I took a look at this forum's rank on Alexa, it was not good enough; provided that Content is king which is a big tenet in this forum, and why merits were integrated for users who post quality content no doubt articles from this forum rank very fast on google but the number of visitors to this forum has reduced and it affected the ranking of this website.
In 2018 according to Wikipedia, this forum ranked 900 on Alexa Globally.
Later in 2018, it was announced that users without any merit will be demoted to Newbie regardless of their ranks. During this period, so many users left this forum and most accounts were sold out for a couple of dollars. People were desperately in need of bitcointalk accounts with merits so they won't be a Newbie and also for their several businesses in the service thread. (You won't trade with a newbie)
Now in 2020, the forum ranked number 11,525 in February and at 22,845 this month this shows that our forum is doing well in good content but performs very bad in traffic, some threads scare new visitors away, just like this one
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5220580.0what is the actual aim of making the merit system very hard for users? This will scare some away and those who are not good at writing, it means they don't belong here?
An internet forum where people come to learn and share information on bitcoin is not just a personal forum for some users that have a good rank to suggest how difficult the forum will be. Also, it is clear that most threads from the newbies are not given much attention because of how they structured their article.
If you noticed well, you will see that the signature campaigns are getting closed because companies don't get exactly the kind of traffic they used to see.
The forum is now difficult not only for newbies but for investors who came as newbies and left because they couldn't understand the forum better. I like this section "beginners and guide" but I didn't discover it as a newbie.
I will say that this forum is easy if you have worked hard on it and it's part of you, But very difficult for freshers because of how old members treat them with merit.
What is the reason behind holding a Smerit without giving it out? Most of them will waste or expire. If we put more energy on how we make good articles and also make it easier to harbor visitors that turned to members. This forum will rank as before and we will get enough people that will make use of our signatures for adverts.
I know our moderators are working hard to reduce spam and scam here. But I will encourage users to make here fun, we are in a war forum of smart Alecks that counter every single thread that is published. How do you expect better learning if they are no fun going on here?
looking at the rank of this site do you think Satoshi will be happy? We can build a forum as famous as bitcoin.
link to Alexa rank on bitcointalk.org
https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/bitcointalk.orgrank for 2018 below
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcointalk#cite_note-alexa-1