Topic: Merit system has lead to more quality posts? (Read 507 times)

I’m not sure about the increase in quality, since I came to the forum around the time the Merit System kicked in, and therefore lack the prior Merit System vision to compare to. Likely the sheer sway in the number of posts (massive rise during December 2017/January 2018, and steady decline of number of posts since then) has a large impact on perception, probably larger than the Merit Requirement itself.

Perception leads me to think that the "mean" (statistical, but yes, pun intended) forum member goes for quick one-liners to comply with campaign quotas, and that is the vast majority. Overtime, one tends to develop a selective sense of which posts to read and where, be it by personal preferences, or criteria to try to avoid spam. After all, it is much more enjoyable to read a thread where a conversation (heated or not) has a natural flow, than an abrupt set of nonsensical spinned-up comments. So quality perception evolves at an individual level aligned to one’s personal process of filtering out the noise.

The Merit System has certainly pushed some people to post better content, and has an enourmos toll on ranking-up speed, but there is no measure of quality is now a trademark of how many people and to what degree. Again perception is the measuring tool we have, and mine is skewed by how I decide to focus on some threads/areas in detriment of others. On the whole though, I’d place my bet that the quality increment is not really that noticeable forum wide, but rather quality that is not that widespread.

For the OP, I don't think so.
Visiting the following page, then we all can easily see that spamming endemic has still continued widely in the forum.
So many shitty posts published recently.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=recent;patrol

This. Making the signature requirement to the "member" rank would definitely significantly improve the quality of the posts here on bitcointalk, but at the same time I'm quite sure that the traffic will significantly drop. It's up to Theymos to look for the perfect line between quality and quantity.

While true, I don't think this is significant in the long run.

LOL

please I took a few mins here to realise this crazy notion under the current systems in place is ludicrous

so to recap on what people here are suggesting

ability to participate in paid2post and the rates be dictated by a bunch of people who control both systems merit(rank) and (red trust) that control those aspects and want to participate in paid2post as well

hahah that's going to work out well as i can see from the idiots posting this stuff here

part of the gang of net negative dip shits that think only they should be able to join "exclusive high paid" sig campaigns and " no way in hell they are removing them" to set a good example

this spiral of central control based upon subject nonsense is compounding our issues but most here just don't have the capacity to see it or have motivation not too.

LOL bunch of scum bag net negative wasters.

o_e_l_e_o  yes I am refering to you you.

It should actually be Members who earned 10 Merits and above... Not airdropped Merits. most of those with Airdropped merits still don't have any good content their posts.

This would essentially achieve the same thing as increasing the merit requirement for a signature to 10, but yes, I would agree. Being able to earn money from displaying a signature should be an earned privilege and not available to any spammer who can beg, buy, trade or plagiarize their way to a single merit.

I would also support a change to increasing the requirement to 1 (or ideally 10) earned merit, regardless of rank. There are still plenty of spammers who only have a signature due to their airdropped merit.

I never said that there are no high rank members with low quality posts in the forum, nor I said that the shitposting is only done by lower ranks, but what I meant to say is that those low ranked members are encouraged to do this since they are getting paid for it. If at least the campaigns don't recruit them (lower rank members) as paid promoters, they won't keep doing it for all their lives and would definitely get tired of posting shit without getting any benefits out of it. The situation right now is that every single user managing to get at least 1 merit is enrolling in a bounty campaign and is posting almost anything to get paid for the week. If these campaigns refrain from accepting them, they would be discouraged at the end and would eventually start to leave one by one if they find no other alternative. Or at least most of them would do.

I say signatures for mods only at this point. Until a new system is available that does not require a reprogramming of human nature before using it with any hope of success of creating a board that operates in  the same manner and same principles as the entire trustless decentralised arena we are meant to be fascinated with.

Until that is ready creating a paid per post evironment will always end in disaster and things actually getting worse or the place becomes a police state dictatorship that is the reverse of what the entire thing was about for some people.

You end up with a couple of people at the top controlling everyones ability to get paid to post and keeping the best for themselves.

If you don't understand that then that is fine but I do.

I have suggested all along that signatures should only be available to members and above.

Given that LoyceV's data have shown that the 1 merit restriction is working, I don't see why we wouldn't increase that limit to 10, at least on a trial basis. It would improve the signature spam situation further, whilst also making it much more difficult to buy merit or have users ranking up their alts.

The other option, as you say, is to have some restriction on the projects themselves. If they employ spammers, then after a certain number of offences they would be shutdown or banned. This would be much more labour intensive though, and it would likely require and entire team of people to monitor every signature campaign.

The merits system has encouraged users to make more quality post in order to rank up and get the added perks, but there are ways around the system which are being exploited by spammers, and bots which reduce the quality of content posted on the forum.

I personally do not use the ignore option for boards or members. If I come across an unhelpful post I would rather report it.

Posts have become better with the system of merit, this is good !!!
But a lot of unnecessary and repetitive topics appeared, this is disgusting ...
PS In general, if you look - nothing drastically bad has happened with the introduction of merit ...

I guess you are right I didn't know much about the pre merit system update but I can deduce form complains that is was not such of a good era in term of spamming although the menace is not totally eradicated it has been reduced.

Wouldn't you think it would be prudent, then, for him to delegate some responsibilities to other members?  Yet he hasn't.  In fact, right around the time he put the very weak 1-merit requirement for Newbies in effect, he had time to ponder and make a thread about whether bitcointalk should have a Youtube channel.  I don't think it's a problem of Theymos not having time.  It's something else, but I can't tell if it's indifference, indecisiveness, reluctance to make large reforms, a combination of these things, or another reason entirely.

Not every shitposter is from the low ranks, to be sure, but I've read many threads in Bitcoin/Altcoin Discussion and it seems pretty clear to me that the vast majority of them are low-ranked members.  That's become even more true since January when the merit system was introduced, since fewer of them are ranking up, lots of new accounts are being created (and not ranking up), and quite a few older accounts have been banned as evidenced by appeals threads in Meta. 

Even Theymos knows realizes this.  Why do you think he put that 1-merit requirement in place for Newbies to rank up to Jr. Members?  It's because people are flocking to bitcointalk as a place of employment, and most of them are incompetent at the "job", which is usually to write posts in English.  Most of the Hero and Legendaries I see posting can write pretty well.  A lot of the shitposting older accounts turn out to be bought, and I've caught and tagged quite a few of these.

So yeah, it might seem like discrimination to you, but to anyone viewing the situation even somewhat objectively it's pretty obvious that any restrictions ought to be aimed at lower-ranked members.  Campaign managers who only accept Sr. Members and above are doing the right thing for the forum. 

In any case, this is a private forum--it's not a country, a court of law, a government, and most importantly it's not a workplace.  No member of any rank should claim he's being discriminated against because of not being allowed to join a bounty or sig campaign or if restrictions aimed at certain ranks are put in place.  People who come here thinking bitcointalk is some kind of equal opportunity employer should be disabused of that notion as quickly as possible.

I believe that its improved the situation, but hasn't completely solved it. There's definitely an increase in the number of users actively trying to post good content. But, its okay if not all posts are top quality. I do agree that jr member signature campaigns or even low ranked members joining campaigns such as members is imposing a problem, because it's so easy to earn that merit. However, I very much doubt theymos would implement any kind of restriction, and I the projects advertising don't really care about the quality of the forum only their project.

The merit system has achieved, the highlighting of quality posts and ranking of quality posters but don't think it have achieved much when compared with the posting habit of the masses on forum. Take some minutes of your time to visit the bitcoin and altcoin discussion board just to read comments and you'll be discourage. True, the meta board is receiving some very quality posts that's why most people are thinking the merit system have done much but most of those are from pretenders (view their posting history for revelations). Not saying M.S haven't impacted the forum but when you look deep you'll understand where I'm coming from.
Just my Opinion.

And who's to say to members from rank:full member and above are all quality/Top notch posters, I disagree with you totally as there are numerous members on that rank,even on well paid signatures but still post poor quality on the forum.
Go to the BD or AD section,and check out threads with numerous pages, the final pages aren't always filled with shitposting noobs, you'll also find the very full members and above ranks with posts in there that are even more worthless than that of a junior member

The problem is with shitposters and not with ranks,putting it out as explicitly a rank problem is rather unfair and saving the shitposting high rankees some sticks.

Signature campaigns inside the Bounty campaigns are the actual reason behind the reduction of quality posts even after the Merit system implementation and also the later 1-Merit Jr. member implementation. And that is because they are still operating in the old ways where even Jr. members are allowed to join and get paid for posting shit all around, while on the other side, Bitcoin Signature Campaigns are not accepting users below Full member rank maintaining to keep the campaigns spam free.
We won't see any big differences in the posting behaviors of the entire forum as long as this Shitposter's Recruitment Process is underway.

The quality of posts published on this forum if and have changed the very a small number of.
The main reason of the Spam and endless useless messages is the company's signature trash ICO. Their such a huge number of their participants no matter what is written in his post, the main thing to write in a week 10-15 messages and get the rates.
The system of merit created only stopped the growing number of high-ranking participants in this forum. Go to Alternate cryptocurrencies, you'll see that what they write is sheer Nonsense and a Scam.

I personally think yes it's working in some parts of the forum, but its still the same situation in the section like Altcoin Discussion and Bounties. ( it to me is just like a arena of shitposter ).

Theymos as left with some very rare time to operate here, there are much thing to be rehandled here some which have already got very good suggestions from the forum members and just waiting for a single step to be applied. But unfortunately, we can just suggest here. All is in the hands of the great Theymos.


Finally got something to say on the current situation, hope you know I read most of your posts and I think you put hell of a efforts in explaining every situation you faced.

I too was surprised by looking at your post history and your merit score it doesn't match in some sense. You have some genuine reasons to fight for the banned accounts and copy/paste problems. But it just how the forum works there are scammers everywhere and its hard to judge in the online world.

Let's just say that we've cut off some tentacles of the octopus. The problem here is that we are only cutting out its tentacles but it cannot still prevent from making new octopus babies which leads to another  huge sucking octopus sooner or later.

Merit system is working but more has to be done, I still feel merit distribution to substantial posts is still very limited.
Account farmers and spammers are making us legit users suffer for nothing

Most high ranking members and merit sources see low ranking members as people who are useless and are just in here for only money
But let's be honest, who doesn't need money? 😁

🤣🤣🤣 Cryptohunter please don't let me choke with laughter
What's going on?
I think am too late.

The merit system is very useful but we just need to leverage the power of it a little more.

You can learn lot's of stuff here still. I learned about scare quotes just the other day. These are like magic. You can use them to get people red trust or just mutate anything they didn't say into a ban if you are lucky.

Now the best idea would be scrap merit and ban all sigs. Sadly NO WAY IN HELL THE PHARMACIST WILL POST WITHOUT GETTING PAID.
He has told me that in no uncertain terms.

Only noobs must not spam for bucks.

I have multiple entire sections on ignore, not to mention my extensive individual member ignore list, so I'd say the problem is still pretty bad.

When the merit system was rolled out in January, it definitely seemed like a lot of people were trying to improve their post quality, but since then it seems like the shitposting problem has returned (it never disappeared, but maybe it was taking a piss break for a bit).  There definitely need to be some improvements to the system, and I'm pretty sure that if Jr. Members with 1 merit continue to be allowed to join signature campaigns, nothing's going to really improve.

For a while, there were some campaigns that had merit requirements to join, but that faded out.  There used to be SMAS, but that also fizzled. 

OP, I feel like I'm writing stuff that's been written 100 times this year.  All of this keeps getting discussed, and I worry about Theymos's shoes, socks, and toes because of all his foot-dragging.  Maybe he can use the copper membership fees that shitposters pay to get around the 1-merit requirement to see a podiatrist regularly and buy some heavy duty work boots.  I suppose if he winds up facing a twenty-toe amputation he might consider putting into place some of the solid suggestions that a lot of members have been discussing, but unfortunately I don't have much faith that it'll take anything less than that.

My unignore rate is higher than my ignore rate. Seems to be working...