In my post I just want to show that not every copper member pays for membership just to make bounty, but I still think that this is the main reason for majority of them.
I think that most of them pay for this because they want to post ANN or BOUNTY thread with pictures.
But as this thread shows Copper Member number is growing more rapidly after the the new rank requirement this means more Copper members are bounty hunters.
Yeah. The majority of people purchasing it previously did so just to essentially auto-whitelist themselves, but Copper Membership has now taken on a new meaning/use as it's the only way for someone to get a signature without achieving any merit. Give it time and it'll probably get some stigma associated with it and will be seen as a shitposting rank/title, especially when you start seeing Copper Members with hundreds to thousands of posts and not a single merit received. I think we should look at solely making Copper Membership as just some sort of whitelist feature that doesn't give you a bigger signature as it's too cheap and allows shitposters to easily bypass the exact thing that was put there to stop them. One merit is still also too easy to get and I think we should remove signatures until Member rank has been achieved. Ten merit is still quite easy to achieve, but not for spammers. I'm still for further donator ranks as well like Silver and Gold but they need to be sufficiently expensive to stop people just coughing up $10-20 per account over however many they have.