Quote from: Welsh on July 30, 2021, 09:00:40 PM

Nah, its a pretty bad idea to compare Reddit's upvotes to Merit here on the forum. Reddit's system is fundamentally broken, and is very easy to abuse. Basically, if someone wanted to they could control what is seen by others on the subreddit by creating hundreds of accounts, and down voting whatever they want. Merit here on the forum is only given to those that have earned merit or have been selected by theymos for their merit distribution, and eye for spotting posts that align to his goal on Bitcointalk, which is usually the higher quality posts.

Upvoting isn't judging the posts quality, at least that's not its intended use. Its used to help upvote content that they think is relevant, and users should see, and down vote things that they shouldn't see. That's basically it, its not really tied to the quality of the post, at least not primarily, and is only loosely associated with it. However, its most definitely misused by many of the users over there.

That's why I hesitate to make a comparison between the two. Since 2017 I still really enjoy my time on this forum even when people say this forum is outdated and need to be upgraded asap if users don't want to leave it.

As for the user base that looks down, I've actually had the same hunch since december 2019 so I created a special thread to find out why. As of December 3, 2019, this forum still has 133,934 active users according to bpip.org, but today we only have 98,669 logged-in profiles in the last 3 month. Obviously I can feel a lot of decline in term of the number of users. But if the orientation is on quality, I think this forum looks much better than before January 2018 or before the merit system was implemented.