Merit is slowly dying, this is only the second week of the month, this means the Merit sources already have the charge from last month sMerit sent. This is the negative record since my reports here, we need more sMerit sources or more sMerit for the currents sources. 30% is very huge in 1 month
next 2 weeks will probably even worse (merit decreasing in the end of month).
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What do you think about it?
I haven't has time to update my stats yet (maybe to early for that too), but I trust yours.
I believe that there is a hell of a lot of sMerit still accumulated in our sMerit bags. I calculated around 90%. Many members make it a point not only to post, but also to award merit often, as can be seen by their profile Merit history. Those are sound examples of a good use of the concept in terms of good usage of sMerit. However, the mass of people that do not play the awarding game seem much larger.
It’s true that it is not easy to always find posts to merit. I for example took aside yesterday a couple of hours with that sole objective in mind, focusing on awarding sMerit and not posting. I managed to award 4 measly sMerits to 4 different posts. No much of a feat, but I tried to focus on awarding it without a mental rank barrier (even so, I only managed to get to 1 Jr Member).
It´s not down to creating more merit sources per se, but to making an effort to play the game by the book, acting as givers and not only of receivers of sMerit (no second readings please here). Obviously, we should no rush to give away this 90% stash of sMerit, but rather incentive playing the game as awarders.
Many profiles still have the same sMerit as they were airdropped, not having awarded any yet. Since nothing happens if it is not awarded after some time, the system could go on like this in a bearish tendency.
sMerit decay is a potential final step that could be implemented as was stated by theymos if I’m not wrong. The thing is that the overall amount of available forum wide sMerit needs to be supervised so that the system in motion does not defeat the purpose.
sMerit Decay on it’s own,with no counterpart, would be like token burning and therefore potentially have an effect of increasing sMerit value and lessen circulation even more.
Maybe instead of decay it should be a transfer to other sources. That is to say, create sources to distribute sMerit that is rotting away (or at least hibernating).
These sources would not be sources for merit generated out of the blue as happens now (obviously to counterpart the natural sMerit decay originated by halfing sMerit upon every transaction), but to award out of the pool of “unused” sMerit (“unused could be something like 3 months without use or so).
That obviously would make the system more complicated to implement, but should help a healthy circulation of sMerit.
We know the focus is to benefit over forum wide post content and cut down on spam and farmed accounts, but we have to be careful not to tightening the noose too much.