Topic: Merit source observations - page 4. (Read 4262 times)

What Pmalek discusses in this topic is only a small number of the top active users who have earned the most Merit but have sent 0 sMerits to other users, some of whom have left the forum. Without them there are still many other users with a high concern for spending sMerit where it deserves.
Those who leave the forum with the number of sMerits they have will not reduce the number of sMerit, the circulation of merits continues even without them.

As many of us know, there is no rule against merit hoarding... but theymos said that he would keep an eye on the potential that it could become an issue.

And, merit hoarding for regular members is surely less of an issue than for merit sources, and I am pretty sure that in the first round of merit source member assignments, some of those members who were assigned as merit sources, were really stingy regarding their sending out merits, and some of them even publicly stated such.

Theymos would not even need to have had to see their posts in which they made such anti-smerit sending philosophies to be able to see whether or not they were using their smerit monthly allocations... so it did take theymos a year or maybe even two years before he really did end up reducing the smerit allocations of those merit sources and/or removing them from being merit sources...

So I do believe that it would be a BIGGER problem if merit source members were merit hoarders as compared with non-merit source members.. and the context of my above quote was attempting to focus on the dynamic of regular members acting like smerit hoarders rather than merit source members.

Otherwise I agree with your overall assessment Razmirraz that it appears that current merit source members are way more inclined to liberally send smerits as compared to either the first batch of merit source members and perhaps even the second batch.. so it may well have taken a bit more than a couple of years to get each of the incremental improvements in achieving more liberal sending of smerits from merit source members.

I surely don't feel like I have enough information to know whether some improvement could be made in terms of either rotating merit source members a bit more or if there might be some improvements if theymos might increase the number of merit source members.. because there does seem to be a bit of work in making those kinds of assessments, and surely sometimes there are likely some issues with how some of the merit source members (and not even excluding myself from the potential problem areas) are sending smerits and/or unfairly benefiting from their being assigned as a merit source member... .but likely theymos does also recognize that even if some of us might be sloppy and neglectful and maybe even deliberately bad from time to time in how we are either sending smerits or refraining from sending smerits, he likely also recognizes and appreciates that there is quite a bit of work that may well go into merit source members figuring out their own approach to the matter and then actually employing it on a daily/weekly and even monthly basis (as Philip mentioned the very issue that he has had with building up of smerits and some dilemmas regarding how to spend them in a way that is comfortable for the merit source member as well as other real life issues that s/he may well have happening)..

For example, there might be some reports that theymos and/or various admins/mods receive - and some of those reports might end up leading to something in which immediate action might need to be taken by theymos.. but then other times, it may well be that he is just making notes and accumulating a file.. to "get to" later, whether it is 1 year later, 2 years later or maybe some longer period of time so long as the accumulated notes are not really causing him a sufficient amount of discomfort in regards to just letting the whole matter just continue to run "as is" until a certain threshold of discomfort is crossed... like the breaking bellow the 200-week moving average as  BTC's price support.. and when it happens.. he says to himself "oh shit, I better do something"..... I.e... buy more BTC.. or globally tweak the forum's smerit system..

A lot depends on how busy you may be with real life shit.

I have about 1000 unreleased merits

I have also given about 4600 merits to people.

Since Last july the merits I have not given away are gaining..

Ie I had about 400 merits Last july 2021.

my bro-in-law developed dementia We found out on August 1 2021.

He lives 90 miles from me. A long drive as most is driving in NYC.

Say 2 ½ to 3 hours each way.

So his sister and I drive back and forth. A lot that is six hours lost to bitcointalk each time.

I say six hours because going online at his house while we are there does not happen So If I leave at 6am arrive at 9am do what is needed at his home leave at 8pm and get home at 11 pm I spent 17 hours off bitcointalk but I likely would have spent 6.  Multiply by 50 trips is a loss of 300 hours the last year on bitcointalk. 

So I built up my merits and smerits from 400 to 1000.

the next year god willing I will be able to do more here and lower my merits again.

I cant be the only merit source that got busy last year and gave less then the normal amount.

So I am just saying maybe its not much of an issue when people do this.

Ah, yes!!!!  Dude, thank you for linking to that, because it's a page I used to have bookmarked a long time ago (probably from whenever it was created) but somehow lost track of because of various hard drive changes and forgetting how to locate it.  Sweet, now I'm going to bookmark it again.

You'd think that for as long as I've been here, I'd know how to find my way around the forum, but....I don't.  I'd like to think it's a forum design problem, but the reality is it's more likely a my-brain-is-turning-to-hamburger issue.  I'm going to blame it on smartphones and social media, the easiest scapegoats I can think of.

And by the way, guys, keep in mind that some merit sources didn't apply for the position and I think those are the ones least likely to dedicate a good amount of time giving away merits.  Theymos tapped a bunch of members to be sources back in 2019 (IIRC), and damned if I know when the last time he accepted an application or created a new merit source.  It'd be awesome if he dumped a ton of statistics about the merit system and in particular the merit sources past and present, but I know that's not going to happen if their identities are kept confidential.  Oh well.

No, I don't think there is a specific consensus on how we rate them, which means you have the right to spend sMerit/ no spend and that's up to you. Some people are known to not care about the merit system and some may not be interested, and again that's up to them.

Pmalek had discussed this matter before, he made a topic and revealed some reasons.

Top 200 Active Members who have earned most Merits but have sent 0 sMerits


But I can think of another reason that might be the 5th reason and that. Forum contributors who left the forum before the merit system was introduced such as satoshi will no longer be active just to spend their sMerit.

True, so far I have found that there are so many merit sources or merit contributors who have the LOYALTY to issue sMerit to users who deserve it. Merit hoarders are only done by people who are stingy or can't appreciate the education of other users, but this case is very rare.

Merit sources that are chosen are really the right people and contribute a lot to the forum, they will always check the posts that are worth throwing sMerit. So I'm not too worried about sMerit hoarding users, because the forum still has contributors who can appreciate constructive, informative, and quality posts.

If you have time, you can read more in [TOP-200] The most generous users giving merits. I just don't have time to look at it, honestly.

In addition, it is not necessary to find out who are merit sources. theymos simply does not want to announce the merit source list publicly. Reasons are mentioned there

Looks like we've got a good list for monitoring the activity of the previously most generous merit sources on this forum. Some of them are no longer send merit for whatever reason, and this is an important thing to note. Even though the merit circulation is not disturbed much, I think some of them may have been disabled or have been replaced by the admin, we just don't know who.

Some of the thread you refer to are also great for time-saving merit sources to distribute their merit on worthy posts, but since this thread is about monitoring merit sources their activity will be noticed and possibly questioned as well. Indeed we never know what happened to them, and that's what made us ask.

You never knows what happen with a merit source.

• If you see them inactive for a few months, this case is clear. They simply don't have time in the forum
• If you see them active (that can be just a short log in and leave), you will never knows how many time (hours) they spend on the forum. This case, you just see a vague signal about their activity

It is about activity status, other things will be whether they have time to glance around to find good posts and meriting them. To simplify merit source jobs, there are a few topics to help them.

• Report unmerited good posts to Merit Source
• Bitcointalk Ranking-up pipeline- Those close to their next rank (lacking Merits)
• [Merit] Help newbies and those who have a little left to the next rank

---

This is a point why we can not verify quality of two posters simply by total merit they earned. Where are they come from? Are sources of their earned merit really decentralized and come from different merit sender population or cohort. If they exchange their merit back and forth with friends, local users that can be a serious factor to decrease their quality.

In addition, merit sources will have a kind of advantage to receive more merit from forum members. Because lower rank members hope they will receive more merit from sources. Anyway, it is human nature, not serious.

Total earned merit is like a skin of your account but it does not exactly reflect your account quality in general as well as in a specific narrower area (Tech, Trading, Security, etc.)

I like your way of thinking, that is your words which I have underlined.

related to your saying that you prefer to send merit to people who are not merit hoarders. it reminds me of the way I thought when I first joined this forum. and it's nice.

But this time I have a different thought, that is, this time I make things easier for me and don't want to complicate things that are actually easy. and don't want to make a broad thing seem narrow.
 I now want to make things simple. i.e. I will send smerit to anyone who makes a quality and commendable post. regardless of whether he is a merit hoarder or not. because this is a matter of who deserves to be appreciated for their efforts in making useful things in this forum through their posts. maybe everyone on this forum has found a post that is very useful (quality) and after reading it we can't help but give it smerit.

so related to merit this is a flexible thing.
everyone has different reasons. And of course we can't make everyone think the same. the important thing is that we don't do what this forum forbids regarding the merit system.

But of course several things need to be done to build a positive current in this merit system circle and encourage people to be interested in participating in running the merit system like the merit sources did and other examples like @DdmrDdmr did in his post most generous and the meanest.

and I am quite satisfied with the performance of the Merit sources. because every time I find a quality post, the source of merit is always there by giving a sign of its presence through the Merit given to the post.

in fact I've recently been looking for a post that's of decent quality that hasn't got any merit in it or that merit sources have missed. I intend to collect it in a special post to be considered for merit sources to read it, who may have missed it. But it turned out to be difficult. because the source of merit is always present in each of these quality posts.
and it's proof that this merit system is doing fine and the merit source is doing the volunteer work really well. my appreciation to all.

I keep a monthly track of those that are the most generous and the meanest in terms of usage of their sMerits for my local board, with the obvious limitations related to data for airdropped sMerits and Merit Source sMerits, but if gives me a rough idea of what we wanted to see over there.The associated Google Sheet includes a second tab where I include the data for all merited profiles forum wide, and with a bit of patience, once can place filters and play around with the data.

If, for example, we set a filter for "MeritsEarned" > 50 and "%sMeritsSent" <= 25% (over earned) I get a range of 452 accounts, of which only 185 are Active/Semi-active (have at least logged-in over the past 30/90 days respectively). With this set criteria, there are two profiles that posts every now and then on my local board, and which I merit. I know that they are sMerit mean buggers, but above this lateral game, I appreciate their technical knowledge that they tend to display when helping out stray members on my local board. Other than that, I’m not really aware of other people’s meriting habits, even though I could easily check on the said list. I’ve got more merits than I tend to hand out, despite my sprees, so I’d probably only consider their meriting habits if I had very few sMerits to handout, and even then, in the big picture, it doesn’t seem like much of an issue.

That's true, and I am glad that's the case. Those merit checks that I mentioned earlier have become quite rare because with enough time spent on these boards, you get familiar with the users. There is no need to check the same people twice. I do a basic check only if I see a username I can't remember from before.

I don't disagree with you, but in the whole scheme of things, there are not very many merit hoarders.. so in that sense, it probably does not matter that much if you send merits to ONLY the hoarders because there are plenty of folks who still give out smerits.. Furthermore, the opposite is true in regards to you having a strict policy that you will ONLY give smerits to those who have previously sent out smerits (the non-hoarders), and I know that even you are not taking that extreme of a smerit distribution position, but even if you did take that extreme of a position in either direction, to me it it would not seem to rise to the level of "abusive" for you to have strict standards on that point.. even more strict than your current stated views.

To me, it just seems like the wrong word to suggest that your having and practicing strict policies regarding not sending smerits to hoarders would be "abusive" absent some kind of further evidence that you had some bad motives or that you were targeting a certain kind of member for some other bad reason... your targeting hoarders does not seem abusive.. even if you are actually doing it to the extreme including if you refuse to give merits to no longer active members because of your strict rule recognizing that they would not be sending smerits out.

Absent some additional evidence the targeting and discriminating against merit hoarders or even the targeting of non-hoarders (to take the opposite extreme) does not seem to rise to the level of my idea of what would be "abusive," even if it were to be more extreme than your actual policy/practice in either direction.... but I could see that the targeting of non-hoarders might have a better chance of rising to the level of abusive rather than the targeting of hoarders for the reasons that you stated about facilitating the merit system as it currently exists.. (sorry I might have made my position even more confusing when I am trying to suggest that there is a wide range of reasonableness that merit source members have in exercising their discretion by taking extremes on various issues including something so extreme as to either merit or to not merit those members that they perceive to be merit hoarders).  

For the merit system to work entirely, those who are part of it should help in distributing those merits, not just receive them and hoard them forever. That's how I see it. Everyone decides for themselves. Are you in or are you out? I have no problem with user X not meriting other people. We can still talk, joke, be serious, even trade with each other or run a business. None of that requires me to reward you with a unit that you don't care about.     

If the majority of merit receivers only hoarded their merits, it would be a failed experiment, and the only way to receive merits would be from merit sources. Right now you can get merited from both merit sources and regular members who aren't and I would like to keep it that way by rewarding those who understand that. The merit economy works because people make it work. If everyone stopped caring then we can just forget about it.

hahahahaha

That is a decently fair way of framing the matter, and sure you have a right to quit your job and even perhaps to be a bit lacking in your job, but it is still up to the boss (the delegator) to decide whether such withholding of labor (spreading of the merits) rises to the level of derelict of duties that might either cause a firing  or maybe a reduction of the quantity of allocated source merits.


You are partially correct, but you also seem to be partially incorrect.

Sure being a merit source is voluntary, and some of us did not ask to be a merit source, but there is also a kind of consent that takes place by actually doing it.

Sure there is a bit of an informal structure, and theymos seems to have had retained complete discretion over who the merit source members are - even though maybe he might get some backlash if members believe that theymos is being abusive of his discretion in some ways.. . .. but in any event, ultimately he can take away or reduce merit source duties for any reason or no reason at all... even though he may well get some backlash if members believe that he is being too arbitrary in his treatment of merit source members.. or his ways of overseeing whether some changes to the merit source members or even to the merit source system might be warranted to be made.


For sure historically, there have been members who stated that they hoard merits and other members who have stated that they do not want to send smerits to members who hoard merits.. so if someone realizes that a certain member is a merit hoarder, then there may be some reluctance to send any smerits to that member.  

Of course there can be a considerable amount of subjectivity in sending smerits, so some members are not going to have concerns about whether the member appears to be a merit hoarder or not.


Theymos can still remove them as a merit source or reduce their allocation - especially if they don't really seem to have any kind of valid reason for going "on strike" or on "slow down" (which largely might be a similar thing as going "on strike").


Does not sound like merit abuse to me.  Sounds like reasonable discretion in which not everyone is going to necessarily agree about how to exercise such discretion.  In other words, there is a range of reasonableness that is acceptable, and each of us will likely have different balances in what we consider to be reasonable.. I doubt very many folks would consider that withholding merits in those circumstances to be abusive - even though you have reached that conclusion.. which might even put your reasonableness in to question that you would label some kind of practice like that which seems to be reasonable discretion to be abusive..

I think we are blowing things out of portion here. I am not looking for who is friends with whom and stuff like that. I am only doing the most basic of checks. If the poster receives merits I want to see a history of sending. That's where the check ends. Amounts and to whom aren't important.

I touched briefly upon this subject as well in a previous post when I said:

That also goes for satoshi-level posting and excellent members who bring quality to the forum. But not everyone fits in that category.

I disagree. How is that merit abusing? Everyone, including merit sources, has the right to decide on their own where their merits should go. I also prefer to award merit-worthy posts from members who pass them along rather than hoarding them. I am not saying that this is an exclusive rule, but if I have time, I will check their merit summary.

I don't know what your definition of 'crazy theory' is, it will never materialize like you said only because many people are involved in the merit flow and system, and that is the way it should be, that is why member's are encouraged to be involved in the system, if they do not, then it will materialize, perfect theory.
It is your own opinion anyway, but merit abuse for merit sources is selling your merits, if you give them to members that are involved in the system and are nice posters, you are in no way an abuser of the system, but someone that wants the flow to continue and that is great. Another theory is that, for members that are not merit sources to be involved in the system of giving merits they have to be good posters, because it is merits that generate smerits, so if you give to those member you are definitely sending your smerits to nice posters.

Satoshi and Hal were not here when the system got introduced. They don't know or care about it. But that does not diminish the value of their posts and their contribution to Bitcoin overall. Lauda was here and he/she was part of the system. He/she received and sent merits to others. I have no problem meriting an old post of Lauda, but since that user is no longer with us, that won't happen that often simply because I won't come across them anymore. Except when browsing through some old threads.  

No offense taken.

It's not a job. We are not paid for it nor do we receive any special treatment. It's a service that people offer for free. For some it's time consuming, for others not so much.

I have to partially agree with Z-tight here. I refuse to merit people who have received plenty of merits but never given any to other Bitcointalk members. I know that many don't agree with that way of doing things, but that's my decision. You are right that merits is not about giving it back to the people who gave them to you. But I always check if the post I am about to merit belongs to someone who is part of the group that merits other posts (regardless of the receiver). If I see something like 200 received merits and 1 sent merits, rest assured that I am not going to throw my merits in that pit. Merits are supposed to circulate between accounts. There are people who refuse to be part of that system and that's fine. But if you don't want to play, don't get angry with me for not passing you the ball. I would rather pass it to someone with more team spirit. The only exception are new users who have just begun receiving merits and people who absolutely don't care about them and have merit-worthy posts.