It was somehow golden period of the forum and you could see literally technical and well made discussion rather than seeking bitcoin investment advice and other spam threads we came across daily now and the well written threads are buried under the piles of such garbage threads.
If we're going to talk about the golden period of spam&shitposting, then I'll agree with that - because that's the time when signature campaigns were managed with bots that just counted posts without quality checks - I'm surprised you don't remember that since you're a member of the beginning of 2016. People who say that it was better then than today obviously have completely different criteria for good and bad, if we talk about the conditions that prevail in the forum today.
I'm not saying that it's perfect today, far from it - but for all those who used the forum to use it for profit, today it's much harder or even impossible to do what they did 4-5 years ago.
See there are some good and positive points along with some negative factors also if we make comparisons of Bitcoin talk related to current and past changes.This is my assumptions related to the same :
Those who use forum as profits and earnings perspective then for sure they have gained a lot like the bitcoin rates have improved as they are still trading above $45k and campaigns paying in btc still pay $50-$80 to hero/legendaries rank and for sure they are into good profits including all of us by the way.
The forum has also seen rise of the members from low rank to high rank after the implementation of merit system but due to making quality posts and good, healthy and effective contributions to the forum which is why they have gained merits from members who liked their ideas and posts.Many members have gained and are still earning merits by making such post.
The other case is that most of the newbies are misguided or introduced to the forum as some sort of income source on the primary basis and we see such threads daily on B&H section and other boards.Secondly there are members who are not able to gain any merits and have left the forum because they cannot join campaign due to merit restrictions or are simply spamming up the threads with no knowledge and writing off topics which is of no use.Newbies who are not into learning phase and implement the bitcoin knowledge are also joining the same race.
If we make certain analysis of Bitcoin discussion section also we could easily see the post quality have been degraded like most of the members don't know what are they posting like if there is any rumour or fake news in the market then without any investigation or finding out the details they will create the thread and later on similar threads carry on with same information.But in past there were some good discussions carried out by members.But now it is changing.
So my main concern was that there are some positive and negative aspects that have changed on botcointalk forum over all these years.