I have almost 5000 posts on the forum, in many different subforums and subjects.  But only something like 13 posts in 2018, most in February. Like me, many other technical parties have stopped using the forum entirely or almost entirely. I don't think it's reasonable to that that I am active.  Usually I only post now when a journalist sees something on BCT and asks me to comment,  instead of comment to the journalist I prefer to just go reply to the the thread.

Your example is one of those in fact, the poster in question was running around with incorrect claims of vulnerabilities in Bitcoin.  I got asked.  I'm ashamed that my post looked anything like anonymint's to you but I'm also not surprised: As you note, you don't currently have the background to evaluate the technical content. So you're reading for tone.   If I write in a less than kind tone even when addressing someone who is themselves unkind, it's a mistake on my part which I regret.  But I hope-- and have reason to believe from the results-- that the good I contribute eclipses the crime of having a bit of humanity here and there.  Unfortunately, to you-- and you are not alone-- someone who does interesting technical work that makes a real difference and someone who strings together terms and disrupts discussions can look pretty similar.  It seems that many draw an equivalence among all people who say things that they don't understand,  and in doing so they do everyone including themselves a great disservice; you can probably understand more than you give yourself credit for, when you don't understand at least some of it is a failure on the speaker's part to make themselves understandable. Sometimes that failure is because they don't understand what they're saying themselves.

To some in shoes like yours, the constant and unrelenting anger in anonymint's posts make him feel even more credible.  Arguably, other more competent posters could win those people over by matching tone.  But most of us don't want to live like that,  we don't want to be king of the crapped up pool. We'd rather just go away, and-- in large-- we have.

Sometimes it's a question of venue-- if I'm writing in the technical subforum I'm usually not trying to address a particularly general audience... but if I'm not comprehensible to the audience I'm addressing it's because I'm making a mistake or because I don't fully understand what I'm talking about myself and so I can't (yet) explain it clearly (it happens from time to time...).  Please feel free to ask me to expand on any of my posts if one interests you but sounds like opaque jargon.


Just as a point of order, sub-forum mods on BCT don't really have much in the way of authority.  Mostly we have the technical ability to zot spammers and move around threads,  but forum norms and policies generally frown on using those tools in an especially editorial way. (Moreover, even if a subforum moderator can get away with it, it doesn't help much without the support of global mods and theymos to do things like ban users).  Generally, subforum mods have about the same clout they'd have as a similar non-mod long time community member.   I wouldn't be surprised if a respected technical contributor like me standing up and saying that anonymint's posting drives him off the forum had some impact-- otherwise I wouldn't have commented-- but thats about it, after all I've been telling people to hit [ignore] on anonymint for years, and he's still been here all this time. We don't, for example, have the ability to ban accounts from particular subforums.  If that had been up to me I would have done that with the tech subforum and anonymint years ago-- the people who find him disruptive are mostly in there and the people who don't are mostly elsewhere...