This is becoming a trend now of a kind: attack the merit system through those merited talking about the merit system (I should know right)?
Various things I’d like to say before I bugger-off for a stroll:
1. Venezuela is living one of it’s most disruptive times, with tremendous consequences on its population. The epicentre of talk is about the crisis, and more specific for the past months how the Bolivar and the Petro are devaluated day by day and how that is changing people’s lives for the worse at a speed they has never imagined.
Taking a (very large) leap, the forum’s equivalent is Merit, being it’s impact on the forum and on ranks in the minds of more people than fit in Wembley Stadium, Santiago Bernabeu and Camp Nou together. It is affecting peoples “forum life” and therefore it is a core topic to talk about, and I suspect will still be for some time.
2. An interesting exercise to do would remove all the top 50 merited forum members (let’s consider them outliers), and see the distribution of merit per subsection. We can get back to that if needed at some point, but in order to see merit distributed per board the easiest way is to see it on the
Merit Dashboard (go to the Tab labelled Section Subsection and check the graph on the top right – apply filters such as Date range or Month to delimit the information to a narrower timeframe).
3. If there are under-merited subsections, these need to cry-out and state the reasons why they believe they require a merit source, be it dedicated or shared with other boards. The cry-out part should, in my opinion, be founded on proof, so that the case can be seen both numerically and quality wise.
A subsection can have a low amount of merits due to it being not too active, the posts not being too great in general, or nobody meriting them when they are worthy of it. If my local board were to severely under-merited, I would be investing time creating a thread with all the links to under merited posts to state my case. Time consuming, but at least I would try to prove my point with or without the help of others.
Technical topics can play against merits sometimes I figure, since they are understood by fewer people than the average Joe. That has it’s toll somewhere in the awarding process too.
4. The
Analysis - Merited on multiple Subsections and the Correlation Matrix shows us quite a lot. The basic idea is to show us when people that are good in one subsection, what other subsections they tend to be good at (using merit as the link to derive this information).
It is therefore interesting, but focuses on correlation (I prefer the Dashboard for actual Subsection thorough comparison).
Note: we cannot add all the Subsections together for a given Section on the Subsection Correlation Matrix, since people merited in multiple subsections will be accounted for twice.
5. It would be smashing if Bitcoin were to be the main driver of Merit (it has 9% approximately of all awarded sMerit). Nevertheless, there are many more sections here on this forum, and despite it’s name (Bitcointalk), it has many more areas of engagement. Merit could have been created specifically for Bitcoin centre conversations, but it wasn’t, so any decent discussion anywhere on the board is a valid candidate for merit.
Some other “feature” could be created to display bitcoin knowledge and it could even be tied to the ranking system as a fast-track, but we know it’s not going to happen, less of all when moving forward on proposals is extremely slow and limited for multiple reasons.
In summary, I think under-merited subsections need to cry-out somehow, proving their case not by comparison to others really, but by showing that there are ever so many un/under-merited cases on the subsection. There is a procedure for becoming a Merit Source, and part of the process is precisely showing these unmerited cases that deserve merit. Stepping-up is a way of proving the above, although on a limited set of 10 posts, which goes more for the candidate’s ability to select that to say that a subsection is un/under merited.