for sure. No matter how hard the mods act.

The moderation against low quality posts here is as good as a well oiled HR department.  

lol, if your depiction of this community is the one that just posted, I don’t understand how you are still willing to be part of it, actually posting.
I have a different experience, but maybe my threshold on some matter may be lower than yours.

Not everyone can hide or curb their vanity, or be tolerant of those with a slightly lesser education. Sometimes I want to wash my eyes and hands when I see how this "genius" responds to people (Follow the reference links he left.). Yes, it must be acknowledged that not everyone is as intelligent as those who consider themselves to be, but their aggressive behavior makes you feel sorry for those who are around them offline. It's become fashionable to talk about toxicity, and toxic people usually have no friends, because everyone tries to avoid them.

[Aanuoluwatofunmi]

Is it worth coming back?

How's the spam been? The forum basically became virtually unusable at a certain point. The noise to signal ratio was 100:1 at best.

Also, remember that 'new forum' that was supposed to happen? Lol, did that idea die again? It can't be that hard to develop a forum

Spam is an issue that can’t really be solved as a whole, but as an individual you can use the ignore button to keep the issue in check.

I think the solution is to increase the signal. The problem is that those with the signal keep getting chased off the site by scammers and trolls. So long as this is an environment where retards can harass creators without penalty, the signal will continue to diminish while the noise gets louder.

As some have already suggested, if you see any spam, then try to report one and if possible you ignore the user if such persist, but as a member, seeing others spamming and not being able to report one shows either we are in support of what they do or just pretend not to see any, that is why everyone of us has a role to play, because not everyone coming onboard has the same mindset others are having, while as for those introducing the forum to newbies, they should also make additional efforts in giving the best orientation needed so they don't come and misbehave here.

[fillippone]

Not everyone can hide or curb their vanity, or be tolerant of those with a slightly lesser education. Sometimes I want to wash my eyes and hands when I see how this "genius" responds to people (Follow the reference links he left.). Yes, it must be acknowledged that not everyone is as intelligent as those who consider themselves to be, but their aggressive behavior makes you feel sorry for those who are around them offline. It's become fashionable to talk about toxicity, and toxic people usually have no friends, because everyone tries to avoid them.

It isn’t easy to be kind.
It requires an effort of empathy and a desire to understand what is working differently in the other part of the conversation.
That is not for everyone.
However, the toxicity is detrimental to the community in the long term. Yes, it can be fun in the short term, but lasting communities, like this forum, which hopefully aim to be, should avoid that.
It requires a lot of effort from everybody.

[Satofan44]

lol, if your depiction of this community is the one that just posted, I don’t understand how you are still willing to be part of it, actually posting.

There are only a few users and good topics that are worth it. If you look at such threads you will see that most of the shitposters avoid them like the threads will give them AIDS. This just proves the fact that very few people read the content of posts at all and they just rush to get a post out. A massive blanket ban would fix the forum over night but it is not up to me.

 ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I have a different experience, but maybe my threshold on some matter may be lower than yours.

No offense, but it is significantly lower. I've seen your apply for merits thread. It is an excellent thing that you are doing, but from the few posts that I have randomly seen I would not have merited. I would have banned those users from here instead  .

Not everyone can hide or curb their vanity, or be tolerant of those with a slightly lesser education.

Posting complete lies and junk posts does not show slightly lesser education, it is akin to comparing monkeys to caterpillars. Were there no incentive to write junk, those posts would rarely appear.

Sometimes I want to wash my eyes and hands when I see how this "genius" responds to people (Follow the reference links he left.). Yes, it must be acknowledged that not everyone is as intelligent as those who consider themselves to be, but their aggressive behavior makes you feel sorry for those who are around them offline. It's become fashionable to talk about toxicity, and toxic people usually have no friends, because everyone tries to avoid them.

I am by no means any genius, those that correct me and teach me are the geniuses here. My post quality should be the minimum level for this forum.  Merits and posts here should not be an Instagram style like club, but I see plenty of you doing it wrong as you are unable to control biases or make any objective comparisons. Users give a low quality shitpost merits if they like someone, and they'll avoiding meriting someone else if they don't like them regardless of the contribution. The local board posters and merit sources are the worst culprits of this and they are largely responsible for the shit state of post quality here.

It isn’t easy to be kind.
It requires an effort of empathy and a desire to understand what is working differently in the other part of the conversation.
That is not for everyone.
However, the toxicity is detrimental to the community in the long term. Yes, it can be fun in the short term, but lasting communities, like this forum, which hopefully aim to be, should avoid that.
It requires a lot of effort from everybody.

If you write stupid stuff and you are called out for writing stupid stuff that isn't toxicity though. The gambling section is the best example. Some of the dumbest and stupidest shit is written there by the most retarded idiots to exist on the planet. Spend energy being nice to them.  

[PowerGlove]

Is it worth coming back?

For the forum, or for yourself?

For the forum: I think so. A quick skim over your post history suggests that you'd help to lift the forum's signal-to-noise ratio (but, it seems like you haven't got much time to spend here; you signed out ~2 minutes after creating this topic and haven't been around for the interim).

For yourself: Maybe not. Personally, I enjoy the forum less than I did 3 years ago. Though, maybe that says more about me than the forum, I dunno. But, my impression is that the user base is less organic and less intelligent than when I started here (and when I back-read the forum, I notice that that's been more or less a long-term trend). Also, the mixer ban seems to have killed off much of the cypherpunk spirit that used to rest here (I'm often surprised, for example, to find users who I thought were very pro-privacy and pro-fungibility to be happily renting out their signature space to services that have KYC and AML clauses in their terms). (I'm myself so fundamentally opposed to the idea of KYC, chain analysis, "taint", and all the rest of it, that there's literally no amount of BTC that could convince me to endorse anything that supports it.)

I'd say there's some kind of intelligence-related inflection point when it comes to framing "Should I participate?" questions. If you're on the left-hand side of the bell curve, frame it more in terms of what you hope to learn. If you're on the right-hand side of the bell curve, frame it more in terms of what you hope to teach. When the less-knowledgeable are doing most of the reading, and the more-knowledgeable are doing most of the writing, things work out nicely. When it's the other way around, participation becomes a waste of time for almost everyone involved.

The new forum was never going to happen - it was just laundry. 

Vod, it really pisses me off when you say shit like that...

I don't know where you get the confidence to speak so authoritatively about things you know very little about. (If you could read some of the PMs concerning the cancellation of Epochtalk that theymos and I exchanged, I think you'd realize just how stupid you sound.)

In fact, the longer I observe the conjecture you often engage in, the less I think not only of you, but also of the people who think it's a good idea to keep you on DT.

I have a different experience, but maybe my threshold on some matter may be lower than yours.

Much as I like you fillippone (and I do), you're currently being paid like, what, ~$1700/week for your participation on the forum? I think for ~$7k/month, most anyone would find it very difficult to have an uncolored view of things.

[Satofan44]

For the forum: I think so. A quick skim over your post history suggests that you'd help to lift the forum's signal-to-noise ratio (but, it seems like you haven't got much time to spend here; you signed out ~2 minutes after creating this topic and haven't been around for the interim).

There is too much noise these days and most valuable users don't stay or never join at all. If you open 5 or 10 threads randomly in most sections and read a few posts you will run away as far as you can. It is a self perpetuating cycle unless someone puts a stop to it.

When the less-knowledgeable are doing most of the reading, and the more-knowledgeable are doing most of the writing, things work out nicely. When it's the other way around, participation becomes a waste of time for almost everyone involved.

Nailed it. It is the less-knowledgeable that are writing a lot in most of the places. That is the root issue. They should be reading most of those threads and almost never responding to them.

Much as I like you fillippone (and I do), you're currently being paid like, what, ~$1700/week for your participation on the forum? I think for ~$7k/month, most anyone would find it very difficult to have an uncolored view of things.

Since you've spoken about conjecture regarding the other user Vod, can you provide a source for this claim that you are making?

[Btcdeybodi]

Apparently, no forum is perfect but as time goes on it is open to improvement. PowerGlove and some other forum developers have been helping to find solutions to bugs and also give suggestion to things that needs improvement in the forum, probably if you were active you may have given your own suggestion or solution on the areas you want the forum to improve.

Even if we are to have a new forum do you think that everything will be perfect over there?
Maybe you can stay a little active on the forum and see if there are changes since you left till now and if it is ''worth coming back'' as you asked.

However, some of your friends who are OGs are still active since you left, you might be wondering why they didn't get bored and left the forum as well. Maybe they found it even more interesting...

As for spams, it is inevitable since there are many benefits that are attached to the forum but why do we have mods? report spams if you see any.

[PowerGlove]

Since you've spoken about conjecture regarding the other user Vod, can you provide a source for this claim that you are making?

Sure. See below. But, just to be clear, that's the least important part of what I'm saying. I'm only making the point that an FMCC member is not really in a position to impartially weigh in on whether or not it's worth spending time here.

One hundred and twenty-sixth week paid. Sorry for the uncharacteristic delay.

[fillippone]

I have a different experience, but maybe my threshold on some matter may be lower than yours.

Much as I like you fillippone (and I do), you're currently being paid like, what, ~$1700/week for your participation on the forum? I think for ~$7k/month, most anyone would find it very difficult to have an uncolored view of things.

Well, I like this forum no matter what.
I have liked before entering any signature campaign.
I would put the same effort anyway, because I like Bitcoin and I think digging into Bitcoin is one of the best things that happened to me, not only financially.
I understand it might be difficult to believe, but it is.

[The Cryptovator]

Why do you feel it's not worth coming back to the forum? Due to spam? Then open social media; still, you will find spam whether there are earning opportunities or not. Lately in my jurisdiction I've noticed a lot of spam on Facebook; due to easy monetisation, everyone is trying to earn money by spamming. It's become shit to scroll Facebook lately. But still there are quality users. Same on the forum, spammers always will spam everywhere. Doesn't matter either on this forum or on the new forum. But your contribution matters for the forum.

So it's worth coming back for real and quality users.

[Vod]

Vod, it really pisses me off when you say shit like that...

I don't know where you get the confidence to speak so authoritatively about things you know very little about. (If you could read some of the PMs concerning the cancellation of Epochtalk that theymos and I exchanged, I think you'd realize just how stupid you sound.)

In fact, the longer I observe the conjecture you often engage in, the less I think not only of you, but also of the people who think it's a good idea to keep you on DT.

And of course you know nothing about the dozens of emails I've exchanged with others who weren't involved in the scam.  

I don't play favorites or take bribes on scammers (that's why I'm perfect for DT).  

[EFS]

Spam is everywhere, not just limited to here. Especially on social media, where there is no moderation, it's much more prevalent.
Even though there are occasional ups and downs, as long as Bitcoin exists, this forum is the best place for discussion. Social media has expanded and grown over time, but the discussions there can't even come close to this place. The knowledge base here on this specific topic exists nowhere else.

This forum has been around for almost a third of my life. I wonder what my life would've been like without it. This isn't just about my moderator position or signature campaigns or other money making opportunities either. This place provides a chance for free speech that doesn't exist anywhere else. Those who have tasted authoritarian regimes will understand better what I mean.

[joker_josue]

For yourself: Maybe not. Personally, I enjoy the forum less than I did 3 years ago. Though, maybe that says more about me than the forum, I dunno. But, my impression is that the user base is less organic and less intelligent than when I started here (and when I back-read the forum, I notice that that's been more or less a long-term trend). Also, the mixer ban seems to have killed off much of the cypherpunk spirit that used to rest here (I'm often surprised, for example, to find users who I thought were very pro-privacy and pro-fungibility to be happily renting out their signature space to services that have KYC and AML clauses in their terms). (I'm myself so fundamentally opposed to the idea of KYC, chain analysis, "taint", and all the rest of it, that there's literally no amount of BTC that could convince me to endorse anything that supports it.)

One of two things: there are fewer and fewer truly AML/KYC-free services. Or these services don't seek out the forum to promote themselves.

I feel like we're going through a similar phase to the one that led me to leave the forum about 10 years ago. People are more focused on personal issues than on what really matters here: Bitcoin and the cryptocurrency universe.

I'm not thinking about leaving the forum today. But I'm reflecting on how I can improve, to break this cycle. I may be able to do little. But what about the community as a whole? Can they? What do we need to do to break this cycle?

[PowerGlove]

I understand it might be difficult to believe, but it is.

I don't find it difficult to believe. I feel a similar way (as in, ignoring the size and number of jobs I'm willing to take on, the effort I put into things isn't much affected by whether or not I'm being paid). But, speaking from experience, I find it difficult to say negative things about the forum. Partly, that's down to me fundamentally liking the forum (or at least, the idea of it). But, the other part of my reluctance to pooh-pooh Bitcointalk has to come, I think, from my animal brain telling me not to bite the hand that feeds it. The thing is, I've all but decided to return to being an unpaid volunteer, so, for a while now, I've been more inclined than I otherwise might be to say what I genuinely feel, and to talk about the state of the forum as I honestly perceive it. Please don't think that I'm accusing you of anything besides finding yourself in a position that's very compatible with having a broadly positive view of the forum.

I'm not thinking about leaving the forum today. But I'm reflecting on how I can improve, to break this cycle. I may be able to do little. But what about the community as a whole? Can they? What do we need to do to break this cycle?

I wish I knew the answer to that. (And I find your line of inquiry to be very endearing, BTW.)

Hmm... I remember TryNinja saying a while ago that they were thinking of leaving. And I notice people like BHC and n0nce are no longer really around (and I miss the posts of many others, too). I've been thinking of leaving for at least the last year (in fact, I think it's very likely that I'll be absent for much of 2026; it's been a long time coming and it feels like I need to very carefully think about what I'm going to spend the next few years working on). The thing is, deep down in my plums, it feels like Bitcointalk is headed in the wrong direction, and patching it is just not the right approach. If I were designing discussion software from scratch, there's very little that I'd transplant from Bitcointalk (besides the free-speech orientation and some of the look and feel, I can think of very little that would survive a blue-sky re-imagining). I'd trash the entire codebase, start again in a statically-typed programming language, and ultimately change just about every feature and every policy. And that begs the question: Why am I working to marginally improve something that I dislike on so many levels? Looking back, I think that what drew me in was the lure of a clearnet cypherpunk stronghold (a proper one, I mean; not an embarrassing POS like "Altcoins Talks"). But, one of the first rude awakenings, which I really should have paid more attention to, instead of just smoothing over it, was the forum's use of Cloudflare: a Bitcoin forum that hands over its HTTPS key to a likely NSA honeypot (or to anyone, for that matter) without at least setting up a TLS-like tunnel in JavaScript, or a Cloudflare-less hidden service, is just such an odd move, and such a contradiction in terms, that I don't even know where to begin (all I'll say on this matter is that theymos and I could each independently solve just about any technical problem we decide to focus on, so, it's a nearly-complete mystery to me why the forum allows Cloudflare to inspect all of its traffic). In fact, I don't even think that an architecture that could benefit from something like Cloudflare makes much sense, and I've for a long time now been experimenting with designs to erect something forum-like (and many other things, too) on top of a distributed data store, and that direction seems like a much more sensible use of my time (please don't anyone refer me to the existing attempts at this; I'm aware of them all). Anyway, getting way off-topic now, so, I'll leave it at that (need to take my dog for walkies, anyway).

[fillippone]

For yourself: Maybe not. Personally, I enjoy the forum less than I did 3 years ago. Though, maybe that says more about me than the forum, I dunno. But, my impression is that the user base is less organic and less intelligent than when I started here (and when I back-read the forum, I notice that that's been more or less a long-term trend). Also, the mixer ban seems to have killed off much of the cypherpunk spirit that used to rest here (I'm often surprised, for example, to find users who I thought were very pro-privacy and pro-fungibility to be happily renting out their signature space to services that have KYC and AML clauses in their terms). (I'm myself so fundamentally opposed to the idea of KYC, chain analysis, "taint", and all the rest of it, that there's literally no amount of BTC that could convince me to endorse anything that supports it.)

We all must be honest: this forum has the unique feature that it was the creadle of the movement, the original temple. Satoshi, Hal Sirius were all there. These people had a quasi-divine status.
It is natural that, with more and more commons status of bitcoin, the original spirit gets diluted in...something else.
It is normal that more and more user approach bitcoin, and, it is natural that those users have a diverse background, culture and intellectual abilities.
We surely cannot censor bitcoin, and for sure qe cannot censor people adopting bitcoin.

[SmartGold01]

Is it worth coming back?

How's the spam been? The forum basically became virtually unusable at a certain point. The noise to signal ratio was 100:1 at best.

Also, remember that 'new forum' that was supposed to happen? Lol, did that idea die again? It can't be that hard to develop a forum

Nothing can be changed but some strict measures could implemented and even though you aren't interested in reading the so called spam post or comments, you could stick at the WO, at least I have seen OG's stick around that section and has nothing to do with the general discussion section, or possibly if you are that technically enough you could stick at the technical section at least to contribute to the general growth of the forum.
A bitcon lover must surely comes around Bitcoin discussion irresponsible of whatever discussion held over there or seen as spam.

[Zoomic]

Nothing can be changed but some strict measures could implemented and even though you aren't interested in reading the so called spam post or comments, you could stick at the WO, at least I have seen OG's stick around that section and has nothing to do with the general discussion section, or possibly if you are that technically enough you could stick at the technical section at least to contribute to the general growth of the forum.
A bitcon lover must surely comes around Bitcoin discussion irresponsible of whatever discussion held over there or seen as spam.

When I was new in the forum, WO used to be a place that some new commers go to earn some undesirable merits unnoticed. I have tried to understand how that thread works, but it seems that there are some OGs there who doesn't bother posting in other threads but stick to the WO thread. Also, there is a bot (chartbuddy) that updates the price of Bitcoin.

I don't think that OP will like the WO idea. His past history shows that he will like to post everywhere in the forum rather than WO. I like your idea of being in the technical discussion side. There and meta will be fine for him, unless he wears signature and wanting to complete post quota.