Topic: Merit Data from 503 Randomly Selected Altcoin Bounty Hunters (Read 845 times)

Ah, I missed that thread. That's exactly what I was looking for.

This merit system has amazed me at the level of detail that went into it. As more and more time goes by, the more I continue to favor the system. I'm hoping that data like what you're collecting can eventually help shape signature campaigns into utilizing more merit-based requirements rather than solely member rank.

I'm going to check out the data that you've collected and see if there are any major differences between Bitcoin sig campaigns vs. altcoin sig campaigns.

Again, thanks for doing this. I'm completely geeking out atm lol

Download the Google Sheets as an Excel sheet, and use this method to get usable Stata data (I think/hope). I'm not familiar with Stata unfortunately.

Hi Sir,

I would like to make boxplot for merit receivers (categorial variable) but I am not familiar with raw data from the forum. I have not use R software, I am more familiar with Stata software. Would you mind giving me link to download datasets which can be used for Stata software to plot.
Boxplots can give us clearer view about distribution of merits in the forum over different categories of merit-receivers.
Thanks.

I'll look into rescraping soon.


This spreadsheet from my Merit Data from 315 Bitcoin Paying Signature Campaign Participants thread has the merit values of almost all Bitcoin paying campaigns, if that's what you're looking for. It's not automatically updated though. If another manager wants live data similar to what I have for ChipMixer, I'd be happy to help them get it set up.


AFAIK there are no Local only campaigns running at the moment (there was Zebpay a few months ago that was India only though, could maybe use that data? pretty smally campaign though I think). This makes it hard to scrape Local posters. Theymos' merit download also doesn't have the section ID info either.

I'm curious to see current stats for the Altcoin sections as in relation to when you started this a few weeks ago.

And regarding stats from other campaigns, could you possibly work with an existing campaign manager for another popular signature campaign to get their user data to plug in for data mining and analysis?

It'd be interesting to see if this format and data mining can be applied towards other sections of the forums, as well. I know everyone hates Local Boards, but I'm curious to see how much merit/sMerit is actualy being distributed on those boards, as well. Possibly the more popular boards like Russia or the Philippines. Is it easy to scrape this data?

I think that's part of my point - the altcoin forum is popular, and not enough merit senders are involved in those communities. While like you've said it might be because there is a lot of dud input to get through, it hasn't stopped these forums becoming very popular.

But put another way, what you're suggesting is that to get more merit, people should post on the LESS popular forums because the threads are shorter and there is less stuff to read through? Not all of the altcoin posts are spam and I don't mind skipping through a few lines of pointless input to read something valuable from a user about an altcoin I'm following.

Also I don't think your point on my latest posts being on a certain page like 76, 383 etc really stacks up - these posts are on the latest page of each altcoin I'm posting about when I post them, so the raw page number is not so relevant. Most users skip to the last page of a thread for the latest info on an altcoin (I know I do) so the fact that it is on page 10, 100, 500 or whatever shouldn't matter - it is always on the last page at time of posting. If you had merit senders who followed particular groups of altcoins, they wouldn't be starting from page 1 anyway, they'd be looking at the latest posts and deciding if sending merit is warranted, or if it is just spam. I wouldn't expect a merit sender to trawl through the hundreds of pages on Ethereum, they could just look at the latest page.

Also I wonder if timezones make a difference - ie. since there are 57 main merit senders, would someone in say New Zealand be forever a newbie compared to someone in Europe/USA due to time differences, and no merit senders being online to see their posts before they get buried a few pages back on a thread.

I think for the bitcointalk community to grow across all forums the messaging and how merit is provided needs to shift slightly to provide the same incentives for members to post quality content in 'Altcoin' forums, not just 'Bitcoin' forums - particularly since altcoins are growth areas.

https://bitcointalk.org/ shows the number of posts per board. The altcoin-boards have much more posts than the Bitcoin boards, and although the Tokens board has less posts, it was created only recently.

Take Announcements (Altcoins) for example: the first page of threads was filled within 4 minutes. In the past hour, 242 threads were bumped.
I do believe there are quality posts in the altcoin section, but they're burried under hundreds of thousands of spamposts. And as much as I'd like to Merit those few quality posts, I'm not going to read through the spam to find them.

I've checked your last few posts before this one, they're on page 76, page 50, page 99 and page 383.
It doesn't matter whether your posts are good or not, barely anybody will see them.

Useful info, but the problem is not altcoin bounty hunters, but the actual distribution of merit on altcoin forums.

I primarily post in altcoin forums (given that is my interest, since I do a bit of GPU mining), and I've seen plenty of pages with valuable posts that just don't attract any merit.

When you look at the top merit receiving threads/posts they are all in bitcoin, meta and apparently some russian threads? Oh and also merit swapping threads.

Think there needs to be more merit/attention on the altcoin forums - bounty hunters who post about spamming their twitter followers about some ICO make up only a small portion of altcoin posts.

I mean based on the current distribution of merit, I would be telling newbies to ignore altcoin forums and post in meta - or learn russian.

The account price estimator was for sure able to distinguish between written and quoted text, how it gave a list of addresses posted and addresses in quote seperate..
I think the estimater even had a post quality algorithm that also may have excluded quoted text..

You may be able to use a modified piece of the code used in that for your purpose?

Very interesting analysis of bounty hunter.

This can be compared with the number of merits that an average non bounty hunter has. Of course because bounty hunters have a higher rank. If you can compare similarly ranked bounty hunters and non-bounty hunters then that would be interesting.

That's  quite educating.  So I want to know if there's a way you can distinguish posts that have been merited and those that haven't been merited based on the following yardstick.
1. Were posts merited meaningfull or friends gave their friends merits.
2. Posts that weren't merited were there meaningful or meaningless as to why they never got any merit?
3. How many spam posts or one liner posts got merited?
Maybe if this two factors can be considered it might help know why those remaining 398 participants never had any merit so far since the inception of merit system. If this can be integrated I think it will be cool in the data.

I'm not sure that this tells the entire story.  How does your investigation into Altcoin Campaigns compare to the group as a whole (i.e., are members of campaigns significantly different than the entire population?)

I just picked a random thread off the Bitcoin Section first page:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2974825.20

At the time, there were 29 responses.

9 of the 29 had received merit (note, I mean at some point prior, not necessarily in this thread) ... 31%  (a little higher)
20 had no additional merit.
The average merit received was 1.28 (a little lower)
Of members who had received merit, the average was 3.44.  (a lot lower)

Granted, a smaller population size, and it was a bit of "shit post" thread to begin with (and I really did select that thread blindly, wasn't look for a "shit post") ... but without a baseline to compare the Altcoin members to, it doesn't really tell us much.

Wow I found some very useful information on this thread. I'll try to put it all together for newbs like me who are interested in gaining merits.

Thanks for the nice word as it encourages me. Well, it is only a data from 1 user (QA as the top giver) and the data was extracted from 14 February 2018 with 907 merits given. Well i myself surprised too to see bitcoin discussion is the most board meritted by QA, but i think the reason for this is because he made a thread to giveaway his merits and many of the participants asking to review post from bitcoin discussion board. If things like this didnt made, i guess it will be hard to find a quality posts on that board, as mostly of them is megathread spamposts like you've said. But from my statistic we can conclude that even in the dark places, if someone can points out a meritorious post, then the merit may go to that post.

I just took a look at your post and it is truly amazing. I was actually very surprised to find that the board with the highest amount of merit sent was Bitcoin Discussion, but at the same time, it is the most popular subreddit as well. I would have believed that the merit density of the subforum would be pretty bad considering all of the megathread spamposts in there. In fact, this might still be true since your data is based on raw data rather than merit over posts, which would also be a very interesting metric to explore. Furthermore, it would also be interesting to analyze the same statistics if any instance of giving merit is given a value of 1 rather than the number of merit given in that instance. This might help prevent the data from being skewed towards alts.

The most important thing is the good idea , so the high quality post is not necessary to get a merit point when the idea is not unique.
On the other hand, due to the presence of merit system many members are giving a great effort and  this has led to an improvement in their behavior's. And it is  essential  that the existence of merit system will continue because that helped a lot in improving the forum.

This eventually will more or less solve itself because if people at some point understand that it's pointless to rank up their alt accounts by giving shitposts Merit, they will stop. In most cases if you apply for a signature campaign spot nowadays, the campaign manager will check what posts have been given Merit, and look right through all the nonsense. This basically means that aside from campaigns managed by baboons, these artificially ranked up accounts won't stand a chance, and thus are pretty much worthless -- this will give account farmers less incentive to continue doing what they used to do. I think it will take at least a month or six before we really notice a decrease in alt-to-alt Merit awards.

It's nice and clear statistic here. After reading the OP, I think that there is a large amount of merit to give to everyone per month. The problem here, that there are a thousand of member doesn't care to give some merit points to high quality posts, In result, many people who write great posts complain about merit, I mean that every high quality poster thinks that he deserve more merit points.
 

I'd say most of the members who post in the altcoin section are complete jizzbags and they probably send whatever merit they have to their alt accounts in an ever-decreasing circle.  Just as a matter of principle I'd give up posting there if I were you.  This post you wrote wasn't bad at all, which is why I gave you a merit. 

These aren't supposed to be easy to earn, so just be patient, but it shouldn't be surprising that a lot of points are handed out in meta.  People who care about the forum post there, and these are usually members who've been here a while and were grandfathered some merit in January. 

Also don't fret that you see seemingly worthless posts being given more merits than some people have altogether.   There's some shenanigans afoot and there probably always will be.   That stuff will take care of itself eventually.   

Life isn't fair, either, I should add.  Don't bite your nails down to nubs over it.

I think it's pretty obvious posts in bounty-sections ("here are 60 links to Facebook") shouldn't get any Merit. But I am curious about the people who did receive Merit: did they receive it for good posts in other sections (there's nothing wrong with a quality poster who also hunts bounties), or did they receive it from their many alt-accounts for worthless posts?

I hope theymos will add more statistics in the future, the total Merit per board shouldn't be that difficult to show.

Long term, they won't earn new Merits from sources, and their sMerit dries up.
This is how theymos puts it:

From what I've seen, almost all posts with any of these phrases are low quality:
-facebook
-twitter
-Im agree
-Great project
-nice project
-sir
I can make this list much longer, but this is just off the top of my head now. It's not 100% accurate, maybe "only" 98%.

I think the first one is some sort of loophole in the Merit system: almost anybody who creates a thread about Merit, receives Merit! Unless the post quality is bad, then people who point that out receive the Merit. Long-term, when Merit is no longer "something new", I expect much less Merit in Meta.
Many posts in the other two sections receive well-deserved Merit indeed. I hope they won't get flooded by Merit-hunters.

It would be quite easy to keep track of Recent merits (downloading the page a few times per day is enough), and add them up per user. But it's too late now to get a historic overview.

I've Merited posts in the altcoin section, but only if they deserve it. The main problem is finding them amongst hundreds of thousands of spamposts.
Two days ago I created a thread in Altcoin Discussion. It got 6 views, including my own. Spam kicked it off the first page in 20 minutes. I moved it to Service Discussion today, and got the answers I needed. As long as the spam continues, the altcoin section is lost for serious discussions.

I just took a look at the outliers (should have earlier, I know) and it seems they got merits for dumb reasons (one guy used alt accounts, the other was selling ICO picks for merits). So a better stat would be that 103 legitimate (I assume) members have received 5.2 merits each.


Based on what I've seen in Gambling discussion and Bitcoin Discussion, those people without merits are probably just posting in spam megathreads or commenting stuff like "nice ICO!".
It's hard to automate a way to find the post quality of the user. I thought about finding the average character per post, but I noticed many have posts like:


I could write a program in some other language (nodeJS perhaps) to do it, but this data was a result of me getting the formula set up for the ChipMixer campaign, and deciding to reuse it.
Without looking though, I'm guessing that the 3 most merited sections are:
- Meta
- Development and Technical Discussion
- Technical Support


It's hard to scrape how many have sent merit, as you must be logged in to see those statistics. It would be too complicated to do it in Google Sheets, and probably still complicated in any of the programming languages I'm familiar with.

I took a look at your posts, and while they aren't spam, none of them really stand out to me as being worth merit. Most/all of your posts are very buried, and are on the 4th page of a thread, or more.


People in Altcoin campaigns likely still post in Bitcoin sections - after all, it's incredibility easy to make a post talking about why Bitcoin is better then Gold by reading the thousands of replies already made. I'm guessing that my Bitcoin campaigner data will show a much higher average too, so it's still possible to argue that merits aren't really being distributed in certain sections.

Members are ignoring merits or they are too lazy to send merit. Can you research how many bounty hunters sent merits and include number to spreadsheet? I guess you will find out that 90% members who are posting in altcoin section have never sent merits.

Is something wrong with my posts? Am I spamming? I don't see reason why nobody sent me merit while some guys here received 40 merits for couple of topics and posts in meta.

Should I become regular in meta now? Should I write more than it is necessary to write? Should I write essay over half page? Should I send merit to someone if i didn't receive any?

There you go, reasons and small rant. Decide which is which

Nice stats btw.

Wow what a nice statistic you got there, i guess this is not a hard job if it is done by an experienced manager.
This statistic really negate all the whiners who said that merits not given in some section and only meta's people getting a lot of merits. I dont know how does people's brain works if they are still denying the facts while we got some nice statistics here.


If you interested on finding out how the no 1 merit giver merit distributed, you can find it here on my thread https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.30272338 , but i made it about 4 days ago, so it is not an updated version, but it can gives you a glimpse on merit distribution based on board.

There are members giving away merits to new members who can apply in those threads. I remember one such thread in service section especially for contributions in alt section. One can quote their posts in alt section in that thread and get some merits.

Nice statistics here. I noticed while browsing the altcoin thread that actual worthy discussion almost always doesn't get merit, but the spam, announcement threads and the like are getting merits from what I would presume their alt accounts.

We will not get correct idea currently because of a number of reasons. Firstly, there are a number of members abusing the merit system, Some are still sending merits like 10,20 to their alts for meaningless posts. These incidences are getting reported in those threads like " report merit system abuse here" daily. Another problem is that initially most of the merits were given for pots in meta section in bulk. This data collection and analysis will be more fruitful as members get used to this new system

This is actually really interesting. While I do believe that there are some valuable posts in the altcoin section and by some altcoin bounty hunters, I think it is rather obvious that a lot of spam happens in the section and I do not believe it is as strictly moderated than the rest of the forum especially with all the coin pumping going on in there. This is mostly the main reason I try to stay away from it.

This does, however, bring up a very interesting question: how is merit distributed across different sections of the forum? It would be interesting to know which sections tend to produce the most quality content in the forums. This would probably be very hard to do considering that you are getting rate limited yourself with just 500 users in the sample size in a single section of the forum, but there might be an alternative way such as scraping the last x number of posts from the section and adding up the merit from there. However, with the number of sections in the forum I can see this being extremely slow. I do not have much experience with Sheets/Excel when it comes to scraping, but I might eventually write a quick script to do it and post the results myself.

You did a great job. These stats speak for themselves:

1) The 105 members in your sample received 10.75 merits each. This shows that there are enough merits for everyone, provided you are ready to make some efforts.

2) Majority has no merits. This is something that needs to be looked after. The promotional offers (bounties and campaigns) should not expect members without any merits.

Suggestion: If it is possible for you to include data regarding the average posts made by the user, please include it. Especially for those 105 members.

I scraped the earned merit data of 503 random^[1] people participating in altcoin bounty signature campaigns, just for fun and because I was curious to see how many of them would have no merits. The data I got was similar to what I expected (398 of them had 0 merit). Here is the raw merit data in the format Earned Merit | Profile URL.

Those members have:

• Received 1129 merits
• Average of 2.24 merits earned
• Excluding those who have no merits, earned, the remaining 105 have earned an average 10.75 merits

Chart excludes 2 outliers: pitipawn with 433 earned merits, and temmuz with 159 earned merits. Stats above do include these outliers.

---

Why?

My reason for doing this was curiosity - I plan on rechecking this sample sometime in the future, and maybe getting a sample of Bitcoin signature campaign participants^[2] (might be harder as pretty much every manager doesn't have direct profile links, myself included) to compare with. Draw your own conclusions from the data. Some points might be:

• Lack of merit sources in Altcoin sections?
• More spam in Altcoin sections?

Also to farm merits - gotta rank up to the Super Uber Legendary Cash rank

---

How?

I'm scraping merit data using Google Sheets, with this formula:

It grabs their merits, subtracts how much merit they would have been given at the start of the system based on current rank, and returns the result. Does not work if they have ranked up, ranked down, are Hero Members who were given 1000 initally or with Copper Members. You need to subtract/add the correction manually, and it's pretty easy to spot errors. This formula grabs their current merit count:


Be warned: You will get rate limited eventually. My original plan was to grab 1000 users worth of data, but it was getting really slow.

Edit: The D2 in the formula is a link to the user's profile. Data will automatically update as long as the formula is present.

---

^[1] By random, I mean I picked a few random bounties, and took the profile links of those who applied.
^[2] I am tracking ChipMixer campaign stats, but it's a much smaller sample.