Quote from: theymos on June 25, 2018, 03:16:59 AM

Quote from: Flying Hellfish on June 25, 2018, 02:12:36 AM

Based on the fact that I now felt that the driving force behind theymos' decisions was not $

Right, I don't care about making money from the forum personally. (I've actually thought about getting rid of the forum ads, since it's often a big headache and the forum has enough reserves for a long time, but operating at a significant loss while there's money basically just sitting on the table feels wrong, even if the level of loss is sustainable for quite a while.)

The things on the forum which encourage spam are allowed mainly because it's part of the forum's mission to be as free as possible. Eg. banning bounties would undoubtedly reduce spam, but that'd be destroying an entire economy/population/culture which has been able to develop due to the forum's freedom. I am willing to take this sort of action, but only as an absolute last resort. It's always preferable to handle these problems by reshaping the environment to make them non-problems, rather than removing some freedom.

It's wonderful when someone is able to constructively do something on the forum instead of continuing with whatever they were expected to do under the status quo. Enabling that sort of thing is exactly why Bitcoin and this forum were created. Though bitcointalk.org is not a worldwide welfare organization, and people are not entitled to make money.

Limiting newbie participation is very harmful for a community. Newbie jail will never return: I consider the newbie-jail period to have been extremely damaging to the forum. When barriers to participation are too high, then the best people often just won't go to the trouble of joining, and the people who are willing to jump through the hoops are often people who aren't good for the community: people with nothing better to do, scammers, get-rick-quickers, etc. Having a permanent newbie jail policy would improve things a lot in the short-term, but would end up being a fatal poison to the community.

The low signal-to-noise is a real issue which seriously annoys me and is often on my mind. But as you mention, fixing it non-destructively is difficult.

Correct me if am wrong.

While the bitcointalk.org community was established to create a knowledge-base system for bitcoiners and future adopters of the cryptocurrency model, ~~monetizing~~, bounty as an economical by-product has helped the community grow so large.

While we may not all have equal access to internet money making ventures that work, I'd say that this forum has brought about freelancers, professionals, dreams and redefined purposes. And putting a cap on that, might not be the best option.

There are many out there who would be the next Satoshi or Vitalik or even you, who can contribute immensely to this great economic revolution and should be given that opportunity even if they don't have the 'necessary resources' to get there in a jiffy.

There are still some high ranking 'shit-posters' (pardon my tongue), who scaled that bridge and had their ranks 'hero-ed'(not epic at all), and while I know that they are carefully being watched, they still have their ways around the system, or don't they?

The obvious solution is to expand/enforce the administrative responsibilities to include calling bounty managers to do due diligence and report shit posters, having specific ordinances that govern bounty hunting with a specific level of service to the BTT community or the larger crypto-family as a whole. - I'm also afraid that it might centralize this once so 'free' and 'democratic' society - but it's all for the greater good ai.

The idea of a ranking/merit system should be one of value, whereby when you see a Hero/Legendary post, it should mean something as priceless as experience and the other ranks should be able to hold such to account.

People still create newbie accounts when they want to comment outside 'their usual self', and you could tell that this person isn't a newbie at all.

I should suppose the ideal state of a newbie is someone who is ignorant and wants to learn more about what cryptocurrencies, bitcoin, altcoins, trading and the sorts are all about. And as they learn, they can contribute their own perspectives, and results should be growth not just in activities but also in rank, to be able to establish their well being in the community.

Practically, a good number of good [informative and educative] posts can catch the eyes of 'meriters', you'd even find merits being wasted on comments that truly add no value. (would love to draw examples here, but no need to be petty).

Finally, we must be aware of the real state of affairs, bitcoin may be popular, cryptocurrencies may have been widely spread, but adoption is the goal and still dependent on the reliability of this still developing 'cryptographic economics'.