Well, while I appreciate the effort of improving the quality, I wonder if those changes are based on research or the pious wish that this will work. It doesn't matter how you call it, every form of ranking systems that are based on user-rating incentivizes trading and any kind of cheating whether by paying people making it a requirement in an airdrop etc.
Making it a commodity is a joke, sorry. It reeks of greed, an elite making their accounts even more valuable.
Another question: Why is the initial merit score equal to the minimum required to your rank? Why not proportionally to the actual activity?
Hope this will work, but I doubt it. Newbies will be disregarded and won't get merit, while known members will give themselves merit back and forth...
You should run for president!!! This is the best thing I have read on this thread all damn day!!!
Even if my grammar is horrible in this post, it's what I think. I mean, there is absolutely no reason to make the rank dependant on merit. Merit could've been an extra indicator for an account, like trust. Something like 'post quality' with a second ranking system. That way everybody could have started at 0 Merit. That would've been fair and everybody would've been equal. To assume that a Hero or Legendary Member always create valuable posts is just nonsense. But that is basically what the conversion did.
Let's assume an average user posts 100 posts with 30% low-quality, 60% medium-quality and 10% high-quality posts, then he maybe gets merit for 15% of his posts. Now you need to take into account that the actual number of merit points highly depends on where he posts (how many are reading the post) and whose opinion he shares. The best example is this post
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/merit-is-the-best-thing-that-happened-to-new-users-2828014 where many gave merit points. But ask yourself, is this a valuable post? It took time to make it, sure, but what makes it valuable. It purely reflects an opinion. It doesn't discriminate or list pros and cons, there is no contrast. It tells the supporters of this new system what they want to hear and of course, they merit it, ridiculously high if I might add.
There are hundreds of posts in this forum that have more value than this post, I wonder if all of them get 61+ merit.
The same post, advocating for the exact opposite or a different solution, wouldn't have gotten nearly the same amount of merit. Because even if there was an equal amount of people who don't support the system, they wouldn't have used said system.
So now it's basically finding topics that Hero/Legendary Members support or like because they are the ones who have the most merit to give and the more you have of something, the easier it is for you to part with a small amount of it.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not against a system that improves the posting quality, I'm merely hinting at some of the flaws this implementation has
Your grammar is not that bad, bud. As far as the example post you offered up not warranting sM, I'm betting that the rewards were based on the entire thread and its creation, not JUST for the OP of said thread.
In case you missed it, I +1 sM your post because that's the type of guy I'm.
