Topic: Incentive to the Merit Sources to Achieve their Quota? - page 2. (Read 688 times)

Health insurance and pension plan?

Seriously though, OP's idea while based on a valid concern (we're are sending barely half of available sMerits) seems to assume that sMerits are scarce. Which they mostly are, but not for theymos. He can produce any number of them at any time, i.e. add more merit sources and/or allocate more sMerits per source. Which he's already doing. Incentives would probably skew the system in undesirable ways.

But if that is not enough we can always go to plan B(eheadings).

One would only assume that he anticipated after dropping the merit system, and selecting the initial merit sources he would receive applications for merit sources rather than finding them manually. Yeah, there's tools for looking at the users sending the most merit, and all that, but that doesn't really show they are distributing their merits to quality posts.

At least publicly, there haven't been many people who have applied. Let alone suitable users for merit sources.

Remind me, why I signed up for this?

I vote for public beheadings for delinquent merit sources.

Of course that would be unfair.

I didn't mean to offend anyone. I didn't knew there were low rank members who were merit sources.

Maybe because I am not a native speaker I may have been misunderstood.

To be a source, you should be trusted.  Otherwise, Theymos risks you just giving all the merit away to your friends, or the highest bidder.  :/

I don't know if it will help, one thing that will help is to add new sources or change the afk ones with new people who really wants to be sources.

Yes, Paxmao is one of those unknown Merit Sources who I consider great contribution as a Merit Source. His Merit Network size is the second overall largest, having merited 468 different forum members as of last Friday. That goes to say for his implication and commitment to finding new forum members to merit.

He is a big contributor in my local forum (but not limited to) where merit is rather scarce, and proof of how being a Merit Source does not carry you to receiving bags of merit back from awarded members.

The issue is not so much that merit sources are not giving out enough merit (if this was an issue theymos could just designate more people to be merit sources), I believe it is a bigger issue that nonmerit sources have sMerit that is unspent, resulting in much less merit propagating than expected.

This is very hard to address and I don’t see any obvious solutions to this. 

paxmao still needs ~740 merits to reach Legendary. I don't think it's very fair to the lower ranked merit sources to prevent them from ranking up, just because they are helping with the distribution of merits.

Isn't it a great privilege being a merit source(s)?.

If i have huge amount of merit, i will be happy to give it to those who only deserves it, to a post where anybody can connect themselve to crypto industry.

 I believe that receiving merits from other is also a recognition of your contfibution to the forum. 

Just a smiple thank you is enough with it, they'll appreciate it.   

Merit sources don't need any incentive.  The incentive is *for everyone else* to increase the quality of their posts, but that doesn't seem to be happening.  So threads like this are both unnecessary and prove that the system is working by demonstrating that new members aren't ranking up too quickly.

I've said it before, and it seems like it's the general consensus that this forum probably needs more merit sources--especially on the local boards.  But until sig campaigns start paying for posts there, that won't keep the non-English speaking population from trying to post in the main section and murdering the language in the process.  There have been a couple of new merit source applications as of late, and that's encouraging.

Word.  OP might not realize that anything here that can be abused, will be.

As in everyday life, many volunteer tasks go unpaid. The reward is in contributing through fulfilling their task, and does not need nor expects any other kind of compensation. When one feels that the task at hand starts to become a burden, one can always leave it and pass the baton on to the next one in line.
Theymos I’m sure monitors Merit Source awarding totals, and probably leaves ample margin for self-management, bearing in mind that one will personally have different windows of spare  time available.
Merit Sources I doubt need much more incentive than the Forum’s recognition for their task, and a bit of freedom to manage how they fulfil it.

What is true though is that there seems to be a rather extended feeling that there aren’t enough available Merit Sources. This nevertheless is really a subset of overall Forum’s weekly total merit being awarded, which is in the area of 3,9k to 4,4k per week lately.
If we take May 2018 for example (to get a complete month), the total awarded sMerit adds up to 19.807 sMerits. That is just little more than a thousand over what the Merit Sources have at their disposal in a 30 day window. We do not know however what proportion of May’s sMerit has been awarded by Merit Sources, and how much by regular forum members.
Even so, it does seem quite a shocker to me that the maximum potential sMerit for all Merit Sources is nearly equal to all the sMerit awarded forum wide within the month of May. If Merit Sources were at their máx., it would practically mean that only they alone are awarding sMerit on the forum (we know that is not the case really, but neither do we know how far this is from being true).

By the way, the official stats now states that there are 81 merit sources with a total merit generation of up to 18.700 sMerit per 30 days. I wasn’t aware of the newly appointed Merit Source whoever he/she may be.   

Being a merit source is already a method to make them proactive. There is no need to "push them" in order to get other people ranked up. Let them work at peace.
No.
In my opinion there was an initial craze about the merit system till last month which has decreased now and initially I thought it was because of the dearth in number of merit sources but it seems that its not so. Maybe if they stop meriting and start becoming inactive, theymos would have to actually look into the spamming of the forum and redesign the merit system. Currently the spam problem will not be controlled without increasing the number of mods.

By getting a certain number of activity points for the next level, which has not been determined yet.

Not only this would be pretty much abused just like said above, merit sources would also be forced to give out what they have. If this happen, sources may give undeserving members merit which literally destroys the purpose of the system. I say let the sources give those who they deem worthy.

Monetizing the merit system? Hell no.
Additional feature on profile? I think this would remove the anonimity of the merit sources, which is also unlikely.

Merit has commercial value , because it allows accounts to rank up and receive money from the account.

Of course people will prostitute to make money, someone also said somewhere that they were trading sex for merit lol


I didn't said that awarding merit to merit source would be a conflict of interest.
I said that merit sources lacking merit to rank up could have a conflict of interest.

Exactly!
I have a much better incentive: with Merit, I can help improve the forum.

Note that merit sources don't have "quota", it's a maximum.

Merit isn't only meant to rank up, it's also meant to highlight quality posts. Exluding people from that doesn't make sense.

Vod and I are in a quiet race. First, he congratulated me on overtaking him, then he overtook me, and now he's closing in again

This post illustrates the one major flaw in the merit system - it has a commercial value. It really should be a means of recognition and guidance for posters. The commercial value means that some members are prostituting themselves to gain merit.

I don't understand how there can be a conflict of interest in awarding merits to merit sources. If you don't understand the function of a merit source, and how they work, then I created an article for my blog site.
https://talkmerit.com/the-source/index.php/articles/the-bitcoin-talk-merit-system

How can you advance forward legendary?

But I didn't said you can't advance in rank, just that you don't need merits. Many merit sources have enough merit to the next rank already, that's why they don't need merit .. this is what I tried to say..

Give us extra, unpaid work to read more posts than usual to find some worthy of merit, then penalize us so we can't advance in rank?

Doesn't make sense...  :/