Topic: Merit? This got to be a joke. - page 2. (Read 2488 times)

This isn't a decentralised forum and never was. It's a centralised one with owners and rules in an attempt to keep order, only the limited amount of rules aren't being enforced much and people are bending and breaking them in an which way they can, and as such the forum has become unfit for purpose. Merit was a way to try combat the abuse of account farming but it needs some adjustments and other rules or restrictions need to be put in place.

That's what i'm saying. Ripple is more decentralized than this forum  

Dear fellows,

Who of you thought that the merit system was designed for quality posting? It was designed for only one thing: To keep the small members small. Together with the trust system eliminating the inconvenient higher ranked members the olichargy was established and maintained. Exactly as Theymos apparently wanted it to be.

Hail the movement of decentralisation. 

This is where you are wrong. The rich gets richer can also be validated if you make it extremely hard for the others to reach your rank. Doesn't mean that the Legendary members receive more merits.
the outcome is the same.



Is true that most of my posting is in ANNS, simply because i'm a translator. I don't care to earn merits so i can get a better signature. I never join signature campaigns.
But i admit i would love to have the privilege to earn an avatar 

The post that i made shows that the majority of high ranked members have a perfect merit score, thanks to distribution, and that most of them didn't earn a single merit point in 7 months.
that's the problem. Is way too hard to earn merit, maintening the status quo of who is high ranked with an airdrop.

Unfortunately, I don’t scrape a vast  amount of data such as all user profiles to answer this question.
Per Vod’s definition used in the BPIP, which does work on all the forum user profile base, an active user is one who has logged in within the last three months. The site states there are currently 444.249 active profiles, which is really nearly a sixth of the entire user base of Bitcointalk.

mazdafunsun has been publishing stats on this recently ( 2 million users and their stats ), and reduces his figure to 90.993, using as active user definition users that have logged in within the last year. He deliberately leaves out newbies and beginners in the calculation and focuses on core users.
Although he has analysed the first 2 million user profiles, there are probably more active users proportionally in the remaining profiles (2.335.558 is the current number of total member officially, so a total of 335.558 are not accounted for), for those are the most recent ones and have not been included in the analysis.

Regardless, If we want to contrast active users to merits somehow, I would go for a more restrictive definition of active user. I would consider an active user for this exercise as one that has posted at least once in a given period of time. Say for example we want to contrast merit given in the past 3 months to active users. We need to consider users that have posted at least once in the same period of time, in order to postulate as a candidate to receive merit in the first place (logging in is not enough for this kind of exercise).

Of course, even this definition would not take us to a terrain that conforms a 100% accurate scenario, since for example posts outside the 3 month example window frame may be merited, so an inactive user may have been merited for previous posts. Regardless, this is a lesser noise factor in the calculations, and the results should be pretty much correct.

So why can’t we do this sort of exercise easily?
Because while the “last active” bit of information is part of the user profile and can easily (but patiently) be scraped, the "last post" cannot. You would either need to enter the user’s profile and scrape data from the last post (not easy at all), or compare two different snapshots to see the post difference. This can be done, but it’s tedious work over 2,3 Million records that download at a rate of one user profile every 2 seconds at best.
Ideally, a field on the user profile with the date of the last post or a counter on Nº posts in a month would allow a simple analysis and distinguish between logged-in users and posting-users when compared to merits awarded to posting users.

I am a member who always believes that the introduction of Merit system is the best thing happened for the bitcointalk forum. It's not good in theory but practically too. However, I'm not saying it's the best system and it also needs some tweaks like take actions against large-scale merit abuse, merit trading, demerit option where necessary, actions for hiding merit abuses when deleting their own posts etc...

I also agreed with "nutildah" that the fact there is no 2 mln, active users after removing bots and shitposters. I think those statistics can be provided by "LoyceV" or "DdmrDdmr". So your calculations to be revised accordingly that data too. Your argument of "richer get richer" is absolutely wrong. If it is true all the Legendary members should have earned more merits than all other members. But check the Merit data and it shows there are so many Legendary members are staying only with their airdropped Merits (without earned merits). I think you just felt system didn't work when some of the higher rank members more often getting merited than others. But the truth is they often make quality posts than others.

When I am looking to your post history it is more obvious why that you're not getting any merits. Almost all the posts that you have posted were in ANN threads. I think it's better to avoid those threads if you're really want to earn merits and contribute to other members by sharing your knowledge and post your suggestions for valuable discussions. After making so many posts in ANN threads then you're trying to blame the system by posting here and also making a thread in Meta too. I think you and you only to be blamed rather than the system.

Another thing that I believe is we need more merit sources not only for local sections but also for other English boards too. Because most of the discussions are going on mainboards since this is an international forum.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                

Merit is meant to highlight good posts and restrict spammers, so I don't exclude higher ranks. I've never been out of sMerit to give, and I'm having a really hard time handing out more than I receive (probably because I give only 1 most of the time).

That's a community effort: someone has to step up and apply to be a merit source.

Mine took about 3 months, some were much faster, and some are still waiting.

It took 42 days to go from 2200000 to 2300000 user accounts. That's over 2000 new accounts per day, 16,000 per week. Last week, only 241 users received Merit for the first time, and most of them were old accounts already.

Good threads are hard to find because there are so many bad posts. But from what I've seen, I don't think many good threads get overlooked.

In my opinion, even if all 84 merit sources worked hard and efficiently, they have still alsmot been unable to catch all high quality threads to give their smerits away.
They all are human, not robots, so it's bigger probability to miss high quality threads for sure.
However, merit source applications should be verified as strictly as possible to avoid potential greedy merit sources, who can abuse the merit system after got acceptance to be a merit source and start using their allocated sMerits for merit exchange.

I agree there should be more Merit sources. Knowing my Merit is very finite makes me not want to dole it out as much as I would if I was a Merit source (I haven't applied but maybe I will some day).

There's over 2.3 million members but you're forgetting that most of them are either non-active or shitposters looking to game the system. Of the 447 average that sign up per day, I'd bet 400 of them are a combination of bots, shitposters (airdroppers and sig campaigners), and people who otherwise don't give a damn about anything other than how to get "free money." The amount of time noobs waste on this forum in an attempt to make "easy money" is simply fucking astounding.

Unfortunately I think all that's happened after the Merit System was introduced is sig campaigns lowered their standards for admittance, regardless it does make it harder for account farmers so it should remain. Until noobs realize that 90%+ of tokens they get from bounties and airdrops are worthless and start telling their friends, we're going to continue to see this great influx of morons into the forum continue.

I also agree to what @sutters said, creating more merit source in each local board could be the solution and it can develop each members. This will also inspire them to continue their journey in crypto.

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@LoyceV we also have a representative for being a merit source in our local, Is it true that it takes a lot of time to review the applicant to be accepted?

I also think that the merit system is good in theory but can be improved.
For example in the local sections there are very few merit sources.

There are 84 merit for sources with a total merit generation of up to 19500 sMerit per 30 days

84 sources for 2 mln users.

it's true that bitcointalk is now a mirror of society where the richer get richer, but shouldn't we be used to this already?  
If you can live in the real world you can accept the merit system

I see your complaint more sentimental than factual.

1. You saw someone selling merit and you did nothing about it.
2. You are taking a swipe on higher rank members for posting crappy post.

I noticed that in the quest for members to rank up, there is an erroneous belief that every of their posts should be merited. It does not work like that. There is no need to get upset. Just go on making contributions and you will be surprised how you will be awarded merits.

There have been 4-5 merit sources added over the last couple of months. It can't hurt to submit your application.

I'll check it out. Do people get added as merit sources often though? I see there's lots of people waiting for account recoveries so is this really a priority for admins?


Appreciate the reward but if you have a limited amount of it it's probably best saving it for lower ranks who need it more than I do.

Why don't you apply to be a merit source? See this post.

You're not a spammer, so in my opinion you shouldn't be limited by Merit. I could probably merit more of your posts, but I'm kinda busy at the moment with something else (and the forum is terribly slow today)

Merit system is a good idea in theory, but I think it needs some tweaking to make it work effectively. The number of sources probably needs to be greatly adjusted and maybe the merit requirements lowered for certain ranks, but maybe that will open up the system to abuse. I see lots of posts that I'd like to merit but I just run out of merit within minutes. I don't really need merit as there's no difference to me between Hero and Legendary, though I;d like to get there eventually, but despite my posts being pretty good [in my opinion] and much better than average I've received very few merit. I was very surprised to wake up this morning to see one post received 7 though, but at this rate it will probably take me years to get enough to be Legendary. A lower ranked user making okay or average posts probably has no chance or will take them years to get to a fairly high rank. I guess it's bout finding a balance between it being an effective system that minimizes abuse but also allowing people to realistically achieve ranks.

Why not 2008 (the year the whitepaper was published)?


That's blasphemy !!!!! 

Yes absolutely  , it's just impossible to earn with just constructive posts .
Believe me I don't think that's how this system works , people like us are not getting noticed and people who already have merits keep increasing their count ,
No offense to Senior users why don't newbies and Juniors with good quality posts aren't getting what they deserve.
I'm not totally against this system but I think it needs correction.

"More Merit than satoshi" could be a good threshold.

I was about to come and edit that with a great follow up. This disgruntled users post, gave me the idea.

Elder

With there only being a few for a very long time they could become known as the "Circle of Elders", nothing creepy about that.


These however make me laugh more, I think Bagholder. It will bring Joy for years when someone wants to vent about a "BagHolder" because in my mind I'm still just a giggling 7 year old.