Topic: How to unlock sMerits Potential and a step towards stopping Merit abuse. (Read 221 times)

The problem with the merit sources is they don't have much time to find the merit deserving posts so they are wasting their smerits which is much valuable for the BTT users.But recently Theymos have added 36 merits sources so we need to wait and we this will make any difference?!

A chain is just dead weight until it is attached to something. We have lots of potential merit chains, but a shortage of posts to which they can be attached. Instead of tinkering with the merit awarding, and trying to move Theymos towards a situation where everybody is a merit source, can we try to improve the quality and number of good threads and posts? That is the reason the merit system was introduced.

I'll have another go at trying to boost the language translation initiative, but it' getting close to the situation where I will have to create my own foreign language posts to translate.

I am not sure what Theymos will do or will not do.  Increasing Merit source and sMerits when we have no idea how to use all source sMerits looks completely stupid to me.

Good suggestions, I’m not sure if theymos will implement then and when (if he implements any of them), as he likes to take time to think.


I think it is better to have more reliable merit sources than to distribute smerits between the current who spend all their smerits because this latter solution is a more centralized one whereas the former is more decentralized. Plus, you don’t know if you give more merits to people who currently spend all of them, if they are going also to expend those extra or not.

During my analysis in last thread sMerits,Merits and quality : Where the gap lies? , I come to the conclusion that not all the sMerits were used by Merit Sources. Merit Sources also have difficultly in finding the quality post in which they can award Merits. In short, We lost sMerits for that month and almost 2x Merits that can be potentially generated by them.

Instead of lapsing these sMerits, we can rollover these sMerits and equally distribute  these sMerits to the Merit sources who are able to use their quota fully. (Do not tell me that none of the Merit source is able to use his/her quota fully. In this case, we should increase Merit Source (not sMerits) so that we have more eyes to find a good post buried in spam for awarding Merits.)

Currently, Merit is somewhat analogous to the "Chain Effect" and stopping the chain (not able to award all sMerits) is somewhat hurting the system.

Second concern is related to the Merit abuse. It look like most of the air dropped sMerits are used but still some people have stock of them and they misuse them time to time. Now system is almost 9 month old, I think we should scrap all the airdropped sMerits and put them back in pool for Merit sources to award them.

I will also like to suggest to wipe the sMerits as Theymos wipes the Merit history in profile after 120 days. sMerits generated today should be used in next 120 days otherwise they will also move to sMerits allocation pool. If somebody have only .5 sMerits left then that user can be exempted and  user 120 days cycle will start when user have 1 sMerit to award.

We can also create a sMerit sink where user can dump their sMerits if they are feeling burden in awarding the Merits and these sMerits will again go and add up in sMerit allocation and equally distributed to the merit source.