Topic: Begging for merit (Read 951 times)

I'm going to close this thread as I think everybody gets the point, and there are many other similar threads.
I am putting together a gallery of members I've put on ignore, and I'll post that link in my sig when it is presentable.

Many thanks to all my readers ( well most of them ), and please keep making those quality posts on the Bitcoin topic boards.

This post covers two of the points that I have made in the past. Merits don't really do much for Hero members and above when it comes to earnings potential, I've looked at this, as I'm getting tempted into renting my signature. It seems that is a major function of this forum. So for me merits donated to me serve two functions. One is that they give me sMerit to give away, but I'm finding this difficult to do for reasons that I've already mentioned. The other use is that merit awards help me to gauge the interests of forum members, and their opinions of my posts ( pretty low by the look of it ). It's a bit of a virtuous circle though, because I get awarded points for posting in Merit threads, then I assume that is what members want, so I post more, and thus get more points. I have tried breaking this circle, but at the moment, that doesn't seem to get any results.

Whilst I agree in principle with the second paragraph, I believe that the merit points system is intended to improve the quality of posting, and thus it should be used to encourage new posts with benefits to the community.

Of course begging for merit is too low and weak. This new system has place to be for 10 days on the forum and I actually didn't see anyone who would beg for a merit. Well, I was predicting that as normal phenomen, it is like to ask for a like in a social network. Creators should to do something with such people indeed.

This is one of the weird aspects of the merit implementation - in this first phase only posts speaking about merits are eventually getting rewarded with merit. This, of course, is producing an increase of posting in threads dedicated to merits.

As for merit to the old posts, I'd distinguish between merit to old posts of currently active people and "necro-merit" to posts of people who are unlikely to even notice they have been merited - for example Satoshi, who has already received a lot of merits which now are totally lost. Currently active members would notice they have been merited for old posts and they would use the additional sMerit they would get.

Ouchy!!! Now that wouldn't feel pleasant at all!

I detest these merit beggars! They may be too full of themselves that they think they are worthy to be merited due to their assumed good work! It is true that getting noticed may shy away from us. But it is not at all a valid reason to deliberately ask for them. SHAME ON YOU!

And by TMAN saying that those who give merit to beggars should be punched in the balls, is quite modest in its sense. They should be yanked out and fed to their owner!!!

Begging someone to give you merit is so unpleasant. Especially to those who actually working hard to get a merit by posting a constructive and useful posts for the other members.

That looks like a Bitcoin address to me. There is a long tradition on this forum of rewarding posters who provide detailed technical information and help with Bitcoin. This has nothing to do with the merit system.

No - I changed it because you pointed out that it could be misunderstood. The first mention of it was "Legendary Awarded Merit |Points", but obviously that was incorrect. I invented it as a result of several threads that suggested there should be a level above legendary for posters who had been awarded points for posting, and I agree with this. I've seen posts from some legendaries which should have been in the newbie forum, and there are legendaries who are truly legends with a great store of knowledge and experience. It would be good if this difference could be recognised.

The only people who could possibly be scared by this new rating system are illiterate one-line spam junk posters who have been treating this forum as their personal free money machine.  Of course they will want “the most easy way [sic]”!  Worthless parasites always do.  Nobody who gives value to receive value would ever be scared by (of all things) a merit system.

As I’ve mentioned in another thread, the word “merit” is derived from the Latin root meaning “to earn”.  The merit system requires that you earn your keep.  Earn your merit, and don’t beg for it; otherwise, in the end, you will beg on the street.  I hope the “scared” people understand that.

I think that people have been scared by new rang system and the are trying to do something with this in the most easy way.

Your syllogism is soundly stated.

As for “some do not view it this way”, who cares?  Should the henhouse and its maintainers fret even a whit over the opinions of foxes?  (With apologies to foxes, who may be sly, but were never execrable sub-animals as are spammers and account traders.)

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s/her/his/  (Note:  I did not fill out the “Gender” field in my forum profile, because I have a sex, not a “gender”.  I have now filled it out anyway.)

Jet Cash is not responsible for my behaviour.  Whyever would you ask the recipient of merit and replies to answer for their author?

I should have stopped right there.  But in case you don’t understand the difference between begging for merit/trust/reputation and the socially innocuous, long-established custom of a tipjar for voluntary recompense of those who give freely, I began to spell it out for you.  It started something like this:  “Social rules and the like are neither mechanistic nor oversimplified in their derivations; and working backwards from a single disconnected abstraction never produces good results for anything....”  Then, it got long—very long.  At some point, it crossed paths with actmyname’s syllogism on untrustworthy behaviour, as quoted above; go reread that, then try to explain how a tipjar demonstrates untrustworthiness.

Whereas I am neglecting replies to other people, and I also doubt the productiveness of explaining the aforestated difference to someone who does not get it, or pretends not to.

Ok.

But you still haven't answered my questions, which are:

• Where do you draw the line, what's considered begging?
• Will you also ignore anyone rewarding someone for begging?

Another example for you - nullius, who I noticed has given you merit and is a poster on threads you start, has "Tips welcome" in her signature - is that considered begging?

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And Jet Cash, I noticed you changed your avatar, it no longer says "LAMP - Legendary Awaiting Merit Points", so you must agree with me that it's borderline begging?

Good. Merit begging is the merit equivalent of asking for trust feedback, which has an equivalence to trust farming (or attempting to buy reputation).

untrustworthy behavior = negative tag
asking for/buying trust/reputation = untrustworthy behavior
buying accounts = trying to buy reputation
begging for merit = trying to ask for reputation

These correspondences should be accepted by all members... but unfortunately, some do not view it this way (typically account traders).

Someone pmd me asking me for 10 merit I didn't even entertain them with a reply. I thought best not to shame them.
When people who are genuinely using and not abusing bitcointalk get more used to the merit system it won't be a problem for people to gain merit where deserved.
On the plus side shit posting is at a all time low.

And... done!  From the trust page for #1443762 “lovepale”:


Also reported to moderators with the message:  “Ipso facto merit farming:  Begged for merit.  Flagrantly.  Amidst a discussion of why begging for merit is a reprehensible abuse of the system, nuke on sight.”

Let this be made an example.

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I know my tagging will have little direct effect at present, other than sending a crystal-clear message.  But it’s important to establish the precedent for declaring merit-beggars untrustworthy.  That, they are!  I hope to see DT members doing same, which will really have some bite.

As for moderation, I’m not a mod, either; but hereto (not including this report), I “have reported 158 posts with 100% accuracy”.  Mods need people to help them clean up the garbage.  By making earlier methods of spamming/farming unprofitable and thus stemming the flow of garbage at its source, the merit system should ultimately result in less garbage to begin with.  The merit system must not be corrupted.

I'm not tagging them, I'm just ignoring them. I'm not a mod, or an admin, or a trust arbiter, or even a merit faucet, so it will probably make little difference to their career on Bitcoin Talk. However, it does make it easier for me to scan threads.

There was recently a discussion of how even some Hero Members were newly learning Bitcoin history due to the awarding of merit to Laszlo (inactive account) for the famous pizza post.  Amidst that, and in agreement with it, I made an impassioned plea to bring all the old technical discussion gems to the surface—and “perhaps even slowly revive the forum to those glory days!”

For my part, those archival posts represent the forum I wish I could now experience.  Seizing the moment when people are fired up about the merit system itself, I thought it might be an opportunity to induce people to read those old posts—to interact with them, in a way—to be inspired by them, as I am.  Broken windows and spammy garbage posts are infectious to neighbourhoods.  I’d hoped that superlative quality would be, too.

Of course, that post of mine seems to have been mostly ignored.  You may be right.  I’ll have to think about it.


Sure there is!  Of course, there’s much difference between Bitcoin having fresh stuff, and the Bitcoin Forum having fresh stuff.

As to the latter, I really think it depends on your interests.  I rarely go anywhere besides Development & Technical Discussion and Meta.  On the development forum, the S/N ratio is disappointing but passable; of course, the real action is on bitcoin-dev (a strictly moderated list) and Github.  I’ve been intending to explore other forums; but last I really tried, I found myself wading from one cesspool to another, and promptly gave up.  I hope the merits system will improve the situation.

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FOR SHAME.  I actually did once award merit to someone who begged me for it.  That person did not need it, was obviously not really seeking it, pulled it off in a genuinely ironic manner amidst witty discussion—and did it in Latin.  By contrast, you are a pathetic freak.  There’s no room for you here:  This village has enough idiots.  *plonk*


...whilst locked in a pillory, being shamed and pelted with rotten vegetables.

As trust is transitive, so is shame.  Giving merit for utter trash is an antivoucher which should operate as the precise inverse of vouching.

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I am a living counterexample to that statement.  The strict majority (78/151 = 51.7%) of the merit I have thus far received was in “Development & Technical Discussion”, plus 1/151 = 0.00662% in “Bitcoin Discussion”.  If you exclude the +50 I got from some whackjob when I insulted him in Meta (an historic forum first!), the current proportion I have received outside Meta rises to 78.2% (78/101).

Those who who complain about the merit system either aren’t smart, or aren’t working hard on their posts—or both.  Some of my best posts take hours to write, edit, proofread, gather links for, etc.  I expended the level of effort in December.  (I will let my post history speak for me as to smarts.)  You will understand if I take a very dim view of the whiners.


...which is why we need the merit system:  Those who are now screaming in pain are precisely those who so should be.

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Touché.  (Said by me because I gave +1 to that post.)

(Aside, I think that the merit threshold for achieving Legendary status should be drastically raised—at least doubled or trebled.  Some back-of-the-envelope calculations show that reaching the current merit threshold within the time needed to accrue requisite activity is far too easy; whereas attaining the top rank of anything should be disproportionately difficult.  Nevertheless, I tend to sympathize with decent posters who were this close to the lower activity bound.)

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I like your approach.  Consider report-and-tag to be my new policy.  I’d still suggest also public shaming—but only occasionally, where appropriate.  That generates noise, just as any other reply to spam.  I think that it’s certainly appropriate to make a public example for others, when somebody begs for merit in a thread condemning merit-begging.


Thought I just had:  I sometimes find interesting threads by looking at the post history of someone whose posts I like.  Perhaps it would be wise to keep track of where quality posters spend their time—a sort of benign quasi-stalking.

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Earlier on this thread, I cut this part of my self-quote for brevity:


I disagree with theymos here.  As I said, asking for merit is akin to a student asking a professor for an A.  Lauda is right:  Begging for merit is inchoate trust farming, by definition.  It is solicitation of corrupted approval.  It poisons the whole system.  It must be condemned unequivocally.

However, theymos might have a different perspective regarding asking/begging for merit.


But excessive begging is another thing.

My point is, is it really justifiable to tag people asking/begging for merit when theymos allows this but to the extent of not begging just like a desperate beggar?

I think that the problem should be tackled from both ends: moderation and the trust system. Whenever someone begs for merit points, their post should be archived, removed and subsequently they should be tagged. The same should be applied for sales (although disallowed, it is unclear whether and what kind of ban this will result it), and a combination of both measures should be much more effective.

Most boards are mostly filled with shitposts. You are just going to waste your time looking.

I have also noticed this and I think the admin needs to do something about this. There should be some limit on sending merits for posts in meta.

In some cases users might have given quality posts and being unlucky doesn't get any merit. In such cases if they quote with the particular post through the merit giveaway thread can get few merit. In this case we can't describe it to be begging, it is all about the understanding of user about merit system.