Hmm... I see that I left an unbalanced closing paren in my previous post. That's a bad bad PowerGlove. No steak with your chips tonight! OK, fine, maybe half a steak, but no fried egg! OK, fine, you can have one fried egg, but it will be cooked through! And don't let me see you having a slice of tarte tatin or asking your wife to dust cinnamon on your cappuccino!

Don't worry too much about people not "liking" you. I've noticed you sometimes say things in an abrasive way and/or say things that a lot of people are probably already thinking but would never actually state publicly. That kind of thing, when it isn't trolling, is rare and appreciated on Bitcointalk (by some, anyway). That being said, and if I may offer you a bit of advice: I think you'll do better (as in, I think you'll avoid picking up trust-system-related "punishments" and will therefore last longer with a healthier frame of mind) if you find more constructive ways to express your perspectives. Thinking of my own trajectory, I'm pretty much certain that if I had just impulsively said everything that I wanted to say on/about Bitcointalk without first toning down my frustration level and then making a considerable effort to come across as polite, I'd have "flamed out" after a few months of posting and would likely have been thought of as a troll. (For better or worse, and among a million other forms of modern brain damage, the working definition for "trolling" seems to be: "Sharing upsetting perspectives, especially in an impolite way.")

For example, the specific incident that compelled me to work on adding 2FA to the forum (when I was still an ordinary user) was something that, at the time, made me think, "It's so very fucking stupid that the forum hasn't implemented TOTP. Can someone please pull their finger out of their ass and just get this done, FFS! Why is this so difficult? How has this been complained about for over a decade without solution? Can nobody here program? Are you all soft in the head, or what?", but, instead of sharing that perspective, I shared something much more politely worded and then quickly concluded that I should just tackle the problem myself (as in, if I had shared my honest thoughts on the 2FA issue, it would only have led to me rubbing people very much the wrong way and causing them to think, "Wow you're an asshole. If you think this is an easy problem to solve and that the rest of us are idiots, then why don't you try to solve it yourself, or maybe just fuck off altogether?", and so I skipped past that avoidable ugliness and decided that the only path with any profit on it would be for me to keep my criticisms to myself and quietly get to work).

Yup. Me, too.

Probably 0.2 merit per post is where I would start if it were up to me, and I'd then ramp it up (slowly) over time until Bitcointalk became readable and enjoyable enough that a random intelligent outsider might choose to spend their time here without any financial incentive to do so. I'll know that it's starting to do some good when I can read the "Bitcoin Discussion" board for more than 2 minutes without feeling embarrassed for all of us. Though, on other days, I'm less bullish about this whole idea, and I worry that the "brain drain" is already so close to complete that it's now a lost cause to try to reverse it. It's as if years of "Bitcointalk's fine! In fact, it's better than fine. It's great!" has given its many problems the breathing room they needed to metastasize, and now its treatment options are severely limited (as in, all of the options that might actually work also carry the risk of quickly killing the patient).

I've gone back and forth about this, but, after I wrote my previous post, I was left with the thought that 0.1 is very close to "inconsequential". The thing is, 0.1 is about as high as I think might actually be implemented, and my thinking, especially as I wind down my "Bitcointalk career" [1], is very shaped by:


[1] I've been alluding to, for a while now, the fact that I'm getting close to throwing in the towel and stepping down as the forum's fix-it guy. In case anyone cares, all that really means is that I'm finding it very, very difficult to operate within this environment (I can't tell you how much I miss working alone and actually getting stuff done), and I think that to prevent me from (very soon) just completely losing my sense of humor and leaving the forum permanently, it would be wise for me to opt-out of receiving further payments, to again consider myself to only be a sometimes-volunteer, and to then re-focus the bulk of my freed-up attention on the independently-pursuable Bitcoin(talk)-related projects that I've been wanting to work on for a long time now. In practice, what I think that will look like is me finishing one or two more SMF patches and then being mostly absent for 2026 and 2027 before showing up again in 2028 to ask people to help me test whatever mini-project it is that I've completed by that point. (I'm hoping that by the time I return, Bitcointalk hasn't yet crossed the event horizon dooming it to become just a few big fish left flopping around in the murky puddle of a micro-earning shithole disguised as a discussion forum, but, if it has, then, I guess I'll just politely wish everyone all the best and say my final goodbyes.)