Topic: Flaws In The Merit System. - page 2. (Read 1296 times)

I think people are missing the point of the merit system. It's to stop the worst of the worst from ranking up just by posting rubbish, not to punish higher ranks. If you write complete trash then you don't get merit. Stick to claiming bounties. If you want to be able to earn by posting then I think you should have to be qualified to do so and I think getting ten merit would be a good aptitude test for that. One isn't, especially some of the crap people are getting merited for.


This is why I'd prefer a higher merit requirement to get a signature. Anyone can get a solitary merit whether they beg or buy or trade it. It's real risky giving one merit to someone because that's all they need to be able to earn here and they could be a colossal shitposter who just makes one half decent post or has in fact copied it from somewhere and that's something you've sadly got to be aware of. Requiring ten merit would lessen the chances of this abuse happening and them luckily getting one or two merit in whatever nefarious way won't matter too much, but when it's just one it's Christmas come early for them if they can get it.


He has said he may do that, but he also put my suggestion for a new higher rank in the "no or net yet category" (though he also put the one merit requirement there so I have hope).


Bitcoin and Alt coin Discussion are both colossal shitheaps and trying to find a merit-worthy post in there is like trying to find an AIDS-infected needle in a fetid, decaying haystack. I hardly even bother posting in there because any half decent post is just drowned out by streams of crap from sig spammers and that's something that needs to change. As long as ICO campaigns can get away with paying people to post crap then nothing will change, especially not a mere one-merit requirement. To make a difference here we would probably have to remove signatures completely from everyone until they've actually earned a good bit of merit. Then we really would notice a difference in posting because if you haven't proved your worth here then you haven't eared your right to earn via posting.


Wat? So you're saying pretty much 99% of my posts are useless and shouldn't be merited? 99% of my posts are in Meta and half of them are probably suggestions of how to make this place better, one of them which was implemented recently, so I'm not sure why my contributions should be discarded or not be meritable.

The interesting thing is that everything is done publicly and with records. It may actually unveil many of the spamnets out there and leave them open for the hunt. If I were a spam-hunter I would be looking directly in the merit awarded in ANN and Bounty threads.


What I did was to set a criteria for myself to give merit an try to stick to it. So, it does not matter if I personally agree with the content or even if I think it is correct from a philosophical perspective. My criteria is related to the posts helping others, providing news or insights, humor (within reason), providing value for the Forum, etc. I try no to merit any "opinion post" unless it is based on specialized knowledge or non-trivial experience and conclusions.

I guess that what I mean is that I "like" the post, but not necessarily agree, as well as the opposite, I don't agree but you post is providing a well built argument or helping.

With the new changes I had to add another criteria a day ago. I will merit newbies only after at least 20 activity, once I clearly see that they are "humans", that they haven't spammed nor made activity rising one-liners and that they are trying to learn, help others and following the basic rules. At least I will make sure that newbies have given some value to the forum and at the same time they are encouraged by the built-in "gamification" of the forum ranks.


I think Theymos has mentioned that he might create another rank above Legendary in the future. "Mythical" perhaps?

So our posts become redundant once we hit a certain rank? We might not need them to move up a rank, but we may in the future if theymos implements another rank which requires x amount of merit, so stop being so self-centred. Merit is another way to see who are making the greatest contributions here, and that shouldn't stop being counted or become irrelevant once someone has achieved a certain rank.


Maybe because this is one of the only boards where anything productive gets discussed and is largely free of spam.


So? Neither do Politics and Society or Serious Discussion. Doesn't mean we shouldn't be meriting quality posts in there.



Or maybe there's only a handful of people actually making posts that are worth meriting. Lots of lower ranks get merited in here as well, that just isn't convenient for you.


Lol. It's not.

Bitcoin Talk is a multi-cultural and multi-dimensional community. This results in a wide variety of opinins and skills. Merit sources can only be subjective in their awarding of merits, and this could leadto a centralisation of topic replies. The sMerit creation is a good way to avod this, and to allow he better members of the community to affect the quality and content of the boards. Of course there will be abuses, but the abuses tend to highlight the members with low moral fibre, and the trust system is being used to record this for the benefit of the honest members.

The system may still be under experimentation and review, and I suspect that we will see a few more tweaks in the future. Hopefully these will appear as soon as the complaints by the newly created spambies die down.

I see no point in giving merits to legendaries.
I also don't understand why so many merits are given in meta. That section has nothing to do with crypto. Like you said it's just a way for buddies to merit each others. If you haven't noticed, it's always the same people meriting the same people.
It's a waste and a clear disrespect to what Theymos intended to do with this system.

Of course people are going to give merit to posts they agree with, but there are numerous factors that are involved in that decision. If someone makes me laugh or has entertained me then I might give them one for that because at least they've put some effort in, but spammers shouldn't be getting merit for utter shitposts and as long as that isn't happening then good, but I'm not going to not merit a post because someone might have an issue with it for whatever reason. Give them to whoever you want for whatever you want especially if they stand out to you for whatever reason and of course that is always going to be subjective.

People are just trying to nit pick things that are complete non-issues here. Big deal if you give a Legendary Member a merit for telling a shitposter to fuck off or for a meme that made you laugh. Legendaries don't even need the merits and if you're a merit source it's not like you've wasted a precious resource, but we're letting them know we enjoyed or appreciated the post amongst the mountains of mindless drivel and trash that are being spewed all over the forum. What about the hundreds of other merits we give for the hundreds of other quality posts? You're acting like this isn't happening and the merit system isn't working because we gave a couple of solitary merits for some memes or jokes to users we appreciate. Please. There are bigger issues here than this.

Unfortunately the spambies are getting a merit. A single merit is far to low for such a major advantage. They are being given the merit by their puppet masters if they are alts or slaves. They also can receive a merit from a generous member in the mistaken belief that they are helping the forum by being sympathetic to the poster's plight.

Yeah all you guys can think of is doing worthless stuff for every penny and you extrapolate the same to merit system. Considering the anger that the forum members have against shitposters, the later can forget about getting merited at all if they continue to post oneliners like this one here which I quoted.


Since you never bothered to get used to the system you will always think like that. Several good posts have been merited. Personally some merit sources are trying to merit the lower ranks to help them rank up more than the ones who are already higher ranked.

99% of the posts in any thread dont deserve any merit. Accept it and move on.

Actually spamming has increased because they are desperate to get merits and are feeling frustrated because they are not getting any.

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As long as the people who are not getting merits understand that the fault lies in them and not the merit sources or merit system they can say bye bye to getting ranked up.

Tman's 'fuck off' post is more worth than 95% of the garbage in this dump. This will less less frequent/obvious once the amount of abuse, whining and whatnot has tackled. Non-issue. Just an FYI, if you try to restrict users (i.e. change this) most of them will just stop participating at all since it isn't worth the trouble.

I doubt theymos will do that because it will significantly affect a lot (potential good) users/posters
he even assigned a merit source in each local board to guarantee good posts get merited in that section
some users are not english fluent and some are not bitcoin (technical) savvy,
so restricting merit award only on bitcoin english discussion would be somewhat unfair

I would agree that there are flaws in the merit system and I think that even if the postings were kind a short and not very detailed, merit has been given to the high ranking member. However, for those low ranking members and newbies may have hard time to acquire such merit even if some really deserves to have one, just continue to do the right thing for merit will soon be rewarded to your end, Anyways, I had notice that the new rule is effective where spammers had been minimize and I believe that people should support it since this will benefit the forum and the users.

Yes, it's good to get points of merit, for a limited effort and useful to others at the same time, I personally set up the subject in my opinion of the fifth bike

But it is pretty much a "like".  The only difference is that giving out merit carries a lot more weight because merits are fairly scarce when you take into account the sheer number of members on the forum.  Plus we all know how valuable merits are. 

I tend to merit posts that I like.  It just so happens that those posts are usually pretty good, even if they're just a gif or a picture.  A picture is worth a thousand words sometimes.  Good posts don't always have to be long, but IMO a post that's well-written and on-topic is one I tend to "like".

I'm hoping Theymos tapped some local board members to be new merit sources, but there's no way of telling as of right now.  There's a thread in Meta that can identify suspected merit sources based on how many merits they've sent, but I think it's too early to figure out.  Having more sources in the non-English sections would alleviate some of the pressure to post in English, which some people are feeling--but then we still have the problem of signature campaigns mostly paying for English posts.  That's something that I think should change.

We all should start getting used to the fact that a merit is not a like and should never be used a such. Until then I guess we are open to manipulation.

This is the fact that the local section lacks the Merit source. It is not like the English section. In local section, there are always some good articles that will be buried.
Therefore, I asked Merit sources, in addition to browsing the English part, can you pay attention to the local part, although language problems may be a big obstacle.

A better solution would be to remove the alt, ANN and TwitBook threads from the discussion board.

This is the biggest flaw of merit system until now because the main reason of this forum is to discuss about the bitcoin and new crypto projects but meta and local board have more number of merit circulation that the main discussion board so still we need to make some tweaks in the merit system.

And also merits distributed in META were totally useless in my opinion so I am asking theymos to remove the merit button from the meta section then we can concentrate on the bitcoin discussion of our forum.

I never said that. What I said was that the reason behind the quality posts being missed is not because people are only Meriting the posts that they agree with, but the reason is the spam.
What you have interpreted here and what I said are totally different in meaning.


I think the posts that are Merited are mostly deserving, unless it is a case of abuse where a person is Meriting one of his alts or a friend only for the sake of pushing them forward in the ranking pipeline. Besides, everyone has a different view for quality posts. Some of us may look for only exceptional posts to Merit them, while others may even Merit the posts that are mildly constructive. I don't think I can blame them for doing that since that is not what I call abusing the system.


I just said what I had in mind. You have your reasons to think my reasons are worthless and I respect that.
And, saying the system has flaws is indirectly blaming it, IMO. The flaws are not carried out by the system itself but have been created later on by its users. That's what I think.

We do have a button "Report To Moderator" for reporting low quality post. You framed the sentences very badly with too many spelling mistakes.
You need to read English articles to improve your posting till then refrain yourself from posting in English Boards.

Your post has high probability to be deleted (due to low quality.) and it is very unlikely you will get Merit for these low quality post.

@OP.  This is one of the drawback of Merit system. Merit hunter are now spamming every thread in search of Merit. Earlier it is much easier for them to farm activity in Spam Mega Thread or Off Topic.

Yes, one of very important reason for people not getting merits is that some members of the forum have misunderstood the purpose of the merit system.

You are just a thrash and your post is shit. Just bounty hunting is what you can do

This clearly shows that local boards are out merites and theymos should see this chart once for sure.

I think no one should have this mindset that only long posts should be merited, this has truly affected the merit system and in still going on as you can see. But instead I think the merit should be rewarded only if some efforts are put in the post by the user and not just because he has wrote a length post.

If they could not find a quality post that does no mean that they should just start meriting the view of other people to which they agree. It better to hold that merit until you find a really deserving post. Your reason is just worthless and we are not blaming the system we are trying to find the flaws and solve it.

My only suggestion to you is please first read your post before posting it. I just cant understand a single sentence.

Yes, some of the section where there are multiple merit deserving posts and quality contents are just very low in the list.

I think this sections should have more merit circulation than meta
1. Bitcoin Discussion
2. Alt-coin Discussion
3. Development and technical discussion

I am also shocked that there are 14680 merits to the deleted posts and I think most of this is a part of merit abuse

You have truly highlighted the mindsets of some people here. Many people just think in the way you have explained and just give merits to the posts which surely don't deserve it. Your efforts in finding this views of people deserves a merit for sure.

You have a very positive way of looking at things. I think you should change it.

I think this would not be a way to judge people by there activity or post counts. You should just check if they have put some effort in the posts. (Effort mean if they really have knowledge about the topic they are speaking and have given proper info )

Yes, I was just addressing to such type of merited posts. You will see much posts like them in the meta section everywhere!