Topic: Merit & new rank requirements - page 289. (Read 167717 times)

It's not even about me but about honesty and fairness. A couple of members are given the privilege to abuse other members and even get rewarded for it. And now it is decided to even expand that abusive privilege and power. This is not right for a forum with the status that Bitcointalk has in the crypto-industry.

Oh, just great. More abuse of power. Let me guess; Lauda, The Pharmacist and actmyname.

Fully agree with you! My rank of Sr.Member still young (2 months only) but for people who near of rank changes its a tragicly! Needs a corrections of initial merits!

Quote from: asapjoshyy on Today at 05:46:59 AM
yes because a great way to help the community is helping new members... but those new members have no Merit to pay your efforts for helping them out.. Which kind of defeats the purpose ?? But it works just for quality posts in general , but i think helping newer members should reward something in this system imo...
Sources monitor eg the Beginners&Help section and reward those helping out newcommers. Problem solved.

if that is being done then i agree that would work... if there is a few "merit monitors"
but man giving like 1 merit for a few good quality posts when somebody needs hundred or more is really tough....
basically anybody close to ranking up is screwed over currently which sucks and anybody who is Senior Member + can just kick back
Long term this could be a positive thing for the forum but man it sucks big time for anybody close to ranking up in the next couple weeks

84 activities and you are still Junior Member. I know your feelings right now.

As a long time SEO professional I see this system very much similar to PageRank, and it will have a number of benefits and pitfalls of the PageRank system.

The benefits are obvious and great, it will reduce spamming by requiring additional tasks.

Now going to the potential pitfalls -
1) Merit farming on paid sites. Some members have suggested banning/penalizing members purchasing this. The problem here however is the same as negative SEO - how do you prove someone bought it? And if people receive merit from a "paid source" and get banned for it, you could then buy paid merit for people you don't like to get them banned or penalized.

2) Reciprocal merit telegram groups. To make it less obvious there could be "merit chains" of 3 people or more.

3) Alt-chain merit giving. Once 10 alt accounts or so have enough merit, they could now use their monthly allowance to instantly pass the merit requirements on their new alt accounts. This would make identifying alts easier of course and is easily solvable by a rule that would disallow this. But since alt accounts are allowed according to the forum rules, it waits to be seen what the admins point of view will be regarding this.

Point 1) and 3) are easily solved by retroactively removing merit given from an identified corrupt merit-giving account, and also removing all sMerit capability from the corrupt account (+other penalty maybe?).

Point 2) will be very, very difficult to combat.

The overall problem here is that professional spammers will utilize their network of spammers and finances to circumvent the merit system, whereas non-professional spammers will be stopped in their tracks. This is kind of like a central power monopolizing corruption to only the most professional corrupt bodies (kind of like the extensive licensing needed for a bank or casino where only the best malicious actors can thrive: ie highly organized crime syndicates, or corruptly-networked individuals that can crash the financial system with crappy equity-baskets with AAA ratings).

At the end of the day it's very unlikely any automated system can overcome the spam. However as an overall I think the merit system is nevertheless good since at least it adds an additional barrier to overcome for spammers. I like and prefer however where trusted community members can simply give red trust to obvious spammers, thus preventing them from meeting the requirements for signature campaigns. It will be good to see both of these systems acting as deterrence against spam together.

PS: Awarding default merit to all existing members is a problem I think. There's already tonnes of farmed hero/legendary accounts that will have huge amounts of monthly sMerit.. permanently. My idea: Make this "free" initial merit expire after 1 year. That gives all members 1 year to make enough quality posts to retain their ranking.

I'm curious to see which posts got points (Lutpin: care to share the list?). I'm mainly curious to see if it's (partially) used as a popularity contest so to speak.

I do not know, I am not able to quote anyone in this forum.
But I saw that post and profile suggested by Dvach.

Some body have merits in profile, when just replying like "Good News"  , "Available in TradeSatoshi" , or some ramdom post of current market rates.

If people are judging the people post , then how it is guaranteed it will be fair. Might I like that post but for somebody else it was commonsense.

Better system I guess, We should do not allow any member to start any thread on there wish to stop scam.
When somebody wanted to start any thread, there should some proper requirement check for them.
Moderator on that thread should able to decide, to whom merit can rewarded or not. (Second level review can also be placed for the people who get merit to ensure that there  post were worthy or not).

I do not understand how the system help when person giving merit to another person without any good fixed guideline.

every person can have different taste and different criteria.

If nothing else, seeing people have gotten hundreds of merits in the first few hours of this rollout should make it pretty clear who is abusing multiple accounts on this forum.

Legendary accounts don't need or care about merit requirement because they are already at the max rank. I want to recommend on the high position right there,  What if the legendary accounts have a job or obligation to give merit to the lower ranks, 14 different accounts or user to every two weeks

Nonsense. Look at Lutpin: he went from 500 to over 1000 in less than a day. Granted, he's an exceptional individual, but it proves that the path to Legendary status is not impossible.

Next to no one got "merit" points. and the thread already has almost 40 pages.

And how we can fight with such things?

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.28896442

50 merits for useless post. Multiaccounts  

Merit does not hide trust nor does it effect trust. All three of trust, activity, and merit are unrelated to each other and independent of each other. Merit is effectively a measure of post quality. Trust is a measure of trustworthiness. An untrustworthy user can create a high quality post that is worth merit.

If you are seen to receive a lot of Merit but not send out Merit yourself, peole would stop sending Merit to you, as that equals burning them.
Eventually, you'd be stuck with those sMerit you have aquired at the beginning, while everyone is participating in rewarding posts.
Or in other words: you'd lock yoruself out from the merit system.
(This assumes the majority of the people participating behaves in a responsible way)

The new system is surely better than the previous one, even though it is over-rewarding "old members". I guess nobody who has joined Bitcointalk in the past six months will EVER manage to become Legendary Member, at least not in less than one or two decades. Fine, this could be a price to pay to avoid the forum getting even more trashy, I fully agree. But I think that the implementation of this new system could be done in a more fair way. The fact that initial merit score is equal to the minimum required for one's rank is not a big deal for Newbies or Juniors, but for higher ranked members, like Senior or Hero Members, it can create big inequalities. For example a freshly ranked Senior Member is now getting the same merit score as someone who has already been a Senior Member for almost half a year and is about to become a Hero. Even more dramatic would be the case of a Hero who has already the activity to be a Legendary but the random system did not grant him the rank yet. A more fair way to distribute the inital merit would be to calculate it proportionally to the actual activity. This would avoid that people like me (I don't want to make it personal but I'm the first example which comes to my mind) who is missing only 4 points of activity (and 5 days) to the rank of Hero Member, instead of getting, let's say 470-480 merits (instead of the 500 of people who already are Heroes), is getting only 250 merits like someone who has just ranked Senior Member 10 days ago, and instead of 5 days it may now suddenly take me years before I can become a Hero - how many very good posts has one to do before he gets 250 merits? If you receive one merit every 4 post you do (on average you are likely to get less IMO) it will take you 1000 more posts to rank up from Senior to Hero, and if you like me were only 4 points of activity from that target, and now suddenly you need another 1000 posts, to say that this is becoming extremely frustrating is a big understatement. On the other side, with a more proportional and balanced initial distribution of merits I think nobody would feel that the system is penalizing them more than it penalizes others - which means people would be more inclined to recognize its substantial fairness, or at least that every effort has been done to achieve the maximum possible fairness.

Sending merit to someone else does not affect your rank merit points.