What a great post Captain
The interesting thing is that it seems like some of the most egregious offenders and the ones who are contributing to the nonsense that is cluttering up the board, are not hobbyists. At all. Since this is a private, for-profit board,it would stand to reason that if anyone would receive preferential treatment or would have their posting habits indulged, no matter how asinine, it would those who are frequent hobbyists and who spend a great deal of money in this hobby. Instead you have people who don't contribute at all to the primary purpose of the board are coddled and left to spread their junk over the board. I haven't any mathematical analysis, but I do think it's pretty clear over the last few years that the amount of reviews have died down rapidly. Now, I'm not blaming all this on the idiot posters in the lounge, as Captain said, there are a proliferation of other boards which are dividing the market, and I'm sure there are other factors involved, for example perhaps the economic situation has led to a downturn in the sex industry as a whole. But I do believe there's a direct correlation in a sense between the explosion of topics in lounge, and of members joining who do not review, have no interest in reviewing, and this downturn. If this was a public board, it would be one thing. Or if it was more of a general 'meetup' kind of board. But the people who run this board do so for a profit, and I'm surprised that they allow posters who do not add value, and might even cause value to decline, to post willy-nilly.
Now, to be fair, obviously since the board is still active, and there's still plenty of advertisers, their profits must be doing okay, and I think enacting a policy like posting 5 reviews before you can post elsewhere would be foolhardy and would lead to many other problems. However, Captain does bring up a good point. The other 'blue' board, if I recall, was founded by many of the major prolific reviewers on here. Now, I've spoken out many times against shillers, and I believe that at least some of those founding members were horrible offenders of that, but I do find myself checking that board more often these days because there's more reviews. Which I don't want to do, since I do think that TERB is better at weeding out fake reviews and shillers than that blue board is. Another part of it, is that it does seem like the majority of reviews that are posted here are of the Asian incall places or of BP escorts, which is not my thing, but at least those are reviews that other people find useful
Again, all this is kinda pointless analysis, since unless the profits are really down, the board is not going to change. I'm an extremely small fish in a big hobbying pond, and I have essentially no influence in this arena, but I did find Captain's post interesting, and I do think it displays some fault lines beneath the surface