And for this reason 56k active members is too many. We need to cut that number down to about 10k; I reckon half the people logging onto the forum at any given moment are either at or below this level of comprehension.
Well, the 56k active accounts were for those who logged in (without posting) and those who posted at least one post in the last three months, but when I drill down to only users who posted at least one post, the number was around 21k active members (somewhere on this thread), and that wasn't enough, so I later drill down to the last 30 days and only 5k members were active (more than 30% are bounty hunters, 70% genuine members). So, realistically, the forum has 5-6k active members per month, which is around 2% of the active users on r/bitcoin (reddit).
Also, a lot of guests/passerbys simply don't want to wade through the enormous ton of shitposts to find the occasional nugget of interesting information. That's probably the main reason why regular people - who aren't interested in making money from the forum - don't sign up and contribute. From the outside looking in its an absolute spamfest.
There is always going to be a shit poster on every topic of discussions, be it on Twitter, Facebook, reddit or wherever so i don't think that spam is the driving force here.
Can you provide links to where have people gone to discuss crypto related matters? Apart from "altcoinstalks" and "cryptotalk" there is not much that comes to mind except occasional questions you might find on "stackoverflow"
The majority of real Bitcoiners are now on Twitter, where much of the discussion takes place with less spam..