4

How do we remove the hostility and radio silence for cryptocurrencies which are not bitcoin on this site?

Recently I posted a question about bitcoin-cash and it was met with hostility followed by radio silence. People here seem to want this site to only be about bitcoin, so when their comments get removed for being hostile, they seem to resort to I guess an online form of "passive aggression" by possibly choosing not to answer any questions which are not about bitcoin.

It seems this sites scope is currently about all crypto currencies. If this is the case, is it possible to open the minds of the hostile ones, so they can look past their personal opinions and just help?

Would it be worth creating a new SE site called cryptocurrencies.stackexchange.com where it becomes obvious that the site is about all cryptocurrencies and changing bitcoin.stackexchange.com to only be about bitcoin to make it easier for people to understand the scope?

3
  • 6
    +1 for creating a cryptocurrencies.stackexchange.com for altcoins not served by a specific community such as bitcoin.SE or ethereum.SE, and then no longer allowing non-Bitcoin questions on bitcoin.SE. Apr 18, 2019 at 14:51
  • Also check out Nick's related answer here: bitcoin.meta.stackexchange.com/a/667/5406
    – Murch Mod
    Apr 18, 2019 at 15:58
  • @DavidA.Harding, do you know how to make that happen? Can anyone create a new SE here? I've never tried or looked into it. If anyone here has experience in this, could you make this happen? However, to make it effective, bitcoin.se would have to be locked down to bitcoin (btc) Q&A only IMO. Apr 19, 2019 at 20:56

1 Answer 1

4

How do we remove the hostility and radio silence for cryptocurrencies which are not bitcoin on this site?

The answer to that is not new: to change this, we'd need more contributors taking an active interest in these topics.

It seems this sites scope is currently about all crypto currencies. If this is the case, is it possible to open the minds of the hostile ones, so they can look past their personal opinions and just help?

Yes, the scope of the site includes other cryptocurrencies. However, that doesn't mean that any individual contributor is obligated to volunteer time answering questions they are not personally interested in.

It's a bit of a catch-22: we don't seem to have a critical mass of users that are interested in maintaining and answering questions about altcoins, so in turn no new contributors for that content are lured in, which in turn means that there are fewer interesting questions to entice competent answerers.

Frankly, this would be solved if every altcoin had one or two contributors that subscribed to the relevant tags and edited/answered every corresponding question such as e.g. Rene Pickhardt has been doing for Lightning Network questions lately.

I and probably others as well have spent time advocating this to altcoin communities, yet the situation has not improved: most altcoin questions still get really low engagement, don't get cleaned up, and also don't get good answers.

In a weaker form, the situation could even be helped, if bad questions in general got culled more effectively, so that any interested party looking at unanswered questions in these tags would not see a heap of trash. So, in a twisted way, altcoin questions getting more scrutiny might actually be working in favor of altcoin questions (although maybe not in your specific case).

Would it be worth creating a new SE site called cryptocurrencies.stackexchange.com where it becomes obvious that the site is about all cryptocurrencies and changing bitcoin.stackexchange.com to only be about bitcoin to make it easier for people to understand the scope?

This has been proposed multiple times in the past, and a few attempts to start a new SE in Area51 had been taken. One of the reasons this didn't succeed was because Bitcoin.SE was covering that topic. However, the combination of narrowing the topic of Bitcoin.SE to Bitcoin-only and starting a Cryptocurrency.SE has not been tried before. I could see this getting support from both Bitcoin and altcoin proponents. It might be that the time for this idea has come.

4
  • I guess Cryptocurrency.SE can be tried, though the situation might be already bad enough when there are too many specific cryptocurrency proposals on Area 51, fragmenting Cryptocurrency.SE...
    – Andrew T.
    Apr 18, 2019 at 19:58
  • 1
    @Murch, how do we make this happen? 1. Lock down bitcoin.se so only bitcoin (btc) questions can be asked. 2. Create a cryptocurrencies.se for everything else? 3. When people on bitcoin.se post about altcoins, we can direct them to cryptocurrencies.se and vise versa. Apr 19, 2019 at 20:52
  • 1
    I've been talking to a couple people lately, some of them are interested in championing this change. I hope that they will open a corresponding meta discussion soon.
    – Murch Mod
    Apr 20, 2019 at 21:21
  • 2
    @oshirowanen: See bitcoin.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1005/5406
    – Murch Mod
    May 8, 2019 at 4:34

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .