Is BCT dead and most of the traffic just mindless AI zombies now?

[suchmoon]

Google itself seems to be attempting to emulate a more human approach in determining its rankings to discourage SEO manipulation, which sounds good for us, in theory. It would be nice to be able to demonstrate that hiring spammers actually damages SEO.

Ok, this make sense, this forum still needs humans but only to provide just enough "organic" content so that it's not completely blacklisted by Google. Otherwise the whole thing would be worthless.

Either that, or capitalism is completely broken in this place and a bunch of idiots are throwing money away buying worthless ads.

[Welsh]

I don't think the forum is in a unique situation here. Dead internet theory seems to be proving true in real time. I'm often frustrated by a lot of sites that have users posting / commenting. However, it's particularly bad here because users are actively paid to post.  

I think its time to crack down on signature campaigns. They've added a lot to the forum through its own economy, but the quality of the forum has taken a significant hit in terms of quality. I'm not sure the benefit of signature campaigns is outweighing the negatives any more. Whether that's significant restrictions or just outright removal. The latter, likely decreasing user count by a massive amount, although that might still be better than what we've got currently.

Of course, before signature campaigns were a thing, the forum had a less 'professional' feel, but more tightly knitted. I think we should try to sit in the middle of that, maybe leaning towards more personable going forward.

We are likely fighting a losing war. We have outdated software (which I quite like SMF) and a sort of out dated way of doing things. Forums aren't as popular as they once were. Reddit, Twitter and all those sites seem to be the more popular choice these days. I think signature campaigns have probably positively affected the forums relevancy. However, we've lost a significant amount of the quality. I guess the community has to ask themselves do we want low activity but absolute quality or high activity but extremely low quality. Potentially creating a community vote (which is open to manipulation), see where everyone stands and presenting that to theymos. Merit was a good introduction, but it doesn't address all issues.

I don't think the mods ever delete anything on their own accord, they are acting on reports 99% of the time, so the solution is to just report every piece of garbage post. Maybe if enough of us start doing this and reporting the same posts, we can kind of raise the bar a little bit.

I can't speak for all mods. However, I tend to go through my sections periodically (ideally daily but depends on real life commitments) that I'm a dedicated moderator in. If I had to estimate, my workload is probably 30% acting on reports and the remaining I've stumbled upon myself.

However, absolutely the more reports the better. I personally can't act upon a lot of the posts within Altcoin Discussion, and I do believe that needs a lot of cleanup. I'll have to dedicate some time to reporting there myself.

Personally, I don't think its a problem with newbies these days. There's enough patrollers that reports are dealt with swiftly. It's the users that have a bit of merit, maybe worked hard to get where they are, but now they're enrolled in signature campaigns they let that standard slip and just posting to earn a quick buck. Largely, regurgitated nonsense.

[Satofan44]

Google itself seems to be attempting to emulate a more human approach in determining its rankings to discourage SEO manipulation, which sounds good for us, in theory. It would be nice to be able to demonstrate that hiring spammers actually damages SEO.

Until someone can actually demonstrate that, I don't think they will buy it up. It is actually possible that they are not as good for SEO as they used to be many years ago as SEO stuff keeps changing. I don't think anyone here is doing any quality analysis on that topic, so they just continue spinning campaigns in the same ways.

I think its time to crack down on signature campaigns. They've added a lot to the forum through its own economy, but the quality of the forum has taken a significant hit in terms of quality. I'm not sure the benefit of signature campaigns is outweighing the negatives any more. Whether that's significant restrictions or just outright removal. The latter, likely decreasing user count by a massive amount, although that might still be better than what we've got currently.

Can it not be done in any way without waiting for the approval of the admin? DefaultTrust seems useless these days.   Right now the issue is that they are set up in a way that maximizes the number of user slots, which has nothing to do with post quality. That could work but not in an environment where there are massive account farms and hundreds of accounts that are ready to take up spots all the time. Something drastically must change in how campaigns are structured or they need to be limited or removed all together.

I guess the community has to ask themselves do we want low activity but absolute quality or high activity but extremely low quality. Potentially creating a community vote (which is open to manipulation), see where everyone stands and presenting that to theymos. Merit was a good introduction, but it doesn't address all issues.

Most people who are not completely useless or who don't have some mental issues are quite busy, and as such they would always preferring reading a few quality posts over many hundreds of shitposts.

Personally, I don't think its a problem with newbies these days. There's enough patrollers that reports are dealt with swiftly. It's the users that have a bit of merit, maybe worked hard to get where they are, but now they're enrolled in signature campaigns they let that standard slip and just posting to earn a quick buck. Largely, regurgitated nonsense.

Yeah it is not the newbies that are the problem. It is the campaign shitposters. If you look around on average, you will only find a persistent shitposter or two every now and then that does not participate in a signature campaign. New accounts that spam or shitposts usually get banned or leave pretty quickly if they don't get any merit.

[MoonReaver]

Google itself seems to be attempting to emulate a more human approach in determining its rankings to discourage SEO manipulation, which sounds good for us, in theory. It would be nice to be able to demonstrate that hiring spammers actually damages SEO.

Ok, this make sense, this forum still needs humans but only to provide just enough "organic" content so that it's not completely blacklisted by Google. Otherwise the whole thing would be worthless.

Either that, or capitalism is completely broken in this place and a bunch of idiots are throwing money away buying worthless ads.

Reviews works wonders here if companies want organic content, those are permanent (Post whatever requirements manager wants for the companies want it to be depending on rules forums abides by.. there’s more it and has backlinking benefits too if it’s being hosted that way).

When it comes to signature campaigns here I am a little hesitant about telling companies what they will get in a guaranteed way.. if you manage to do that then yes you will secure many projects..
On the second note I didn’t find a good (or any to to be specifc) way to monitor total impressions of these Signatures (I believe forum hasn’t developed it specifically targeting companies promoting themselves here.. so can’t say much here too).

This forum doesn’t have a bad reputation on Google’s search index I have checked it and found this forum is quite healty as far as that goes too).

[Cricktor]

I don't think there's an easy solution because if there were one we likely would have it already.

My stance on AI usage and especially AI spam is: if not clearly labeled as AI produced content, then it's plagiarism. And plagiarism is reason for a permanent ban. rephrasing isn't much better, maybe harder to detect and likely more work for the spammer. Overly spamming should also result in at least progressively increasing temporary bans and finally a permanent one. Are moderators too lenient here? My gutt feeling says yes, but I don't have strong evidence. I don't know any numbers really.

The incentive to participate and benefit from a signature campaign drags a lot of issues with it, because when there's a benefit, there's potential abuse, cheating, bending to maximise own's profit. We don't live in an ideal world obviously. I don't particularly like campaigns that have (high) mandatory minimum number of posts to qualify for payment, which from my perception are more common than those without minimum posts.

I don't know how signature campaign managers would be able to track AI slop of their campaign's participants. AI slop should not qualify to be paid in a signature campaign, but this needs clear rules about AI generated content. I'd wish these were mandatory!

I assume campaign managers with more than one or very few managed campaign have some tools to monitor if their participant's posts qualify to be paid or not. Why not extend this with a tool that checks for AI crap/slop? Signature campaign spammers should go quickly on a public signature campaign blacklist so that they are banned from participating in them. (It should be possible to dispute this, but the AI slop/spammer has the obligation to prove they don't belong on the blacklist. This could be a fun place to grab some popcorn for...)

I don't quite like the concept of learning by punishment, but in the case of signature campaign spammers and specifically the low quality posters who only want to fulfill their paid quota, I'd like to see more temporary bans and also campaign managers throwing banned participants out of their campaigns when a temporary ban was justified.

Justified temporary bans already hurt a signature campaign "spammer" and if this raises the probability for them to be blacklisted from campaigns ongoing, it might be an incentive to post better quality and less noise. Maybe, I guess I'm hopelessly idealistic.

Can anyone who is able to see the concrete numbers say if temporary bans are a good and sufficiently used utility? I would think they are, but I could be wrong.


P.S. edit, if I may shed some light on my personal situation in context of signature campaigns and posting quality:
I don't remember (and I can't prove it) that I had the very focused goal to "develop" my account to qualify and participate in signature campaigns. Once first merits came to me, I enjoyed it to be sort of "recognized", period. That was motivation enough for me. I simply don't want to post crap. Of course, this is subjective.

When I first got invited to a signature campaign, I was honestly flattered. I didn't apply prior for existing campaigns as a first step from my side, if that makes sense. There surely were weeks when I tried to reach max paid quota, why not. Sometimes that was "easy" (for me it depends heavily on what are currently hot topics in areas where I post and if I have something "valuable" to contribute) but when it was not, I didn't fulfill max quota and that's fine for me.

I acknowledge that a campaign requestor/funder wants a certain quota of exposure and new growing numbers of it each week. That is sort of an obligation of campaign participants, but I for myself don't want and refuse to fulfill this if it would mean to post crap low value posts. YMMV.

[Rikafip]

The fact that there is no proactive moderation tells you all you need to know about the priorities of this forum.

Perfectly summed up.

But I would not spend 8 hours a day reading and deleting (or moving  into a I think you are fake spot)

If each board had its own moderators who were active on a daily basis and actually engaged in conversations within the boards they moderate, no one would have to spend eight hours per day clearing out crap.

I'm also quite sure there would be enough reputable and competent people willing to do that job for free. This approach works well on many other forums, and I see no reason it wouldn't work here as well.

[MoonReaver]

I don't think there's an easy solution because if there were one we likely would have it already.

My stance on AI usage and especially AI spam is: if not clearly labeled as AI produced content, then it's plagiarism. And plagiarism is reason for a permanent ban. rephrasing isn't much better, maybe harder to detect and likely more work for the spammer. Overly spamming should also result in at least progressively increasing temporary bans and finally a permanent one. Are moderators too lenient here? My gutt feeling says yes, but I don't have strong evidence. I don't know any numbers really.

The incentive to participate and benefit from a signature campaign drags a lot of issues with it, because when there's a benefit, there's potential abuse, cheating, bending to maximise own's profit. We don't live in an ideal world obviously. I don't particularly like campaigns that have (high) mandatory minimum number of posts to qualify for payment, which from my perception are more common than those without minimum posts.

I don't know how signature campaign managers would be able to track AI slop of their campaign's participants. AI slop should not qualify to be paid in a signature campaign, but this needs clear rules about AI generated content. I'd wish these were mandatory!

I assume campaign managers with more than one or very few managed campaign have some tools to monitor if their participant's posts qualify to be paid or not. Why not extend this with a tool that checks for AI crap/slop? Signature campaign spammers should go quickly on a public signature campaign blacklist so that they are banned from participating in them. (It should be possible to dispute this, but the AI slop/spammer has the obligation to prove they don't belong on the blacklist. This could be a fun place to grab some popcorn for...)

I don't quite like the concept of learning by punishment, but in the case of signature campaign spammers and specifically the low quality posters who only want to fulfill their paid quota, I'd like to see more temporary bans and also campaign managers throwing banned participants out of their campaigns when a temporary ban was justified.

Justified temporary bans already hurt a signature campaign "spammer" and if this raises the probability for them to be blacklisted from campaigns ongoing, it might be an incentive to post better quality and less noise. Maybe, I guess I'm hopelessly idealistic.

Can anyone who is able to see the concrete numbers say if temporary bans are a good and sufficiently used utility? I would think they are, but I could be wrong.


P.S. edit, if I may shed some light on my personal situation in context of signature campaigns and posting quality:
I don't remember (and I can't prove it) that I had the very focused goal to "develop" my account to qualify and participate in signature campaigns. Once first merits came to me, I enjoyed it to be sort of "recognized", period. That was motivation enough for me. I simply don't want to post crap. Of course, this is subjective.

When I first got invited to a signature campaign, I was honestly flattered. I didn't apply prior for existing campaigns as a first step from my side, if that makes sense. There surely were weeks when I tried to reach max paid quota, why not. Sometimes that was "easy" (for me it depends heavily on what are currently hot topics in areas where I post and if I have something "valuable" to contribute) but when it was not, I didn't fulfill max quota and that's fine for me.

I acknowledge that a campaign requestor/funder wants a certain quota of exposure and new growing numbers of it each week. That is sort of an obligation of campaign participants, but I for myself don't want and refuse to fulfill this if it would mean to post crap low value posts. YMMV.

I quite like the idea of pay per post, I have seen a few campaigns that asks to complete a certain number of posts to get paid and if you don’t then you won’t get paid.. maybe leading to some borderline post bursting.. When I ran the campaign I wanted to see what benefits there will be, it was mostly a question answering job that was initially assigned to.. I actually saw a huge potential in it but not being to monitor the impressions (A system for managers can be developed).. I have also noticed some members help in the reputation board for certain questions surrounding companies promoting themselves here..

I am quite sure when you manage 10-15 or plus members then you surely need tools to monitor posts (For being on topic.. and replies being on topic.. and so on), I was doing the work manually at the time.

But yes majority of gambling brands promote themselves here if you look the services section of the forum, I narrowed down a few threads and found them having 100+ pages, all have a reference thread to the gambling discussion thread of the company, people regularly talk there surrounding queries (It also doesn’t hurt someone dedicated answering the questions, but many times it becomes a spam feast and you see Signatures ads everywhere..) Forum has a rule of not incentivising to post in gambling thread of the company, so yes someone in the forum’s thought out possible scenarios that could happen.. I think it was done to avoid bumping of the threads to keep them on the first page or on the first few lines from the top. (That’s where the gamblers typically pay attention).

[mindrust]

I think it is time for bitcointalk to become a digital museum where only the museum admin allows limited number of people to visit it daily. Theymos should probably issue museum tickets for paid visitors so they will be able to visit the place without a restriction.

This place is holy.

This is where satoshi lived and spread his wisdom.

Gamblers are befouling these holy grounds with their filthy signatures.

This is a sin.

There will be a day of reckoning and I pray we all gonna make it without having to pay anything fatal.

[Free Market Capitalist]

Read it again, it doesn't ask that.

Yeah, OK I realize now, it's Bitcointalk, not Bitcoin. Anyway, it's not dead at all.

I couldn't care less about your chatbot response.

The fact that someone as rational as you does those things indicates that it is your emotional side that is kicking in every time you see the word AI.

But I see that this is turning into a mega thread, originating from a two-part question, the correct answers to which I will now provide:

Is BCT dead

No.

most of the traffic just mindless AI zombies now?

No.

Go ahead, keep arguing about campaigns and moderators and SEO and all that stuff, but this whole thread is based on blatant false premises.

[Satofan44]

I don't think there's an easy solution because if there were one we likely would have it already.

The problem is harder than it seems because absolutely nothing is being done to correct it. Meanwhile you can have endless discussions on how it should be solved, how it could be solved or how hard it is or isn't? There is no perfect solution. A system like this requires many minor tweaks. As I said, the first thing that can be done proactively is permanently ban every reported shitposter in the Reputation section. That would be a massive cleanup with only beneficial effects. Let's talk about the difficulty of the problem only when we hit a dead end, shall we?
 
Furthermore, justification-style arguments about bills are being paid are misplaced here. The cost to run this place is trivial and theymos is not a poor man, so this argument is completely invalid.

Justified temporary bans already hurt a signature campaign "spammer" and if this raises the probability for them to be blacklisted from campaigns ongoing, it might be an incentive to post better quality and less noise. Maybe, I guess I'm hopelessly idealistic.

With this part you are very wrong. My short observations from reports in the Reputation section indicate that a temporary ban or signature ban does not do anything at all. The spammer just waits until that account is no longer banned and resumes spamming as usual. Why would they care so much if they have many other accounts that are earning money simultaneously? Don't make me look for example, someone like nutildah or lovesmayfamilis can confirm as they have a larger history pool.

This place is holy.

This is where satoshi lived and spread his wisdom.

For your proposal to make sense, 99.9% of the posts here would have to be deleted. Do you really want to show this place as the birthplace of Bitcoin to anyone? Directing them to very specific historical posts would be fine, but anything else would spell disaster. Do we need to quote random posts and threads to demonstrate the impression that this place generates to an outsider?

Yes we get it, your signature payments are under threat from this. You made your bias quite clear, there is no issue even if 99.9% posts are junk. All good. Now move along.

[BlackHatCoiner]

I hate to say it, but to be honest, I think the only solution is to prohibit any signature campaign from taking place altogether.

- It's extremely easy to generate lots of text with LLM chatbots. And they're trained to mimic human responses slightly better everyday.
- It's easy to create an account and get some merits using those chatbots, if you're not severely stupid.
- Moderators have failed to sufficiently prevent this thing from continuing. Users have also found it futile to report every single one of them.

What other solution is there apart from killing the monetary incentive in the first place?

[goldkingcoiner]

The main issue I think is that there are too many signature campaign posting requirements and not enough stuff to talk about.
So whether AI or not, people are forced to pull convos out of their asses because the campaign managers need their ads to stand out in a sea of other ads,
so the users feel compelled to post more, regardless of whether their posts are good.

AI just adds another layer of BS on top of this BS.

Here is an idea:

Signatures get displayed only on posts that have an x amount of merit or more. This functions as a quality pass and forces people to make their posts into something that people would like to read and merit.

It would also reduce the amount of ad spam. So, even if a signature only gets displayed once every 20 posts, it will stand out in the thread more than it does now.

And when it comes to avatars, I think putting ads on them should be discouraged or a similar rule applied. We need entertaining, individual and recognizeable avatars. Otherwise it just looks like the same person is posting because all the avatars look the same.

From a marketing viewpoint, a individual, self-created non-ad customized avatar is far more attractive to the eye and will put more attention on the signature of said poster than some ad-slop image.


edit:

OR - customized non-ad avatars/signatures get displayed regardless of the merit barrier but the signature campaign avatars/signatures must pass the merit barrier to be visible.

[Satofan44]

- Moderators have failed to sufficiently prevent this thing from continuing. Users have also found it futile to report every single one of them.

They have not really been trying though. The bar on what constitutes a low quality post is too low and simultaneously the bar for a ban is too high.

What other solution is there apart from killing the monetary incentive in the first place?

A complete redesign of the campaigns or a complete removal, yeah. Due to the admin's inactivity for many years on these issues, I don't believe that he would ever go with the extreme measure though.

Signatures get displayed only on posts that have an x amount of merit or more. This functions as a quality pass and forces people to make their posts into something that people would like to read and merit.

This would not work either as account farmers have many local board merit sources on board. They have plenty of merit circulating between them and you will notice this in the pattern of their merit behavior. They will merit each other on relatively low quality posts and will not give any merit to the best posters of this forum.

[LoyceV]

What other solution is there apart from killing the monetary incentive in the first place?

I'd say enforcing this 9 years old guidelines would be a good start.

[nutildah]

What other solution is there apart from killing the monetary incentive in the first place?

I'd say enforcing this 9 years old guidelines would be a good start.

Ha. What was described there 9 years ago is exactly what is happening now, except on a much bigger scale:

Due to the unacceptable level of spam and low-quality posts signature campaigns generate we have decided to offer some guidelines of what is and isn't acceptable and an explanation of the punishments for users who continually make low quality contributions and the campaigns that continue to pay them to do so. Signature campaigns should be a way to reward users for quality contributions and only those that do should be paid, but at the moment it has become a way for many campaign operators to lazily and cheaply advertise their business by paying greedy users to spam whatever unsubstantial rubbish they can be bothered putting the minimal amount of effort in to and this will no longer be tolerated.

It is stunning how much of a mirror this description is to our current situation. I don't want to say "nothing has changed" because I think what happened was we all got complacent again. But the reintroduction of regular sig and temp bans for continual production of low-quality content would be a good start in helping to correct things.

I am going to take it upon myself to fire back up the The SpamBusters Club and post candidates for sig and temp bans there. You all are welcome to join me.

[apogio]

- Moderators have failed to sufficiently prevent this thing from continuing.

In reality, not taking action is even worse than failure. You don't even have the "I tried as hard as I could" argument. I'm also feeling that I can think of at least 10 users that would significantly improve forum's moderation if they were asked to.

[Satofan44]

What other solution is there apart from killing the monetary incentive in the first place?

I'd say enforcing this 9 years old guidelines would be a good start.

- Moderators have failed to sufficiently prevent this thing from continuing.

In reality, not taking action is even worse than failure. You don't even have the "I tried as hard as I could" argument. I'm also feeling that I can think of at least 10 users that would significantly improve forum's moderation if they were asked to.

It is very strange that for some reason the major staff members are not involved at all with the forum or any discussions regarding Bitcoin. For example, neither hilariousandco nor Cyrus are active at all. The same is true with mprep. It is like they don't care about any of this at all. There may be other examples that I don't know about?

As someone has said already, preferably staff members would be involved in discussions everywhere instead of semi-passively farming money (?) -- that way they would feel just how bad the discussions are and would save time actively moderating. I wonder why they are so inactive (they don't post at all, I'm not talking about moderation)?
Bitcoin-talk forum where most of users who are posting don't care about Bitcoin and most of the senior staff members don't care about Bitcoin either. What kind of dystopian environment is this?

[MoonReaver]

What other solution is there apart from killing the monetary incentive in the first place?

I'd say enforcing this 9 years old guidelines would be a good start.

If it’s a guideline of an almost a decade ago then don’t the current managers go along it?

[BlackHatCoiner]

What other solution is there apart from killing the monetary incentive in the first place?

I'd say enforcing this 9 years old guidelines would be a good start.

I'm curious: isn't a moderator paid to be a moderator? If they aren't paid, there's so much money sitting in forum's cold storage that could be used to fund moderators that actually moderate.

[nutildah]

If it’s a guideline of an almost a decade ago then don’t the current managers go along it?

They are probably unaware of it as it is so old. Wouldn't hurt to refresh the guidelines for this next decade.

I'm curious: isn't a moderator paid to be a moderator? If they aren't paid, there's so much money sitting in forum's cold storage that could be used to fund moderators that actually moderate.

Another thing to consider is that there hasn't been a shakeup in the moderation team in over a decade. About 5 years ago I started a thread pointing out how moderation was getting stale and the response was "what else do you want us to do? we handle all the reports." Well clearly there's a few other things the mods could be doing these days.

If I was a mod I would work on coming up with a system to objectively categorize useless posts and then issue temp bans and sig bans to those who have 10+ reported posts deleted. I'd try to make it a waste of time and money for campaign managers who insist on hiring low-quality posters while simultaneously encouraging said posters to improve their post quality.