Topic: Merit Drying Up? - page 4. (Read 990 times)

That includes our right to try to keep sMerits away from the Twitbook bounty hunters.

Yes. Some people have been acting like Merit Police recently. I am quite sure this is not what Satoshi's spirit would have supported.

If people gain Merit, they all have the liberty to decide what to do with it.

Every single member has the right to decide for himself which posts deserve his hard-earned sMerits. Sarcastic remarks, statistics, images or not, Merit or decentralization analysis or whatever... In the end, a quite surprising mix of high-Merited members might come out of that...

I had to do something, my merits are still wet.

Yeah, of course, so we must just change our mindset and don't judge others if they give someone 5 merits for some post we don't agree or think that deserves that, or give merits to the same person if this person is doing a pretty decent job (I say that because sometimes I stop myself of giving merits to one user I've recently merited, just in case, you Know). I think most of us more or less "know" each other, meaning that it's clear that none of us are farmers or merit-sellers, and each of us has our own policy, our own favorite board, etc. So lets us be.
We need to show newbies and other ranks that it is possible to rank-up if you have a decent behavior. If they have hope and see results, probably few will change their mind and be more careful about their own posting history.


Wild JC!!!!

Seems like you pulled it out of my mind  
I had roughly something like this in mind. The problem is, you can not set a standard when it comes to give merits. Different people have different points/variables for analyzing a post to determine in which category the posts falls in. For a post which you will think it worth 5 merits I may think nah (!) it worth 1 merit (although I am out of your guys's league, I barely have sMerits), Jet Cash may think the post does not even worth a single merit!

But having a category in individuals mind is a good idea. It does not have to be publicly exposed and common for everyone.

---

Argentina are OUT! 4 - 2. Can you believe it?
PS: France was a better team especially Kylian MBAPPE. He stole the match from Argentina. Congrats France.  

I've become radical. I've awarded a few posts with 2 merits recently.

On the rewarding of 'normal' posts - If I have time, and I see that a guy has made a sensible post ( what I would call a useful one), I have a look at his activity. If 50% or so of his first page on the recent post list are 'useful', then I will award merits for the block.

No Merit for Messi today.

That might be one reason. I definitely think the system has worked, the amount of shitposting & spammers have dropped dramatically. It's not only me I have seen some other members are also thinking the same.

A couple of days ago we have an interest insight regarding merits in this thread: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/analysis-smerits-per-transaction-and-smerit-transactions-per-post-are-they-low-4559515

But, in addition, even when numerically the number of merits seems stable, the truth is that the number of users isn't. Probably, that's why we all feel that the merit system is decaying.
Now, maybe that's normal. It would be interesting to see how many new accounts are immediately enrolling bounties, and, in this case, why all those members are probably don't receiving merits. On the other hand, I'd like to point out again that maybe this is our fault: I mean, maybe this is time to change our mindset and reward more than just one merit to the deserving people, because, being real, this is really difficult to rank-up beyond member if we don't give a "punch" too good new users, good members or whatever the rank. Just don't be shy, and if you find a really good post, why don't give 5 or more? Because of farm accusations? I think we are beyond that already, to accuse one to another when the merit system is about to be 6 months old, is kind of annoying. If oneof us reward with, I don't know, 8 merits to someone and the post is decent enough, let it be.
Besides, I might point out that is is also truly important to reward also to high rankers, because, as you of course know, if we want to spread merits we need also to win some (I don't beg, I'm just doing well with my amount, what I mean is we must not stop giving merit to a high ranked based on his/her position).
While some can be interested in, for instant, tech, others can be in society. As well as we spare our merits, more people will be rewarded, for we have all different points of view and different approach about what a good post need.

That's a really important statement with which I totally concur. Instead of dividing the awards in between "Bad and good", we mentally can change and divide it into:
- NOt bad= 1 merit
- Good= 2
- Very good= 3
-Awesome= 5 or more.
As an example, of course.

I've only been keeping track of the number of transactions per week for 5 weeks, but it seems to be stabilizing:

I don't think you should only Merit high quality posts: I think "normal" good posts deserve Merit too. Merit was introduced to stop spammers from ranking up, but people with "normal" good posts shouldn't be should also be able to rank up.
Of course, high quality posts should receive more Merit, but that happens already and doesn't need adjusting. Ideally, I think good posts should receive at least 1 Merit, and high quality posts a lot more.

It would be interesting to see if this is true. If theymos can make a data dump of the initial sMerit distribution, it's easy to see who has sMerit left.
It would also be interesting to know how many users received the sMerit airdrop. Until yesterday, only 15159 users gave one or more away. I think many users haven't even touched ther sMerit supply.
As of yesterday, 180742 Merit was rewarded since introduction. Theymos said that around 600k sMerit was distributed.

Is it okay to promote my latest addition to my Merit history overview here? This is OP's Sent Merit (5 days per column):

And this is OP's Received Merit:

I can only conclude it looks quite stable!

I hate that, and I put a lot of posters who insert non-essential images on ignore. It's hard enough wading through all the threads to look for gems, without having to scroll down a long thread with quoted images. I usually don't bother to read the comment associated with the image either. The other advantage of putting the poster on ignore if he is the opening poster, is that the thread title gets greyed out in the index, so I don't have to keep looking at the picture.  It also saves my bandwidth if I am on the mobile.

Merit rewarding is drying up yes. I am also seeing people going back to the pre-merit era, where they don't care about their post quality, since people have figured out that, good posts don't get merit, whilst, the high quality posts only do. By good posts, I mean, if  a person has a good point via discussions, or if they help answer a query. The posts that do get merited are, if they are long, but yet constructive,or if a post is written with some humor. The normal discussions don't meet the merit standards and hence spam is spreading more and not less.

I am trying to find good posts that have been recently made but it is not easy to find a good posts. When the merit system was implemented, people started putting so much effort in posts and now they have stopped. There are some tweaks that need to be made in the merit rewarding and merit sources should begin with that.

Based on my observation, most merited post are those who have inserted images or clear detailed information where most of us find it helpful. I believe that most merit provider are getting more strict to judge that post since we are all aware that we are seeing repeated or similar topics here in the forum. Good posters are running out of idea how to contribute their knowledge since most of it was already raised thrice or more. Just my opinion.

I've got 74 sMerit which doesn't get touched until I've awarded all my current source merits. I'm not sure how you can factor that into your calculation. Also, I don't know what my source merit allotment is, it just seems to get topped up by a few merits every day.

Objectively, checking the amount of sMerit that is being awarded on a weekly basis on the Merit Dashboard (Global Summary tab or Sent Merit Tab), the amount is rather stable overall, being in the 3,9k-4,5k per week since the beginning of May 2018.

Of course if we scale this up to a monthly  follow-up, the amount of awarded sMerit has in effect decreased over the months noticeably:
July 2018:         17.768
May 2018:         19.807
April 2018:        23.482
March 2018:      32.141
February 2018:  48.374
January 2018:   39.170

Recently we discussed this issue in a couple of threads on Meta ( Incentive to the Merit Sources to Achieve their Quota? and Analysis- sMerits per transaction and sMerit transactions per post-Are they low? ).
The basic additional output is that awarding is very often on very low amounts (namely one or two sMerits), and posts tend to be awarded by one person or two at most. These patterns may vary a bit depending on the forum board we focus on.

What does seem weird is that the amount of sMerit awarded per month these past few months is roughly the amount that Merit Sources have at their disposal per 30 days (last I saw, there are 81 merit sources with a total merit generation of up to 18.700 sMerit per 30 days).
We do not know how much of the aggregate sMerit Pool the Merit Sources manage to award, but in the extreme cases of awarding it all (which does not happen really), it would mean that basically only Merit Sources have sMerit available or are commited to awarding on the whole. As I said, that is logically not the case, but I would have expected a weekly overall sMerit of at least twice what the Merit Sources have.

Statistics may seem a bit of a bore to some, but the give us some solid insights which normally surpass our intuition and, on occasions, ament it (as I often find myself). 

I'm still finding it hard to award merits. I'm back at about a hundred again, and I've started several threads to try to award them, but it is still difficult. Maybe I've got too many people on ignore for begging, merit abuse, and over-quoting. or maybe I set my standards too high. Also, I quit some boards if they are full of Twitface and bounty threads. Maybe I put too much emphasis on looking for newbies and juniors as well.

It's really up to the members who want merits. Post some construcvtive and useful posts, and think about them before you hit the post button.

If some of you senior members want to try for some merits, I've opened up my discussion threads on the beginners board to all members ( even Satoshi ). I could do with some cleanup posts, as there is a fair bit of misinformation in the threads. I'm trying to avoid doing it myself as the threads are supposed to be merit generators.

Don't know how you are doing this. But I am indeed actively rewarding people with my modest pile of sMerits.

Not just another Merit statistics post or hidden begging, but posts helping other people, or with an interesting "fresh" vision on some debate or subject about crypto. I keep a reserve of 5-10 sMerits for posts I read along the way, and if I go over 10, I try to actively search and reward immediately.

I suppose it's different when you're Legendary, but as a lower level members, like me, it would be very dishonest to wish and hope to go up in rank, if you don't reward others either.

PS: Argentina vs France livestream here:
https://neosportek.blogspot.com/p/world-cup.html

Oh me too, I reckon France 1-2 Argentina. Messi is about to explode into this World Cup after a slow start I think.

It's not only me I have seen some other members are also thinking the same.

There could be other variables too like: people are bored now, they don't care enough spending time on searching for good posts, merit review topics are ending up in off-topics section (I have seen some members are upset about this because the topics are not receiving much traffic) etc. I am not literally saying that all these could be the valid variables, I could be completely wrong in my thinking.

PS: I edited the earlier post a bit (just to inform). I am off now to watch France v Argentina   

I definitely think the system has worked, the amount of shitposting & spammers have dropped dramatically. It’d just be nice to see more posts being Merited. I think your last paragraph probably just about sums it up.