I noticed last week the Ancient Coin Forum for CoinTalk has grown to 18,023 messages. It's refreshing to see this growth since ancient coins offer so much more than other areas of the hobby. Not only are ancient coins bargain priced compared to modern coins, but they offer so much more in the areas of history & aesthetics. Internet growth & blogs like CoinTalk are drawing new collectors to ancient coins.
I like that we have a high average number of posts per thread, reflecting the interestingness of our subjects .
I only recently found this group and am happy to belong and participate. However, I fear that interest in collecting coins of any sort is declining fast. I wrote an article about this on Moneta which reached maybe half a dozen people (rather neatly showing the irony)
Pretty popular on Instagram. Many collectors on it that share and even sell & I find just as friendly and young to boot. Heck, I get more replies on it then I do on here with my new buys, especially my last few, pretty frustrating. The like system on here has made most here not want to comment. I try to bump low replied ones every so often for others to get more comments. Sometimes it helps.
It doesn't seem that way to me. Perhaps Moneta is simply not the currently popular venue. CoinTalk is enjoying brisk activity because the owner has provided an excellent platform. XenForo is so easy to use and the formatting is visually pleasing, unlike FAC, CCF, etc, with their outdated platforms. Just because a post doesn't get many comments doesn't mean it isn't seen, and Likes are a perfectly valid way to acknowledge a post. The half-life of the average new post has already grown extremely short due to the popularity of CoinTalk and activity of members. Is bumping a thread beneficial, given the volume of new threads we enjoy?
In order to surpass the US section and Coin Chat section, we would need to pay 30 people a day to post threads like "How much is it worth?", and "Is this valuable?", or "I found this tiny variation, is it worth money?", or "Is this an MS-64 or MS-65 and how much can I get for it?" They may get more posts a day, but as far as quality of content is concerned, our content here is miles above the content you'll find in those two sections. And it shows in the number of threads that get featured from the ancients section vs those other sections, and the number of posts per thread. Also, our threads are far more academic and historically rich, while theirs is pretty much all about "slabbing, MS-63, MS-64, money, investment, blah, blah, blah).
I just joined about 2 weeks ago, and I am loving it so far. Easy to use, great coins, and lots of knowledgeable members.
Moneta-L is just a dead venue. Others have replaced it so it may just seem that coin collecting is declining. Maybe you should post that article here? Discussion of ancients is also popular on Facebook and Reddit.
I think you're looking in the wrong places. I see far more posts and coin discussions on Facebook than anywhere else believe it or not. The quality of the posts is higher on CoinTalk and FORVM which allow far superior formatting but Facebook has the numbers and has a lot of collectors who seemingly never post on the other forums. I've managed to buy and sell a handful of coins there as well.
