Topic: Erosion of merit. How to prevent it. (Read 505 times)

You have to step back and consider the operation of the merit system, and its impact on the forum. Most members seem to think of it as an additional ranking tool, but it isn't. Activity is the ranking tool. You join the forum, and you participate in a variety of discussion, and over time you should learn about the operation of the forum, and the variety of communities here. It is assumed that you benefit from this experience, and your rank is increased accordingly. Unfortunately many members are myopic, and don't realise any of the benefits, or they seek to take advantage of the forum for their own financial gain. The merit system was introduced as a barrier to restrict such selfish members to the lower levels, and to allow the community to decide who should be allowed to increase in rank.

Another important function of the merit system is that it gives an insight into the morality of the members. This is especially true now that many excellent analysis tools have been created. These are detecting many abuses such as account farming, the misuse of alt accounts, bounty frauds , and spamming leeches.

I haven't taken much interest in the activities of other merit sources, other than discussing policies with a few of them in my private chat room. From reports that I've read, it seems that Theymos made some pretty good choices in his initial appointments, but that a few of them do not have the time to hunt for meritable posts, and a couple have been abusing the privilege. I think that Theymos has said that he will be reviewing the behaviour of sources, and I'm sure he will resolve those minor problems.

It seems that there is a serious shortage of sMerits available for non-english speaking members, and if we are to combat the creeping evil of globalisation, we need to benefit from the cross-pollenation of ideas from members without the advantage of fluent english. There is no way that I could evalute a Vietnamese post ( for example ), but Vietnmese opinions are important ( as are other countries) when you are considering the preservation of nation states. It would be useful for me if I knew of a trusted member of a local community, and I could provide him with a few sMerits to support his community. There are sufficient observers to ensure that this wasn't abused, especially if all merit transactions were made openly, and were subject to analysis.

The challenges facing the merit system to me are 1. Many members are adamant in releasing merits. Either they don't know how to award merits or cannot evaluate what post is worthy of merit. 2. For those that know how to award merits, they award merits to farms, acquaintances or outright selling. These are the most prevalent reports of abuse. So how do we solve these challenges?
Erosion of merit or retention of merit is meaningful only to those who know it. It is apparent that the majority have not fully understood the working of the merit system.

There was a suggestion for a separate thread to educate members about merits. Can that suggestion be looked into.

1 merit = 1 smerit will result  in a situation where spammers will keep moving merits in between alts. The idea of increasing the number of merit sources is much better and may be implemented if the admin feels the need to do so. Even that idea is limited by number of responsible members available to him that are fit for this job.

The admin already did his homework before implementing and did minor adjustments later on as well.

Thanks for your kind words, vpashita, but, to be honest, I'm not interested in becoming a merit source for the moment. I don't know if I will be able to manage the frustration 


Jjajaaj I do like the idea. To be honest, I truly believe you must apply to be a merit source. I really appreciate how you can manage to always have a polite and a calmed answer, even for merit beggars.
Besides, you will be able of helping Paxmao on the Spanish board.

The sMerit would remain undestroyable, whilst increasing the merit counters at no cost, and it would only stop when it reaches a dormant user who refuses to play ball (I’m exaggerating a bit here for drama purposes).

We would be able to detect new patterns of merit abuse easily, and have fun in the charting process, with cases such as:
-   Fast paced ping-pong match increasing Merit by exchanging sMerit very quickly between two users.
-   Slow paced tennis-match increasing Merit by exchanging sMerit at a slower pace, tending to get into the fifth set.
-   Football match style Merit abuse, with 22 Alts bouncing around the merit with no kinetically energy loss.

Take your pick, detecting merit abuse would be rather wild …we could ever use the VAR (Video Assistant Referee) and check the replays...

I still remembered the first Merit that I got. Actually it's from "Jet cash"  for one of my reply. In that reply I mentioned famous quote of Albert Einstein "The world will not be distroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything". So I think it should be changed like " The Bitcointalk forum will not be cloged or spammed by those who do spaming, but by those who watch them(yes we can report, but I think that will not enough) without appreciating the good posters "

"Jet cash" is doing best he can in order to make the forum better place to learning but not shitposting. So now i think it's your turn "seoincorporation" to apply and become a Merit source. I feeled like, you have the sense of finding good posts as other merit sources. Sometimes forum needs to diversify it's merit distribution. So make that happened.

Jajaja... I don't want to meet Jet Ash, for sure. I've managed to deliver 4 in no time, there were some good ones waiting for merit. I will keep the others just in case I found something truly good, so I can give 3 in a time (I already had some). But you must know, 4 of your merits have been already delivered  

To the OP, apologies for being quite off topic, but, well, 4 merits have been awarded so far thanks to this thread.

Just don't give any to me, or Jet Cash will become Jet Ash.

Getting wild again, JC!!  

Don't worry, I will spend them wisely, and yes, probably in my local to spare @paxmao from the responsibility of being the only source in there.
Thanks for your trust in me.

I totally understand how difficult may be to be a source. Sometimes I've even thought about making my merit-source application, but, in a second thought, I always prefer not to. It is already difficult to lead with the frustration when searching some good posts to reward, mostly from newcomers, and it might be too much for me. That's why even when my local needs another source, I prefer to stay away from being one.
So, yes, I feel you. This is becoming difficult.

Ok, let's go to merit some good Spanish ones. Thanks again.

I think your calculations are based on two hypothesis that believing merit distribution is in a linear system and one user getting only sMerits from another one user only. Since those two hypothesis are incorrect, your calculations are also incorrect. I think "DdmrDdmr" already explained in his thread how the system works by his nodes analysis.

I'll probably get into trouble for this, but I've just given you ten merits. That gives you 5 for the Spanish board. I know that as a legendary they won't make much difference to you, but hopefully you can use the five wisely. I'm having trouble dispensing them, and I'm starting to feel guilty about it.

Maybe we just need the "shitposter" rank under their names profiles, for those incapables or unwilling to make any contribution to the forum. This will ease the work of many merit sources and others looking for good posters and ending with a red face due to the facepalms they provide to themselves. Besides, it will be a nice rank, the most accurate of the whole forum.

Just joking (or not  ). The situation is related to low quality, to be honest. I usually have 5 or 6 merits to expend in a week and seek good posters. I always ending meriting the same people for another amazing post or someone from the Spanish board. But, to be honest, to find something decent even in the Spanish one is getting more and more complicated each day.
I used to think there weren't enough merits, for I always went quickly out of them, but now I do have some and anyone to award but the common ones. Eh, and, in my case, I have usually less than 10 to spare. I can't imagine how it is to be a merit source and confront each day the frustration of finding nothing of value in between a lot of shitposts. We all are seeing how the forum is taking the path of decay for some time now, but the recent month has been really annoying (I prefer to stay away from the red tagging and yesterday I gave two, for instance).
But maybe one of the answers is to spare the merit between the users doing a great job and stop looking for deserving newcomers as an incentive: maybe you can't find a newcomer, but another user can, so, eventually, your merits will be given to a deserving one, maybe in a local, maybe in some forum hidden hole... Perhaps the point is to have the merit circulating.

But, I don't know. I just feel sometimes kind of angry/sad/impotent because of the shape the forum is taking.

Everybody keeps targeting the merit awarders as the culprits in this, and their worst critics are the low-life polluters who clog the boards and deprive the better posters of their rewards. Why don't we try to make them aware how damaging they are to the forum, to other new members, and to their prospects in the crypto-economy. If we could halve their thread graffiti, then I'm sure that the merit would start to flow

Creating 1 to 1 ratio will not genarate unlimited smerit. It will just remain ( frozen)  that current smerit of forum. May be you are right that merit should be need those user simply want earn money. Merit system wasn't implemented for earn money, it was implemented for motivate people to keep spam free forum. But I want to clarify that actually my discussion about smerit. I am not argue with merit or merit distribution.


Spammer doesn't belongs to got merit. So no question about smerit dries up. Because if he didn't receive merit , it means he haven't smerit.

I actually read this "posted by mistake. Not yet ready for post"  but your concept of 1Merit =1sMerit has a very big flaw . I want  you  to drop this concept at once and you can use your time on any other subject.
I know you are good scam ICO buster and might your  scam busting skills have saved millions of dollar of investor.

I’m personally convinced that there isn’t enough sMerit being awarded from a global Forum’s perspective on the whole, but as I’ve often mentioned, I’m sure that the Forum monitors the supporting numbers as I do, with better and more complete information. Additionally, they can internally contrast them against their inner set objectives (namely people ranking up, posting quality perception and posting spam proportion amongst others). Without performing this contrast (results vs goals), we cannot really say if we’re going short or not, even if perception and intuition tends to sway in one direction.

Having said that, there are two other important matters that participate in the equation: Meriter’s standards vs posters’ accredited standard, and potential meriter’s willingness to participate.

The meriter’s standard is our own personal view on what kind of content is meritable. This standard is as I said personal, and may even change overtime. In my personal case, I can spend quite sometime skimming through the Beginners & Help section for example, and find barely anything meritable by my standards. Now it’s not as if my standard was tremendously high, but it is also not coincidental with what many postulating posters think of their own posts, considering it a blistering injustice if they go unmerited for a short post with little added value.
Not that a short post cannot be a great contribution, it’s just that I find that they often are not and tend to repeat well known answers (give me tomorrow’s lottery results and I’ll but that short post anytime though).
  
Surprisingly enough, I kind of get the feeling that many people do not perform a bit of research at some point, and try to understand why other people are being merited and they are not, going through merited posts and understanding the difference to theirs by comparison.
Some try, and give a link to an article with a two liner associated comment. Going a bit further is not that difficult, but it does require effort (and time), and that does seem like a rarely exercised will. Going that extra mile with a well-versed personal opinion could make all the difference, but that is not a path that is often chosen.
Others perform better to the eye in the short run by plagiarizing, but one is kind of getting used to spotting these out, even if it means having to waste time trying to verify whether the posts is original or not.

The other factor is the potential meriter’s will to participate. With an initial airdrop of 600k sMerits + halfings + sMerit Sources, the 185K aggregate sMerits that have been transacted seems lowish. There are many active members that join in to the sMerit awarding game actively and regularly, bearing a sense of responsibility and believe in the principals behind the Merit System, at the expense of their free time (merit sources being at the top).
Nevertheless, there does seem to be a large amount of people that, having received the initial airdrop, have not joined in the game of meriting others. Now this may be due to multiple reasons, but it is certainly a factor that weighs in the overall scheme of things.

I think another valid point that rarely gets mentioned is that NOT getting merit does not affect any users ability to use and learn from the forum in any noticeable way shape or forum.  Users with 0 merit can still achieve jr rank and thus lift the majority of "restrictions" (ignoring paid membership which is another option to remove some restrictions).

The forum allows full access to it wealth of knowledge regardless of merit.  If a user wishes to part of the community merit is NOT a barrier of entry.  If a user wishes to simply make money here than yes I believe merit will and should be a barrier for those users.

Creating a 1 to 1 ratio is like creating unlimited smerit which would entirely defeat the purpose of the system so I wouldn't personally hold my breath for that change!

If the current system (user earns half the merits as sMerits) is being played out and abuse already what more if a 1 is to 1 merit system be applied bin the forum? A normal user won't need merit sources anymore as literally he/she can generate sMerits by himself just by transferring merits back and forth to his/her alt accounts or friends in the forum. Technically your solution will just promote more spam and shitpost and will make the merit system as a failed solution to the forum.

Exactly you point the right thing. There are many well reputed member's more then active from some merit source. Thats why I think need more merit source on forum. 82 merit source is not enough right now with limited smerit monthly. If newcomer make something useful and he didn't get enough merit then he might be disappointed from it. If some one new here it doesn't mean he can't creat good content.

I respect their decision but I feel that there are other people who are more active in the forum than the merit sources. Also theymos is monitoring them for their "performance" in meriting posts in order to evaluate their decision.

I dont blame you. They make my eyes sore too.

True but the merit sources also need to patrol the more spam infested threads. But that a hell lot of work to fish out some worthy post to merit in the ocean of shit.

I have felt the need for more mods to be higher than more merit sources. Specially the boards with the "__ Discussion" format.