Topic: Merit & new rank requirements - page 172. (Read 167726 times)

Getting a merit is like finding a bitcoin block while solo mining.  

[whine]

Development team of new alt coin

Development team of new alt coin using new account will be limited to few post for certain period of time and no link/image allowed, if he stuck at Newbie rank probably for long period of time because nobody care to give him merit, that just hinder productive discussion.

(Purposely quoting the whole thing, as I usually would not:)


On ante of my own merit masturbation video, I privately made a bet with myself that I could reach the “Hero” threshold of 500 merit within one calendar month of the birth of the merit system.  Alas, I failed!  I only reached 495 merit during the period from 2018-01-25 through 2018-02-24.

Unfortunately, as “nobody’s” wraith in the nym.zone, I am invisible.  Thus, the camera can’t see me.  Too bad.  I’m glad that the bet was only with myself.

Only 99% of merit Heroism within a month.  This merit system is way too hard!  All ranks will be frozen forever!  The merit catastrophe almost makes me want to curse.

The soonest I can reach the activity threshold for Hero Member will be 12 March 2019; so I suppose I have awhile to earn those 5 more merits.  Meanwhile, I will commence whining about activity thresholds.

Happy mensiversary to the merit system.

I have an easier solution:  Don’t ever do “KYC”.  Avoid anything and everything which requires it.

For Bitcoin-related purposes, I have never submitted to any “KYC” identity-rape.  No, really.  Nobody’s records show I own even a single satoshi—“nobody’s”, as in “nullius”.

Oh—you said “ICO”.  Well, those are scams which should be avoided, regardless.

For the sake of fishing for merit points the 'I love this ICO' posts have now become 'I love the merit system' posts. Quite an improvement indeed. 

I am not complaining about it. Like I said, it is good for more quality posts instead of "nice project" or "I like it".. So only pointing out that it should get more known, so more people understand it, so we can move forward with this system and people can be more rewarded for their quality posts!

You should change your attitude to more positive one. If keep complaining about current flaws of merit system, you will miss magic things of the system, which can, has changed, and will change the forum forever.
Of course, this is one-month system and need to be adjusted somehow in order to make it work more smoothly, and create bigger impacts on bitcointalk users. However, I don't see any inconvenience with current system. I am not sure what you have done over the last month, but you can see that there are lots of newbies, Junior members (lower-ranked members) jumped to Meta; Beginners & help boards to discuss, to help each other. By doing this, they also increase their knowledge, skills, experience faster than ever before. Personally, this is one of magic impacts of merit system. And many things more I dont mention in the thread, and many things more will come in the future.

In merit system, I strongly believe and will go along with it.

Even though you re mocking the system that grandfathered the high rank members, you still get the merits man, 37 is not that bad, why are you still put an effort to put a shame on higher ranks? It doesnt get you anywhere you know.

Meanwhile, happy 1 month merit system, i hope the purpose of merit can be achieved soon for this forum.

In addition to activity, everyone now has a merit score, and you need both a certain activity level and a certain merit score in order to reach higher member ranks. The required scores are:

Rank	Required activity	Required merit
Brand new	0	0
Newbie	1	0
Jr Member	30	0
Member	60	10
Full Member	120	100
Sr. Member	240	250
Hero Member	480	500
Legendary	Random in the range 775-1030	1000

You get merit points when someone sends you some for one of your posts. Additionally, when someone sends you merit points, half of those points can be sent by you to other people.

Certain users are designated as "merit sources". They can create new merit out of nothing, up to a limited number per month (which differs per source). I will not be posting a definitive list of merit sources (so that people don't bug them too much), though you'll soon figure out who they are if you pay attention.

There is currently no such thing as a "demerit". I'm hoping that the positive merits alone will be fine. I could add demerits pretty easily later on if necessary, though.

I'm hoping that this system will increase post quality by:
 - Forcing people to post high-quality stuff in order to rank up. If you just post garbage, you will never get even 1 merit point, and you will therefore never be able to put links in your signature, etc.
 - Highlighting good posts with the "Merited by" line.

While we will not be directly moderating this, I encourage people to give merit to posts that are objectively high-quality, not just posts that you agree with.

Do not beg for merit excessively.

Useful infographics

Forum users have helpfully created some infographics to explain the merit system:
paxmao's infographic
ibminer's infographic
8Habits's infographic
JetSet11's infographic
zentdex's infographic
alia_armelle's infographic

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.

Trivia:

For current members, your initial merit score is equal to the minimum required to your rank. Of that, a certain amount (less than the usual half) is spendable. The spendable amount was calculated based on your current rank and the number of activity points you earned in the last year. A Legendary member who hasn't posted in the last year would still be Legendary, but would not have any spendable merit.

If someone sends you 1 merit, the 0.5 sMerit is not wasted; it is just not shown until you get another merit point.

There are stats here, and you can find someone's merit summary by clicking the "merit" link on their profile.

It's too early to get a clear picture, but my thoughts so far:

First, most people complaining about merit are constantly posting garbage, and should not rank-up. The forum is not a welfare system; you don't run through a few hoops and then get paid for doing something that nobody actually wants. I like that good forum members can make money, especially when said forum members are in poorer countries and this is a major opportunity for them. I very much do not want to destroy the sig-ad/airdrop/bounty "industry". But I am not going to tolerate people posting garbage upon garbage. If the merit system completely fails and I can't think of anything else to replace it, then my next step will probably be to completely remove all ways for forum users to make money from posting (eg. removing signatures entirely).

Maybe there are ways for people who were making money by posting garbage on the forum to make money on other sites with easy bounties, etc. (For example, I don't know if they're actually any good, but https://bountyhive.io is currently advertising on the forum.) But people should use the forum to talk about these money-making ideas, not as a way of making money itself. Once you spend a lot of time here, you may be able to make some money here (which is great!), but you should consider this a far-off hope, not your primary objective.

BTW, if anyone has any ideas for simple things that these ex-nonsense-posters could usefully do to make money, I think that this'd be a good project right now. There are apparently quite a few people who were making money on the forum and could use guidance. Even though their past activities were not good for this forum, I doubt that they are useless in general.

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Merit awards may be too spotty/uneven currently, though it's still too early to say. In addition to continuously adding more sources, if things could still use improvement in this regard in a couple of months, I may do something like decay old sMerit and unused source merit and randomly redistribute the decayed merit. How the random distribution would work would magnify past merit -- so perhaps you would get an increased chance of winning extra merit for every post you've made which has at least 1 merit, but certainly you would not get any extra merit if none of your posts was ever merited.

Merit sales, transfers to aliases, back-and-forth trading, etc. are not much of an issue. All illegitimate merit will decay, and will account for a tiny and very expensive fraction of the total merit economy. It's basically a rounding error; fight it where convenient, but waste no sleep over it.

I think that actmyname has been too hasty with some of his negatives, but I haven't had time to look carefully enough into it to justify making forceful changes. I did exclude actmyname from my trust list, so another DT1 could remove him from the default trust network by doing the same.

You have 18 merit. I take it you sent merit to your friend krassy registered a day after you and vice versa?

https://bitcointalksearch.org/user/lunarics-1350339    Lunarics  November 26, 2017,
https://bitcointalksearch.org/user/krassy-1352631     krassy November 27, 2017