Topic: 50 merit for an non-contribute topic (Read 745 times)

We have seen and received answers from the people we mentioned, this story, this topic will be stopped here. It is impossible to verify what gizmoh said, but it is also impossible to accuse him. All depends on how everyone think and see the problem. I have brought the topic here to everyone, now it's everyone's part. I'm going to lock this topic here.

As I said before.... don't load your guns so fast...

Guy who sent 50 merits replied, but I am sure most of you know this

OP is not selling anything ...so I don't see any big problem

Yup. It's up to people whether they would bother tagging and/ or calling out.

Uh, definitely.  50 merits to a brand new account for what amounts to a short shitpost?  The sender and the recipient of those merits are obviously related somehow, whether they're alts or related through a merit-buying transaction, who knows.

The main question I have is whether there will be any consequences for this, and I suspect there won't be.  There's been merit abuse going on since the start of the system, and merit abusers generally don't get tagged anymore.  I stopped tagging suspected merit abusers quite a while ago, and I don't think any DT members are making it their mission--and Theymos doesn't even want that anyway.

Fortunately this sort of thing can't go on forever because of the limiting nature of merit decay as it keeps getting sent.  So even if this member gets away with this, it's the exception rather than the rule.  It's not a huge deal IMO.

1. there is no such thing as merit abuse (except apparently if you honestly admit you will give special consideration to good merit worthy posts that favor your own politics, rather than just do it without saying so or deny it when really you are, or selling them blatantly)

2. lauda and his pal swapped 50 merits for simply pushing some crap service or project nobody got him banned, or reversed the merits. Go take a look. No double standards. ALSO are they not his own merits to do with as he pleases?? some merit sources give 50 merits to people because..... they ask for them lol

3. merit is subjective, NOBODY can apparently claim for sure the "giver" did not find the post worthy of 50 merits personally. FACT

4. Merit is completely moronic, subjective, gamed and dangerous nonsense. Not worthy worrying about the allocation now just keep throwing it anywhere you like for now. Just focus on getting it reset and some criteria put in place for its allocation going forward. Then put some sensible limits like 0 or 1 merit,  0-50 is of course completely mad and would require such an expansive, stringent set of criteria it would be impossible for most here to evaluate a 50 merit post.

5. Yes, that post looks worthy of zero merit REALLY (if we had some sensible criteria not just give it to posts you think are good). Like most of the DT and merit sources posts that do receive merit from other DT and merit sources it is undeserving . Actually  DT and MS are mostly of negative value for misrepresenting and deceiving other fools that there was some value in their nonsense and lies. So if their net negative posts are worthy of 5-10 merits, this post is worthy 1000's of merits for simply  having no value. Therefore to be fair boost this post up to a couple of K minimum with DT includes for both lol

The user (i.e. gizmo) has also given an explanation of why he gave 50 merits at once in a post that we know he asked for help tracking the stolen coins, without explaining how his coins were stolen by others.

the following explanation:

the mistake made by gizmo was not to think in advance why he had to give 50 merit, if he really needed help regarding the 5 btc error that was transferred could use just a gizmo account to be more convincing.

he follows the way you want to be like you, maybe Gizmo will be your partner, as the most merit provider for one user 

lol   I think this is your witty way of speaking. This topic is very clear, OP is talking about a non-contribute topic. Your case is completely different from what the OP mentioned, your merits were given to those who deserve it and it continues to circulate, it is what's going on on this forum. And here, the topic mentioned does not even deserve any amount of merit. This legendary guy has never even sent or received any merit since the system was born. This is a public sale of merit 

To be fair though in your case, though 50 merits might definitely be a lot, at least you're giving the 50 merits to people that actually deserves to have such number of merits. In this case though with these accounts that OP exposed, errr...

Haha TMAN, please stop make me laugh.

I thought  this would be about me as I am dropping 50 to members on the regular, it does look pretty dodgy to me!

In that case, I don't think merit should probably be sent though, giving positive trust feedback would be more fitting than just giving 50 merit on a not-so-merit-worthy topic.

IndecentProposal

Registration Date: 9/13/2018

This user recently woke up from a long period of inactivity.

1/5/2020 5:34:03 AM    woke up

1/6/2020 5:50:57 AM    Profile woke up    

Source : https://bpip.org/profile.aspx?p=IndecentProposal

Yes something phishy with the account !


And when i look at the https://bitcointalk.org/seclog.php there are a lot of users woked up lately !!!

Deal in exchange for merits is literally what "buying merit" means.

Someone sends 50 merits and forum is on fire  

Just consider the option that this 2 guys talked in PM and maybe they have some deal related to job offer OP suggested.

Don't load your guns so fast

Few sentence and nonsense statement for 50merits is unacceptable. I accept it if the post is quite humorous or very straight clear answer from a hard question but no it isn't. Anyway the sender doesn't react so meaning this account is either hacked or the account received is an alt of him.

It's just hard to accept some are contributing well and helpful post but got only few merits versus this kind of event. Like many said if merits is reversible then this would be avoided.

If this happened during the time when Merit was introduced, it would almost automatically lead to the saying that it's an alt. Easily connected, but now that Merit has been part of the norm, all you could just say is it is an abuse. You can never really tell what happened unless the user gives an explanation but as long as you could see the quality of the post, it's really not worth that much IMHO.

This is clear merit abuse in my opinion, and that's happening because no one tagging them since admin isn't  much encouraged to tag. But admin should reverse when happen such as massive abuse. Otherwise Some good contributors will discourage from their contributions and will look for easy merit scheme like that. What I have seen now l, mostly merit abuse case happened from airdrop merits. Abuser are feeling freedom now, they don't have fear of tag/ban.

Almost 2 year going on after merit implementation, those still didn't spent airdroped their smerit that should be decy and refill it to merit source or add new merit source. So it couldn't be abuse anymore from airdroped merit. Who have earned merit by their contributions, I think think they will not abuse merit. Because they know how hard to earn even single merits.

I know it but bounties are worthless, time-wasting, IMO. That is why I make the previous statement on this.
theymos does not feel hundreds of illegitimate merits is a big issue. (please see the quote in my previous post)

I don't remember why the forum rolled back those 16 merit transactions (with small amount as you see). Maybe LoyceV or DdmrDdmr can help. I see many topics about 50 merit transactions for non-sense posts but the data shows no history of roll-back on those 50-illegitimate-merits transactions.

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By now, we have 497 transactions with 50 merits, 331 transactions in 2018 and 165 ones in 2019.
Why 50? Because you are not allowed to send more than 50 merits to a single user each month.

* The label 0, in fact, represents negative merits (I made a wrong label).

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Edited:
Based on time points, I found it. Due to political issues with merit usages, theymos stepped in and rolled-back merit transactions made by stingers, and finally removed him as a merit source. Those amount of transactios fluctuates from 1 to 10, mostly 10, as you see, that evidence matches with below findings.

Yes, both of you are right. No one will be banned for merit abusing. Also, I agree that reversal of such a merit transaction is a good idea.
But as far as I know admins (or maybe only theymos, I am not sure) can ban suspicious accounts until they prove their ownership. I have seen some topics about such cases in "Meta".
The account that has sent those 50 merits might have been hacked.

That alts could actually participate in Bounty Campaigns though, if the OP put in some effort.

Provided the CM isn't aware of that.

i am confused gizmoh 50 merit sent , he really sent or miss take

gizmoh miss take sent merit  or gizmoh Secondary Account or anyone hack her account and sent merit

Nope, that batch of 50 merits is the first one he gave his sMerits away.

• According to the merit data dump from theymos (extracted by LoyceV and stored on loyce.club), last week (2019w52), he did not send a single sMerit away, before today.
• According to the converted dataset, released by LoyceV, stored at loyce.club, there is no history of merit transaction for that account.

[1]: http://loyce.club/Merit/merit.all.txt
[2]: http://loyce.club/Merit/userID_sent_received.txt

But that account shows nothing strange with password and email changes on profile page and on the the modlog page. There are three rounds of password changes, back in 2018 and 2019 (early months of each year). I don't see strong signals of hack.

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No one will be banned simply because of shady behaviours with trading or merit transactions.

Decaying unused smerits, I don't think it will happen.
Moreover, there are barely cases that theymos stepped in and do roll back (demeriting) with 16 negative merit transactions so far, but all of them happened months ago (February of 2019, forum time). Sent_userid = 0 is the forum account, used to roll back merits.
Neutrally, I gave you data, the rest things for data interpretations depend on your own thoughts.

Personally, 50 merits can not change the destiny of one account. If one is unable to make a single good post, the one will consequently be unable to rank up without other abuse and they will fastly dry out of their airdropped sMerits.

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Theymos:

• He states that he only starts to feel issues with hundreds of merits used illegitimately.  

I am curious to see what that person does with the merit from gizmoh. If the one post newbie doesn't spend the merit, I wouldn't worry about this, especially if he doesn't post again.

Great share !! That's what I wanted to draw attention to... There are 5 months waiting for this 50 merit in Local forum.. People are leaving for the sake of bounty..

Funny that the Legendary account has also sent 50 to another newbie dupe (IndecentProposal) today on a similar PI topic.

So at least 3 accounta in total.

lol   obviously, that post is not even worthy of such a merit. It's ridiculous, but I'm not the authority to handle this problem. So I post it here for everyone's comments and help. Anyone with full authority or trusted, please tag these users or take the right measures, I hope this situation does not happen anytime in the future. The merit system should not be used for wrong purposes.

Merited post:
Archived: http://archive.is/vgSCz

If you ask for my opinion, I would say this is mocking the system (assuming both users aren't connected in some manner) and this transaction should be reversed immediately. I see people struggle to rank up while been very productive yet users like this make their effort look useless. The post isn't worthy of even 1 merit talk more of 50 and assuming one could send more than 50 merit per month to particular users, the user would had probably gotten more.

I know the merit issue is very subjective but come on guys cases like this that involves large amount of merit shouldn't be overlooked. This is obviously a misused of the system and it shouldn't be encouraged considering the post been merited isn't even a quality (contributive) post. Seems this most have been an airdropped smerits which again bring about the discussion, all Airdropped smerit that haven't been used upto now should be decayed to minimize scenario like this from reoccuring.

We should have a report button for cases like this (large merit abuse) so the adminstrator can investigate and probably reverse the transaction).


This isn't an offense worthy of ban (they haven't broken any forum rules which consequences is getting banned), we're also discourage from leaving negative feedbacks on users account for behaviors that doesn't involve trust like spamming, merit abuse etc best solution would be a reversal of the transaction by theymos.

Ps: Can @LoyceV get his demerit source status already to tackle issues like this.

The purpose is clear. Abusing the merit system
The user probably know nothing about trust system (The abuser will get negative trust from DT members once they see this) or don't know merit transactions are shown publicly.
Most probably, the account has been hacked or sold and now a newbie that know nothing about the forum is using the legendary account.  

Soon both accounts will be banned or at least will get negative trust.

Maybe, theymos should consider decaying unused smerits.

Yeah.. This is quite shady. That 50 merit sent is the first sent merit from the gizmoh account in the last 120 days.

It's either:

• He's sending the merit to a friend or to a secondary account
• The gizmoh account got hacked
• The 50 merit is bought

There's zero way that topic deserved the 50 merit lol.

The topic in question: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/private-investigator-serbiacroatialithuania-5215178
gizmoh: https://bitcointalksearch.org/user/gizmoh-87919

You can see throung this picture:


I wonder what the purpose of this merits is. I know that everyone has the right to give his or her merits freely. But is this a worthy way to give away a tremendous amount of merit? As far as I know, that is all the default merit he has, because he hasn't even received any merit from anyone.

I think we should give our merits more worthwhile, not having to dump everything on someone like this case.

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