Quote from: TheUltraElite on September 18, 2018, 08:53:38 AM

Second, it is not tough to earn merits.

It is when you can't write for shit. If I tried to make posts in the French local board (of which I studied in high school but know very little), there's no way in hell I'd earn any merits, because I have a pretty limited French-language vocabulary and grasp of the grammar of that language. I have no doubt that my posts would come off as very simple, and the native French-speakers would know this and might even resent me even trying to do so--especially if it was obvious that getting paid for it.

I belong to a non-bitcoin related forum that draws people from all over the world--it's all about fountain pens. It's in English, but there are people who post there because they're passionate about the subject matter. I would never criticize someone there, because I know what their motivation is. Here it's a different story, especially when the local boards exist.

The standards are different on bitcointalk, and I think that's because so many members are getting paid for their posts. On the fountain pen site, there are TONS of "great looking pen!" posts and those are completely accepted. Here, members are cranking out posts just like that because they're being incentivized to do so, and probably not because they're so passionate about bitcoin. Ultimately that creates a ton of noise and drowns out the signal.

All of this is probably obvious, but I'm hoping some newbies read the above. The problem had gotten so bad by about 2015 that Danny Hamilton created an ignore list that included every member who was wearing advertising in their signature. That's an extreme solution, but it's obvious why he created that.