Topic: Merit System - Looking for Goals (Read 476 times)

No I don't, but call centers are pretty well managed and tightly controlled because they can be. Call centers allow the organization track so much of the work being done that it's easy to use metric based management techniques. Sales is another easy one, but call centers are better.


I think you are talking about price predictions? If so, then yes...if you don't say when the price will hit a number, you are not really being helpful.


SMART goals are just one tiny example of what I think should have been used to help reduce spam. My original question is not 'did they use SMART goals' it was 'does anyone know of any publicly communicated goals that even come close to fitting the description of the SMART goal system' and so far, the answer is no. No one seems to know of any publicly stated goals for the Merit system that even come close of the SMART goal system.

Do I have data/evidence that suggests that a formal goal setting method is more likely to improve an organization than an informal one...yes. Stated another way, normally a clearly thought through strategy is better than just guessing.

Do you need my help finding evidence as to how SMART goals are better than informal goals? If you do, please first read the reference I posted in the OP.

I totally understand how IT works, I just said that in a posters standpoint. But regarding the goal of merit system using SMART I don't think it applies in it. The only goal is to produce quality posts in this forum and I'm not against the merit system but I believe it didn't work even let's say that SMART was used to establish merit system.

No. Timebound does not mean that you put a timeframe on your post like it’s speculation.

SMART is not a criteria for posting but rather it should be your basis on making a goal. OP has given some concrete examples on this. OP has already throroughly explained and gave examples but I’ll repeat it for your sake.  Just to reiterate, i.e “The merit system will reduce 30% of the spam in the forum within 5 years”. In setting such a goal, you should first ask yourself whether it is:

Specific - the goal has specifically targeted a problem in the forum which is the “spam”
Measurable - the goal may be achieved by measuring it as “30%”
Achievable/Attainable - the goal can be achieved, unlike saying that it can eradicate spam by “100%”
Relevant - the goal is addressing a relevant issue to the forum

And lastly,
Timebound - the goal is given a measure of “6 years”

It’s funny that you say SMART is being used in your BPO/call center when you don’t actually understand how to apply it. Yes, it’s being used widely because it’s an effective way of creating goals so most orgs/companies use this. Good luck with creating your action plan.

OP, are you working in a BPO/Call center? We're using it for creating an action plan lol. (I know it is being used as well for other stuffs)

With the T - time bound so you mean whenever we post something specially let's say speculation we should give a timeframe or so. And just want to ask on your example in reducing spam here. Do you have like data that will show that IF we use SMART shitpost will decrease?

I think we have different native languages and so I don't want to be too critical of you here, but SMART goals are not exactly jargon but I can see your point. Please allow me to explain, there is a very specific reason why I used the SMART goal system to ask my question. I was debating a highly aggressive person in another post on this same topic and he kept accusing me of assumptions, and saying I was claiming expertise but not proving my expertise, blah, blah, blah. All of those were him just deflecting my questions because I found a flaw in his arguments. He seems to be in love with the Merit system where I am concerned about its unintended outcomes.

This post was my attempt to find a professional and courteous way to obtain an answer to my question. I'm just attempting to understand how much planning went into the Merit system.

From what I have seen offline in professional settings, when someone begins a major intervention like the Merit system that person will set goals. But all goals are not equally useful and the SMART goal system is probably the most famous and is a great one, so that is why I used it here. Maybe people do not set SMART goals and the problem with skipping that step is that you get lost months later trying to figure out "did we do it?" "should we fix X?" "are the complaints right? "are the praises right?" Without an agreed upon standard you end up with what is called "scope creep" now that IS jargon. But it means that your project all of sudden is now asked to fix a lot of things you were never supposed to be working on.

In part, if you don't use SMART goals or some other similar system, it becomes very difficult to defend your intervention when you hit difficulties if you have set no goals, or vague goals. And all interventions hit difficulties. That's just called life 

To me, the Merit system is a screening system. It is a method to screen who should and should not rank up. I don't know the goals. It's clear that those goals, if set, were not publicized. Knowing what I know about how people normally implement interventions like this one, seeing the results, seeing the stats, reading the posts, I am pretty sure the Merit system did not achieve what they wanted it to. Since February, I have been warning that the Merit system would likely not achieve it's goals. But I have no way to be sure because I can't find any public goals.

Here is where I first warned of the problems I was seeing: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.30489106 (2/17/2018)

Here is an example of how I don't think the Merit system is NOT working as planned: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.41158125 This post shows the numbers of people who have been able to rank up during the new system starting with the Full Member level. The number of people who have ranked up is tiny!

The Merit system is a screening system and they set the standards way too high. If you are familiar at all with medical school screening process, they too set the standards way too high. And in the US we have a nursing shortage as a result. No one wins when that happens.

Good at comparing it to psychological behavior. I think your a master of degree on it.

Merit system is a punishment for those members that don't want to interact in the forum and only want is to profit by signature campaigns and bounties. The goal you are looking for are still on the run because admins already have stats, its for them to take actions without missing the intent of the forum.

Different goals to different situation are needed on the later part because of new cases of spamming are popping out.

Lol... That could have gone better as S.N.I.P.E, which sounds more like a target 'locked on' objective.

S - Your objectives have to be Specific first to gain the attention of truly able doers.
N - Then they need to be Number bound, not edited after they are set (constrained objectives should be flexible but within a set 'objective').
I - Inspiration is what drives followership, and if it moves you, doesn't mean it has the power to move others.
P - Predictable, the era of the blind leading the blind must have been over by now. When you communicate an objective, people tend to want to see the end with you before they embark on that journey.
E - Easy is the new comfortable, mankind has always sought for the most convenient ways of doing stuff. Complexity on the front end is a complete turn-off.

S.M.A.R.T goal is only a jargon, to beautify or make some hypothesis more convincing. I propose P.E.N.I.S goal (created by me) which is more update and easier to remember:
P: Predictable
E: Easy
N: Number bound
I: Inspiring
S: Specific
Don't get me wrong. I'm not trolling here, I'm just a little bit annoyed by the overuse of a jargon, and to make it sounds more academics.

It's not an incentive system. There are four ways to change behavior. Positive Reinforcement and Negative Reinforcement [these both encourage the behavior], Positive Punishment and Negative Punishment [these both discourage the behavior].

The merit system falls under negative punishment. The result of negative reinforcement is the decreasing of some behavior. Negative punishment is when you take away something good that the person wants in order to stop the behavior you don't want. But it really doesn't matter what you intend, if you take away something good people will stop doing what they think led to the loss of what they liked.

Walk up to your child and tell the child 'no more TV for a week' and the child will ask why, complain, and try to figure out what the child did to deserve this and what the child can do next time to maintain access to the TV.

That's called negative punishment. It's been a documented concept since Pavlov/Skinner and is sometimes called Classical Conditioning.

You are calling it an incentive system because you think 'we give merit for good behavior' but the big picture is, BitcoinTalk took away ranking based on activity alone and has now made it harder to rank up with ambiguous rules and a liquidity problem and really really high merit requirements for ranking up. That's almost the same as freezing ranking up. It's not exactly freezing, but it close.

The merit system will be seen as punishment for anyone who wants to rank up and has been involved in this community for over 10 months. I don't know their reasons for wanting it, but anyone who wants to rank up, and has been around for a few month prior to this change, after this merit system came out has been punished. Again, using the formal term of punishment in the sense of behavioral conditioning. I know how people on here like to debate about the meaning of words https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punishment_(psychology)#Negative

 

War can easily include incentives. Yes the merit system may look like an incentive. That does not mean it is not part of a plan. War is when one people-group is attempting to impose their will on another people-group by force. The merit system, make no mistake, is part of the war on spam here. That war will never end. The goal of the incentive system is the "what" you want the people to do. An incentive is just one tool people use to get other to do actions. Incentives are absolutely viable tools of war. I will not into great detail here -- but bad people get paid off all the time in war because some bad people are better than other bad people -- Yeah, incentives, yep, those are used in war.

It is no war. It is an incentive.

Analytical tools are still being developed for it.

Ddmrddmr has developed some here:
https://public.tableau.com/profile/ddmrddmr#!/vizhome/BitcointalkMeritDashboard/GlobalSummary
https://fusiontables.google.com/DataSource?docid=1wM2Op6_ol8_0iP0sDEemIGr9weKvIeLPvKsKMpFy#rows:id=1

The OP seemed to be asking if anyone made any objectives for this mission before going to war or if they just launched a few nukes and said 'let God sort it all out.' Mission planning is a key to victory for those who actually win. Poor mission planning is what the losing side does -- so teaches history.

“Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win”
― Sun Tzu, The Art of War

I believe that rather than the S.M.A.R.T. goals (which is a planning technique and management jargon) they use the basic A.R.S.E implementation technique.

Activate - the merit system
Regulate - by punishing the worst abusers using T.R.U.S.T.
Stimulate - by providing M.E.R.I.T to those that deserve it.
Evaluate - with statistics.

I have always thought that the most you try to put a thought into a cage, the far you get from reality. Maybe I am an anarchist, but to confine ideas into a previous-designed mindset seems to me to lose all of the nuances a mere idea can have.
That's me, so far I can't see the point in creating such kind of mental-pre-schemes.

But maybe, since you are interested in doing so, you can look into the data and create your own SMART-based scheme and share with us. Probably it will take you time, but, the data is out there, you only need to organize it as you need. 

Thanks everyone. But it looks like there have not been any publicly released SMART goals that the Merit system was intended to achieve.

If you are not familiar with S.M.A.R.T. goals here is a post form MIT about them (http://hrweb.mit.edu/performance-development/goal-setting-developmental-planning/smart-goals).

S.M.A.R.T. goals are:

Specific
Measurable
Achievable
Relevant
Time-bound

If anyone runs across any, I would love to read them. Thanks again 

You can check out a lot of stats in here: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/bitcointalk-merit-dashboard-4428616  This is a post created by @DdmrDdmr in wich how many people have ranked is detailed.
Also check this, from the same author: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/our-very-own-smerit-network-picture-enhanced-with-access-to-all-smerit-txs-3395255
In there, you will be able to see your own and other's merit networks.

Regarding the spam problem, no, there isn't, for the moment, any stats, but you just have to check out Meta or Reputation to make yourself an idea of how big the problem is. In fact, there is in crescendo, but, at least, most of the spammers become now "Forever Juniors", I mean, members with a lot of activity and zero merits.
The merit system is actually working, but just in the sense of the ranking-up problem.

Please note I did not say it has been reduced 100%. That was a best case scenario of what  any system could bring, as OP was clearly looking for fixed numbers.


I personally take this as an attempt to reduce spam, worded differently. I can't remember where but in the beginning this had been described as a way to reduce the spamming of this forum. Your right about the Bounties as opposed to the SIGS and if I'm not mistaken those Bounty hunters only post in their bounty threads and spew garbage over other social media platforms.

Whereas SIG campaigns pay to post in most sections of this forum. This can cause spamming so any barrier placed in the way of a larger payday IMO helps in reducing the spam issue

That's awesome. Thank you. I think that's a great post, but that's not what I meant  

I'm literally looking for something that would look like this:

The Merit system will decrease spam by XX% within XX months after being launched.

That is a SMART goal because it is:

Specific. It says what the system will do, specifically, it does not say "help the community" which would be too vague to be considered a SMART goal.
Measurable. The percentage set becomes the standard by which success is achieved.
Achievable. A XX% reduction in spam is more achievable able than say the elimination of spam which is unrealistic.
Relevant. Reducing spam as you pointed out is relevant to the community and a tangible reduction would be helpful.
Time-bound. The number of months sets a countdown. If the XX% reduction is achieved, but it takes twice as long as the time amount set, that's not success.

The point of SMART goals is to help ensure success. For example, you can check in on your progress each month and see if you are on track. So if the goal was something like a 10% reduction in spam within the first 6 months, you would expect to have more than a 5% reduction in spam by say month 4 and if not, something is wrong and you might not achieve your goal unless you make some changes.

But again, I love how your wrote that out. Thanks very much!  

Merit system was not introduced to stop spam and it certainly is not even close to 100% reduction. What it was introduced for was to prevent those that offer poor quality posts from ranking up and those who do post quality posts be rewarded through merit and eventually be able to rank up.

This only acts as a reduction of spam there will still be many people who dont care about it especially because the majority of new members are looking to earn money through a bounty campaign which are accepting any rank.

Your answers are pretty much covered in the OP of that thread, to the extent that they exist.

Specifically Merit is intended to increase post quality.

As far as measurable, this will be an opinion or an overall feel of the forum as you explore. Well mostly Users who have been here for a while will notice this.

It is acheivable, because not everyone will be able to wear SIGS immediately and cash in at a higher rank without being a decent poster

Relevant - to what? The system is relevant to trying to curb the problem

Time-Bound, no there is no timeline, and that is why there is no rush to make changes or tweaks until there is a decent baseline to review the system. I've heard some people talk 6 months to a year before making any judgement, and that's just Legendary members reserving judgment.


I get that you are looking for hard and fast numbers but there aren't any. I guess you could say ideally Spam reduction will be 100%. Other than that it is more about the experience and that's not always quantifiable.