Would it be helpful to show both the application date and the approve date (if you know that information) for those members who were approved? I'm thinking that it could provide some meaningful information for future merit source applicants to see that there is a decent amount of variation in how long applicants might have to wait before getting approval, and maybe even might inform future MS applicants regarding what kinds of things to do (or not do) while a MS application is pending.
It seems that the applications are approved in batches when theymos has time to review them. Last big change was in January IIRC. Based on some wording in the recent e-mail to merit sorcerers we can probably expect another review in about six months or so.
I read everywhere about many active and committed sources asking for more sMerits allowance, while many other sources were "dormant" and not giving merits away, of feeling that as a chore.
Probably Theymos wanted to fix that.
Wondering if there is a new "methodology" to determine new Merit Source allocation (some kind of bakward looking average), and consequently determine if a Merit Source is still a valid one (and hence if new are needed), or it was just a "reaction" to what apparently was an extemporaneous "imbalance".
Frequently, theymos comes up with quasi-genius solutions, and surely no solution is perfect, and even this whole merit system could be criticized for being more proof of stake rather than proof of work, and other criticisms of centralizing too much trust into few individuals... hahahahaha
Anywhoo..... theymos's announcement from yesterday was likely a surprise for many members, but yeah, if they had not been giving out many merits for the past 6 months, and could NOT at least average the dishing out of a paltry 10 merits per month, they were removed as a merit source, and in that regard, theymos employed a largely objective algorithm to remove those who were not playing game with this merit system.
In that regard, actions speak louder than words, and even some members who had been assigned as merit sources might not have been so bothered by their assignment as a merit source as to ask for their removal, but their non-use ended up speaking for around 30 of them.
Of course, not every member is good at appreciating the contributions of other members by spending time to give merits, but that does not make them either a bad member or even a non-contributory member. I won't name any names, but there are some members who are awesome contributors to the forum, but they might not be very good at giving merits and they also might get shit on a lot from other members, but the forum would not even be close to what it is today, with the many quality contributors and even quality incentives to post good content without some of the contributions of some members who kind of suck as a merit source.
Of course, we are never really going to get rid of troll shills, but some members are very helpful at identifying, or flagging troll/shills in order that more innocent members might take those members with a grain of salt. At the same time, there are some members who might be nice and innocent and even real good people who are just looking to be scammed. For some reason they cannot help themselves, and there is ONLY so much that any forum can do in order to protect those kinds of members from theirselves.
In other words, some members have to learn by getting scammed, and even some of those members might not ever learned and keep getting into scam after scam after scam. It takes all kinds of peeps to make the world go round, and surely it would be boring if the world did not have a variety of intelligence, strategies and experiments, and surely the free markets would not function as well either if everyone had the same opinions about how to value assets and/or strategies in regards to profiting from the present/future value of such assets (whether we are referring to bitcoin, crypto assets or even non-crypto assets, and even the errors that people might make in assessing and acting on their own personal financial/psychological situation(s)).