If you want a forum without the freedom to advertise in your signature, you can literally choose from thousands of other forums. Go there, and see if it's better than Bitcointalk. If it is, you've found your new place to discuss online. If it isn't, you'll be back.
All we need here is enforcing the
Signature Campaign Guidelines. I expect that would end all campaigns that pay useless tokens, some campaigns that pay in Bitcoin but at very low rates (I can think of 2 old online casinos) and it would end the biggest Bitcoin paying spam campaign Stake (check
the top 20 posters and see who pays most of them).
That's true; 14 out of 20 posters are from Stake. I've noticed that participants in some specific signature campaigns, which I'm not going to name, are generating spam content; generally, it's those that have a high maximum post count. They're often paired with a large number of participants with low payment rates or feature scammy services that attract users other campaigns wouldn't hire, such as 1xbit approximately a year ago.
I'm also here when there are a few signature campaigns and so much spam, people are very more interested in airdrops and bounty campaigns you'll see members with legendary accounts where all their posts are bounty reports, the merit system stops this ranking abuse, you have to be a good contributor if you want to be in a signature campaign, those who get in the signature campaign are privileged because they earned it.
They make the forum rich in content, other forum members contributed without a signature but it's their choice not to be part of a signature campaign.
That's what I'm referring to, some managed to rank-up to Legendary just by posting on bounties, the introduction of the merit system was extremely justified.