I don't think this place is struggling to survive at all. In fact, quite the opposite. The board continues to grow, but the majority of traffic and new users coming here are just shitposters looking to earn and it's certainly struggling to be a place that is actually useful for anything other than earning by spamming.
How can a forum survive if all good knowledgeable members leave and its only shitposters and bots that are left(with a few members here and there)? theymos himself said it, managing this forum is more than just a headache. Like it or not, the forum is getting worse by the day. And we are sitting here with our hands tied and not able to do anything about it.
Delegating workload would have a huge impact, and I'm not sure why things haven't been done already. I'm not just talking about making new admins either. Most sub boards need their own dedicated mod and this is something I've been requesting for years. More staff should be added as well to help with the clean up. If some users can spend hours upon hours reporting tens of thousands of posts then they'll probably make a pretty good staff member and they can then handle these things themselves without having to waste time reporting them which in turn just puts more pressure and stress on the current staff. New staff members and sub-board mods could be made/assigned with the click of a few buttons for theymos and this can be done today. If theymos doesn't have time to run things like the forum ad slots of respond to emails and restore accounts etc then this business should all be delegated.
It surprises me that there are only 26 staff members. In other forums(like reddit), there are like 8-10 moderators per board(subreddit). We need like 2 mods per sub-board, and one Global mod for entire board,if that makes any sense. It doesn't have to be a Global Mod, but a new type of mod just to handle an entire board, and helping other mods of that specific board.
We don't need more admins, but the admin power certainly could be little delegated. I don't think theymos will ever delegate things like running ad slots or responding to emails or restoring accounts. He'd be potentially putting a lot at risk.
What annoyed me the most about that is he didn't even put them into simple 'yes' or 'no' categories. He's smart and careful what he says so nobody can hold it against him and say, well you said yes to this or you would do that, or you said you would never do this etc, and at the same time he didn't commit to anything either so he doesn't have to do any of them at any point. My only solace is that he didn't actually outright slam them all with an exclusive 'no'. I'd really like to get his reasoning for why he is against some suggestions though, especially things like requiring at least one merit to become a Junior Member etc. That is essential in my opinion if we're not going to remove their signatures altogether and nobody else has really made a workable suggestion on how to stop or at least limit how we can prevent spammers and bots getting paid to post or copy and paste here. Hopefully he just thinks it needs tweaking etc rather than outright never doing it in some capacity.
theymos doesn't want to remove signatures, because he encourages people to earn from this forum, but he also said that people shouldn't shitpost to earn. I am starting to wonder if theymos gets pissed everytime someone says "theymos said this." "theymos said that."
It could be really annoying sometimes.
This forum isn't decentralised. There needs to be some minimal rules and they need to be enforced otherwise it is just chaos and disorder and the greedy and nefarious dominate over everything ruining it for everyone else. The forum can't continue on as it is or we might as well just rename/rebrand it shitcointalk or getpaidtopost.org because that's all this place has become. A forum for people just to post generic crap to get paid. 95% of people here don't care about contributing to a discussion, just churning out a mindless sentence of drivel then moving on to the next thread. Rinse and repeat all day over however many accounts you have. This can't be acceptable and is why there needs to be rules and regulations to make sure it doesn't happen and ruin the board in the first place making it unfit for its true purpose.
People think this forum is decentralized because one, it has bitcoin in its name, and two, it was created by satoshi. theymos, increase your standards, lighten things up a notch.
It is huge, and I'm glad it's here, but it needs tweaking. It stops people from ranking up by shitpositng but it does nothing about bots and spammers being able to get paid as Juniors. Requiring merit or removing their signatures would help with this. People also need to start giving out merit more and more merit sources need to be added. There's quite a lot of people making decent or even great posts that just go unmerited a lot of time and I think even decent posters will take a very long time to get to Hero or Legendary if they start from scratch.
How can you expect decent users to rank up especially when they make posts in the spamfest discussion boards. People come here to "talk" about bitcoin and that itself stops them from ranking up, and that is got to be a shocking but not so shocking truth.