Topic: Is the Merit System Generating Enough Merits? - page 2. (Read 801 times)

Anyway, dont be too Focus about merits  and  rankings. Be thankful if anybody Will give merits to your post.

If no one did it, Its okay, make  a better post next time.

IM not good in English as what they always say that you must be perfect in English to get some merits. But most of those have merited are using Links for average people like me to understand of what they are saying in their  quotes  for  no more further details.

Theymos could've solved this problem the time he created the merit system.. He could've easily given every member merits based on activity and not ranks, for example: A full member like you who has 250 activity should have been given around 200 merits to start with not only 100 (the amount needed for member rank).
But he must have his reasons not to do so...

.....I considered giving merit proportional to activity, but I decided not to because doing so would probably give far more undeserved merit than deserved merit in total. But undoubtedly some people got screwed by this.....

It's not "that particular person" it's the average member which means more than half the members of this forum have this problem and even if you are a better poster how much above average you think you'd be? will you get double the amount an average user gets? triple? it would still take you much more than it did in the old system.

I'm not complaining about the merit system I'm complaining about the very low amount of merits it produces..

Maybe theymos will take a look about this idea, and increase the sMerit points for Hero members and legendary members (Which they are active and reputable), Or to increase the number of merit sources, which will be enough merit for each one to receive. Honestly, I didn't know how theymos choose the 57 merit sources, It's random or what? , I think there is some criteria if this is not RANDOM.

If you want to be a merit source:

 1. Be a somewhat established member.
 2. Collect TEN posts written in the last couple of months by other people that have not received nearly enough merit for how good they are, and post quotes for them all in a new Meta thread. The point of this is to demonstrate your ability to give out merit usefully.
 3. We will take a look at your history and maybe make you a source.

I am especially eager to have merit sources in sub-communities such as the local sections.

This is the reason why Hero members and legendary members need to receive merit so they can distribute it all the same as other members. I imagine in a few months time or a year from now when we have an adequate number of merit sources receiving merit and redistributing it won't be a problem. 

I don't need merits to rank up, but I do need sMerit so I can give merit to other people.
Being a "nice guy", I'm actually getting much less merit than I'm giving away.
I'll sooner or later run out, which is unfortunate, since I tend to reward people who make meaningful contributions to my threads.

Well, I am exactly in this situation. More of that I've reached Sr. Member rank by my activity in a short time after Merit system saw the light, so I count that totally unfair, cause on now with my current speed of earning merits the target seems just impossible. I think moderators should to think about those members who are on boarder between two ranks and to make the mission to them a little easier.

Well, I don't really see how they can be mad, they're newcomers to the community, and newcomers always have a hard time integrating or becoming established among well known members, this is true for all industries.

I thought that in the beginning, I was just a fresh Member when the Merit was introduced. I had some old good posts and started getting merit just keeping those up to date.

 I'm still a member but tomorrow evening I'll reach the needed activity points for Full Member, got enough merit til now to prove that the system is really working if you are helping the community in some way and stay away from shitposting. I guess these 30 points I'm missing will not be
a problem , but I'm not In hurry. I'll be happy to wear avatar some day.

As I like to say, "don't blame the system, blame yourself" is applicable here too

As I like to say, "don't blame the system, blame yourself" is applicable here too

Good analysis. I believe the merit system is still too young and it will be needed some time to all users to get used to it. Now, everyday I read publications abput how to get merit (mostly made by newbies), but I understand even in the higher ranks now it is really difficult to rank out, for example from hero to legendary.

It is time to create a kind of Merit-contest?? We can pick a topic and let the people talk about it, and see what happens...

Since new participants cannot able to analyze the quality post. High rank members have the knowledge to understand which one is quality post. If meriting option goes to less rank members it will become another spam here.

Now Hilariousandco starting washing out the merit sellers and exchangers. You may find many people have bee tagged in this, Hope he will take this as a huge list.

Well, I am exactly in this situation. More of that I've reached Sr. Member rank by my activity in a short time after Merit system saw the light, so I count that totally unfair, cause on now with my current speed of earning merits the target seems just impossible. I think moderators should to think about those members who are on boarder between two ranks and to make the mission to them a little easier.

I know that the purpose of this system is to create a better forum with better members but just imagine yourself a full member needing almost 2 years to get to senior. Is that fair?

Legendary members get 8% x 24k = 1920 merits which they don't need to rank up.

I think the issue is that on some forums lots of merits are given out - eg posting on Meta.

On other forums hardly any merits are given out (speculation, trading, altcoins and bitcoin discussion).

That means that if you want merits you need to post exclusively in Meta.

A potential solution is to get merit sources to "patrol" a specific forum to award good posts. That way, the distribution will be more even.

First of all I wanna thank zentdex for his great analysis about how many merits each rank - on average - gains a month. I used some of the data he provided in his post: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/3-merit-stat-after-a-month-of-merit-3015036

Now to my point:
I took my time to do the math and see how many members can the current merit system sustain and here are the results:


https://imgur.com/a/snYsn




First of all let me remind you of rank requirements:

Newbie:           1 activity                   and     0 merits
Jr. Member:      30 activity                 and     0 merits
Member:          60 activity                 and     10 merits         needs 2 months to get the activity
Full Member:    120 activity               and     100 merits       needs 4 months to get the activity
Sr. Member:      240 activity               and     250 merits      needs 8 months to get the activity
Hero Member:   480 activity               and     500 merits      who knows?    around 12 months
Legendary:       775 - 1030 activity     and     1000 merits




There are currently - at the time of this post - 57 merit sources with a total merit generation of up to 11975 sMerit per 30 days. Those are the merits generated by sources only, and given that a member can send half the merits he receives and imagining the best case scenario where every member sends all the merits he receives, the total amount of merits generated by the system would double to 23950 sMerit per 30 days. So, roughly 24k sMerit per month.

Now to the boring math:

Based on Zentdex's analysis the 24k merits are distributed between ranks in the following manner:
Legendary: 8%
Hero: 8%
Sr. Member: 14%
Full Member: 16%
Member: 19%
Jr. Member and Newbie: 23 + 11 = 34%


So...
Legendary members get 8% x 24k = 1920 merits which they don't need to rank up.
Hero members get the same amount 1920 which is enough for 1920/500 = 3.84 members to rank up every month. The No. of Hero members the system can sustain: 3.84 x 12 = 46.08
Sr. members get 14% x 24k = 3360 which is enough for 3360/250 = 13.44 members every month. The No. of Sr. members the system can sustain: 13.44 x 8 = 107.52
Full Members get 16% x 24k = 3840 which is enough for 3840/150 = 25.6 members every month. The No. of Full members the system can sustain: 25.6 x 4 = 102.4
Members get 19% x 24k = 4560 which is enough for 4560/90 = 50.67 members every month. The No. of Members the system can sustain:  50.67 x 2 = 101.34
Jr. Members and Newbies get 34% x 24k = 8160 which is enough for 816 members every month.

The time needed to rank up is easily acquired by dividing the amount needed to rank up by the average merits gained per month.

Conclusion (my opinion):
The amount of merits produced by the system is too very low, as we've seen that it would take an average member 3 to 5 times the time it took him to rank up in the previous system, I know that the purpose of this system is to create a better forum with better members but just imagine yourself a full member needing almost 2 years to get to senior. Is that fair? How frustrated you'd be?
Not to mention that I described the best case scenario and didn't go into calculating all the sMerits that are horded and not used and the merits that are sold on black markets.

You can see the image here: https://i.imgur.com/BGE88BT.png

Zoinks! You've taken a wrong turn.

OK, let me add some calculations too then.

We stated with 35 Merit Sources (MS for short) on the first day of the Merit system.

On 26th Jan. were already 49 MS. /reference/
Today they are 57 MS.
So for one month from 35 till 57 this is 22 new sources, awesome but...

14 were added for 1 day, so we exclude them to be more realistic /see the reference link above/

Then there are minimum around 8 new MS added per Month!

Since this is the first and only month till now and the data is not enough, we need to give more time to the system to actually see how it is working.
Now it's just speculations.

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P.S. The image in the OP is not loading.