When I think of Bitcointalk, for some reason, altcoins are at the forefront of the traffic and activity. I wonder: have we already crossed the point to where the signal-to-noise ratio overflowed into the negatives, and now we think everything is peachy?

The forum will continue on, but what is the actual purpose of using it anymore, if not to spam, scam, or continue in circlejerk topics about nothing?

As of this post, the list of rules has been viewed 736769 times, with a member count of 3398535. Bear in mind, those are not unique views. For some reason, the forum is most unfriendly to new users despite having removed the Newbie jail system years ago.

As a guest, you can't view trust, and thus all marketplace threads (where trust is viewable and relevant) should ideally be blocked off to such users or have a giant warning that gives them prerequisite knowledge. Flags are the only preventative measure for this subset of users, and of those only the yellow ones could be applied without the existence of a victim.

Once you sign up, you receive the great privilege of seeing DefaultTrust metrics but if you never learned about rules, trust, or anything that should have been taught immediately after registration, then once your seven-day grace period is up, you no longer see those yellow flags. I wonder if there should be some "remove type-1 flag" button that requires user confirmation, to indicate their experience and knowledge of the system, rather than an arbitrary time-based metric?

Thankfully, we have an intuitive forum where all users are responsible for their stupidity when they can't find the rules or when they play at websites that everyone (but them) knows is a scam or become frustrated, spam, and banned when they finally do learn about the convoluted mess that is Bitcointalk.