Topic: POLL: Initial merit provided to older established accounts - page 3. (Read 847 times)

That may be the best answer, because some have definitely shown that they deserved to keep their ranks because they have contributed to the forum in various ways over the years. So if someone is get 500 airdropped merits as Hero member, and today he is Legendary member, this means that he managed to get 500 merits in next 2 years. If the merit system had existed since 2016, such a member would in that case very likely have collected those 500 merits.



More than 1000 airdropped merits would not make sense, because merits were tied to member ranks at that time. I think the admin has done the best that can be done, although neither system is perfect. I also believe that in the future, there may be further improvements to the system, maybe even new ranks.

There are a lot of older members who may not post here anymore, or anywhere near the frequency they used to. I still think they would deserve merit from prior posts but most of them do not have people going back to their old posts and adding merit. Users like satoshi, Hal, and other core developers may have had other members go back and add merit to some posts, although, I still think they deserve more... and there are members who are not core developers who probably deserve merit, but nobody is going to go back and merit those posts.

Just because a user hasn't "earned" merit since 2018 shouldn't necessarily mean they didn't deserve merit for their prior content/posts.


Valid point. I realize it is probably more of a subjective subject, maybe not fair of me to ask people to try and answer objectively, as I had hoped it would calm that subjectivity, but I guess there isn't really an easy way to approach this objectively since some people will see posts as deserving merit, others may not.

But maybe this sheds more light on the notion that a majority of posts would be objectively considered deserving merit when you factor in the multitude of subjective viewpoints across the entire community... which sort of lends a hand in saying the majority of users "deserve" merit in one form or another, if you are going to take into account the subjective viewpoint of every other member.


It does seem that the point of the initial merit was intended to just keep the rank, and a primary reason why I added the hypothetical statement. I'm more interested in what people think of the content from the past from their point of view. I think the majority of content from the past ends up more relevant/deserving of merit for me than most of the current stuff, so I end up leaning more towards the majority in the past deserving more merit.

Merit is obviously meaningless or near meaningless.

I would take loycev suchmoon pharmacist nutildah et al
Put them in several debates with monsterer, smooth, Dz, gjhiggins, cfb et al

Then ask yourselves who can really provide extremely valuable content?

Merit is good for preventing bot and slowing down account farmers. It stopped super low quality spam ( that you could avoid) and replaced it with a ton of huge and dangerous insoluble problems. Conflating it with trust was pure crazy.

So no do not remove air dropped merit

Remove the huge incentive to obsess over merit. Keep it to being the jail keeper for bots and account farmers.
Other than that forget about the largely meaningless political points that merit really has become

I would say vast majority of really high quality valuable posts were made pre merit system

Not only did I never care about the airdropped merits, I'm kind of wondering why it would be an issue right now, more than two years after the inception of the merit system.

Theymos realized where the problem was as far as shitposting goes, which was in the lower ranks.  I don't think he wanted to penalize any members who'd already ranked up, nor was he going to spend time trying to figure out which members "deserved" higher ranks.  In other words, he did the best he could when he created the merit system.

As far as those airdropped merits go, keep in mind that there were also sMerits associated with all of them and that was necessary to jump start the system into action.  Nowadays if you're looking at who's an excellent poster based on the merit system, you'd be looking at earned merits, and anything that got airdropped can be discounted.  It really isn't a big deal, nor do I think Theymos would make any changes to what was done in 2018 based on present complaints. 

It's a non-issue.

Some users deserve it and some don't deserve it.
The merit system was implemented about two years ago. A user who has received many merits in these two years, deserve those airdropped merits as well.

A user who hasn't earned a single merit in these two years, couldn't earn any merit even if the merit system had been implemented 10 years ago. So, this user don't deserve to be a legendary member.
There are some users in the forum who deserve even much more airdropped merit.
Assume that a user has earned 4000 merit in these two years and is active in the forum since 2014. If the merit system had been implemented in 2014, this user could earn 8000 merit before 2018.
So, this user deserve even more than 1000 airdropped merit.

 

It is only title for each user. Some users don't need a Legendary title to be a real legends on the forum, like Hal

In reality, the percent of total valuable members depends on our definition but I am sure that it will be higher than 0.43% if we included inactive valuable members (who likely on received but have not yet sent a single sMerit). It is worthy to note that my legit definition is too easy with AND for all four criteria:

• Not autobanned
• Not nuked
• Earned at least 1 merit
• Sent at least 1 sMerit

If we apply stricter criteria, we can see the percent of valuable members falls dramatically.

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The idea has been forgotten so now it is time to bring it back to lively discussion.

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Bringing my request back to life too (for BPIP), with additional data, number of days since the last active day.
So it will be something like this:

I’m not really too concerned personally on whether they deserved it or not, although the attribution behind the term "deserved" is subject to a large range of diverse criteria, the same as merit attribution is often scrutinized from heads to tail with different perceptions and sensibilities.

Having joined the forum around the time the Merit System was being brewed, I assumed that preserving ranks and the associated awarded merits was thought out to avoid disrupting the whole system retrospectively, and in a sense, it is a sort of "early bird" reward. Preserving the rank seems fit, even more so with what I express in the following paragraph.

The hypothesis in the OP does though consider that merits could have been started from scratch, whilst maintaining the rank. That is equivalent to the merit counter only representing the amount of earned merits, which is a counter I favour more than the total amount of merits (earned+airdropped). The criteria expressed in the OP would seem more fitting in my opinion, as it would give the merit counter a homogeneous meaning for all accounts (albeit the diversity in the action of actually earning each merit).

Well, I'm new in this forum and never know if rank up on old system only have activity requirement. After I check it, then I know.

In my opinion, if they didn't received initial merit it will make they disappointed. We should know they're the old members who have contribute this forum for 9-10 years before new merit system. And I think bitcointalk grow bigger and bigger from them. Maybe @theymos give airdrop merit to them because they're have a lot contribution in this forum for long time till 2018. It's just a reward for be loyal in this forum.

I know merit is hard to get, I also only get 2 till now (I didn't complain, but it's much easier to rank up in old system). But, we should don't forget what "they" was do in this forum. So I think they deserve the airdrop merit.

I thought it will be discrimination if airdrop system only give for few user. So, it's better to give all to old user.

A quick thought on your poll, and my thought is that as many users who received airdropped merits and have continued to earn merits since then, have proved that they really deserved the merits they received; and would have ranked up even if they started from zero. But users who only have airdropped merits and have not "earned" any afterwards may actually not deserve the airdropped merits they received, and as such may need to prove that they are HQ posters/users and with or without the initial airdrop would still have ranked up.

This forum has been around since November of 2009, the merit system was implemented in January of 2018.

Initial merit was provided to accounts which existed before the merit system, and merit was provided based on the rank of their account (Legendary, Hero, etc) -- Full information here.

I'm curious what everyone thinks. Should older accounts have received initial merit? Did most of them deserve it?

Note: When answering, we should hypothetically assume their ranks would have remained (Legendary, Hero, etc) even if they had 0 merit and were never provided initial merit, and that the entire forum would not have been demoted to a newbie status because of the alterations to ranking that the merit system introduced. (i.e. you need merit to get to the next rank)

I'm trying to establish whether you believe the majority of users (not *all*) before 2018 actually deserved merit or if the majority of users did not deserve it.

There is a good argument that many members who received initial merit deserved it (and maybe even deserved more initial merit), and that these initial merits are meaningful, overall.

There is also a good argument that many members who received initial merit did not deserve what they received, or that they didn't deserve any merit at all, and it makes these merits not meaningful, overall.

What is your opinion?  Try to answer objectively and please explain below.

Thank you!