I think we all agree that the spam amount at Bitcointalk still is too high. The merit system perhaps has improved the situation a little bit, but even that is debatable.
The reason, in my opinion is related to the way signature campaigns work currently, and specifically, to the incentives they generate.
In short: In some campaigns there is currently no incentive for campaign starters and bounty managers to control the quality of the posts of the participants.
How are signature campaigns "supposed" to work?
- A company wants to advertise its services.
- It thinks that Bitcointalk is visited by a significant audience for the service(s) they offer.
- So they pay people to show signatures.
- Good content posted by a campaign participant should increase the visibility for the company, and thus the RoI of the campaign.
- Only if the RoI is positive, then the campaign is profitable, and makes sense for the company.
It's essentially the way the "content industry" works: Companies get attention by readers in exchange for their payments to the authors. They would only pay authors which met some quality standards to attract an attractive audience.
The incentive problem
In theory there should exist an incentive for the bounty managers to control the quality of the posts. If most of the posts were of bad quality, then nobody would read them, and the company would get little to no attention from the audience.
The core of the incentive problem is, however, that it costs them nothing to pay participants of signature campaigns, if they pay in ICO tokens! They simply create additional tokens out of thin air.
So the ROI of ICO-issuing signature campaigns will almost always be positive, regardless of the quality of the participants' posts.
That means that the "content industry model" does not work anymore, and that's why we see so much spam.
Solutions?
- One could restrict campaigns, e.g. only allow campaigns that pay out in Bitcoin or another cryptocurrency that has an independent blockchain and is not an ICO token.
- Stricter control of Bounty managers.
Both solutions would require additional efforts by the forum staff.
One could wait for the ICO problem to be solved by the regulators (i.e. the incentive for ICO-based campaigns could decrease drastically if ICOs are heavily regulated in more countries.)
One could wait for the merit system to flourish, but for this to happen, the moderators would have to ban farmed accounts.
Any other ideas?