Topic: POLL: Initial merit provided to older established accounts (Read 873 times)

Yes, most of them contributed good content and initial merit is deserved
18 (31.6%)

No, most of them were bad/shit posters and did not deserve initial merit they received
17 (29.8%)

Undecided
4 (7%)

I don't really care
11 (19.3%)

Other (explain)
7 (12.3%)

Total Voters: 57

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I've locked the poll. Thanks to all who participated and for the comments!

The "Yes"'s ended up with a slight edge. I do personally believe, for the most part, enough users before the merit system do actually deserve their initial merit, and the quality of posts was better back then or at least easier to come across among the noise... although clearly there are some who did not really deserve it.

I realize the forum's perspective on it, and the intents behind it. I was just trying to get an idea on the perspective of other members and how they saw most of the posters from the past (before the merit system) and whether they saw them as deserving their initial merit, wasn't my intent to start a debate on how the system was created nor to give the impression I had some sort of "issue" with it. Obviously some people had opinions they wanted to get out about it, which I'm fine with, just wasn't my intent.

I'll lock this topic for now but if anyone has a reason for me to unlock it, let me know.

Both years had huge Bitcoin & altcoin rallies which attracted tons of newcomers, but the one in 2017/early 2018 was obviously greater in magnitude (and being more recent it stands out more). I just wouldn't hold an average Hero Member from those days in too high a regard seeing how easily and quickly some of them were able to achieve their ranks in the pre-Acitvity level days.

The way the airdropped merits were given out is the only objective way to do it. Had theymos picked which users to award and which ones not to award, it would have created controversy. People would have argued that it was a subjective selection. Many users were undeservedly awarded with a lot of airdropped merits but since when is life fair?

I personally don't really care, but I believe that some members who were spamming the forum since the beginning for bounties/giveaways don't deserve to have merits. This is an online forum, let's not complicate things further. The current merit system is doing good with the original intention of curtailing new users from spamming, let the merit system be as it is.   

The change is very important as time flies.

Just take an example this thread itself, it has made you think about the merit system in different way today. A debate, or discussion is held as to whether the merit system was fair for oldies and new one's equally?

Now here is whats happening . .

1) Many of them are agreeing to the merit system's existence.
2) Some of them are disagreeing to it.
3) Go through the thread and you will read most of them were actual contributor to the forum in the long journey of forum.

Additionally,

Many account farmers are around the forum, they are reduced in numbers OR can be caught very easily if they try to do merit farming.

**If by any means these farmers had legends, hero etc accounts earlier (before 2018) then I am 100% sure that they will now fail to achieve enough Merits as they are most probably shitposters thus making their accounts baby-corn!


Taking the first & second part in mind, I guess merit system is fair enough and it was OKAY to have pre-merits to oldies.

I think that's just what they say to hide their truth.  Most of them are newer users (after the 2013 bubble) who came to this community seeking riches and are power hungry.  They want to appear as though they are above other members and the best way they've found to accomplish that is to try and tarnish the reputations and diminish the contributions of those who came before them any way they can.  This is just another attack angle to do so.  The truth is, it is likely Bitcoin wouldn't have seen near the early adoption or success it did without people like Gavin Andresen and Roger Ver pushing things forward in the early days.  The thought that users like that don't deserve their airdropped merit is sickening and shows the ignorance that has befallen the community today.

And that's why I don't particularly care whether or not they deserved the merit. Older accounts made 5 years ago which spent enough time to post things that brought up their activity are old members anyway, and the merit they got airdropped could be considered a reward for hanging out here early. Just like users who have Donator/VIP badges.¹

People here seem to be concerned that there are a lot of inactive accounts who got airdropped merits. Well if they are inactive then in most cases they can't be abused for bounties since they aren't posting in the first place. A rare exception would be if an inactive account is hacked to start posting spam for money but that is usually caught quickly because of the password change notices displayed in their Trust page. Seriously if you were a shitposter in 2014 would you have kept making 1000 posts for money for more than three years given that you did not forsee a merit system? Most of them would have given up the site by then.

As for how we will be able to tell how much merit users actually earned, that's not a problem. BPIP and LoyceV's trust pages already have this information.

¹Although some of the worst scammers of the history of bitcoin are VIPs, so there will always be anomalies that can't be distinguished by a script in charge of classifying users by badge rank, say for a sig campaign. Those outliers can always be booted off manually, get red tagged and other disciplinary measures designed for mischief-makers.

Although I come into being when the merit system was introduced, but this does not mean that the old high rank accounts merits should be erased.
I think those who have been on the forum from 2013 onwards diverse to be on the rank on which they are and most of the good trusted users are role models for the newcomers.

Your proposal is garbage for the reasons I already posted here.
Why are you proposing it again.

Should confirmed scammers have all merits deleted?

I think so.

As I have said  and as OG has  said many pre merit legends or posters made contributions that are worth billions of merits if measured against the 1000s of cycled merits these new retarded sig spamming fools are rewarding each other in colluded chipmixer credits or political pal points.

Delete the entire garbage and start again. Think it out a bit more


Range 1 to 3 max.  50 is crazy. You get idiots like lauda and atriz sending each other big chunks
Some algo so narrow cycling is not so obvious with people with 1000s of merit losing 80% if you take away 20 pals cycled collusionary contributions to each other.
Sensible time limits between leaving merit so you dont get foxpup timetravel 0.01 second between meriting 20 different posts from his pal pharmacist
Max merit per month to one member max percent total from one member when you have 100s

Most of all though as suchmoon says with no objective enforced criteria then " good post"  and "bad post" are meaningless concepts.
I agree with him.

If you are unable to enforce objective standards for merit that introduce meaning then you must reduce the incentive and benefits of having merit. While merit gets you anything more than a good post or bad post score. If you monetize something you will bring huge determination to corrupt and game it for financial reward. It will then certainly have nothing to do with good post bad post scores it will be about a group of people giving it to each other that best suits their selfish gain.

Therefore i will support the scrapping of airdropped merit if there is a serious attempt to make merit a valuable tool. If i was sure merit would be a meaningful measure of a posts objective value.

If not then no. Delete it all and start again where it could have meaning and value  or leave it as the divisive damaging and broken mess it is. Only those wishing for centralized control want obviously to control all of the merit floating around out there.

When merit system was introduced, I never thought it would gain so much importance over time. I thought it would simply act as an additional barrier to rank up just like activity and people won't care much about it. But as time progressed, merit talks came up as the hottest topic on forum. Many users are maintaining interesting merit data in Meta section. In nutshell, merits earned by a user has become status symbol and often regarded as a synonym of how constructive and quality poster the user is.

So in such scenario, it is wrong that all accounts from pre-merit era have been awarded merit points according to their ranks. I would have better liked the system if all users retained their pre-merit ranks but initial merit count for everyone shall be zero. So if someone is Hero Member before merit system, his starting rank shall be Hero but he needs to earn 1000 merits (not 500) to become Legendary.

Correct, but those contribution authors usually actually earned merit! See my proposal:

Most of the contributions to this forum prior to 2013 are immeasurably more valuable than what passes as a contribution today.

Irrelevant.

About 5 minutes to write a script, about 10 seconds of execution time depending on hardware. What exactly would be the issue?

The issue boils down to one thing: they were here when it mattered!

And let's face it, editing a. csv file with 2 million lines if a bit nerve wreking for an old and reputable project like bitcointalk.
It's high time we get confortable with the idea that things will not be undone.

Also I ask you this: if you had a platform with aprox 2kk users what decisions would you have made? Of course, without knowing the future. What would you 2 years ago have done better?

not at all....

just pointing out that the numbers can be highly suggestive and unbalanced based on the nature of perception of worth. (when speaking of the merit airdrop)

I was thinking airdrops are not allowed in this forum  

It is ok that first members received merits, but it resulted with merit abuse and selling.
I guess that any other system would also be abused.
I would be more interested in removing merits - because of abuse, banned users or inactivity for example.

Will i am also new in this forum, i created my account last december 2019. So i didn't actually know that old members deserved to have a merit, but user's are very lucky those year 2017 below because there is no merit system. Unlike this days if i didn't read this THREAD BY THEYMOS. I didn't know that there is a merit system are used to be able to rank up. My understanding in this situation as i read some of the threads here in bitcointalk merit system are used so that everbody will post constructive posts. Because due to the fact that bitcointalk are being abuse by other user to rank up easy. That's why merit system is a very good idea.

Correct, but it was applicable as soon as it was introduced. There is no way that the forum was better off in January 2018 than 2013 in regards to shitposters. Even to this day, it remains a huge issue. You are right about the giveaway threads, I had forgotten about that one. It was quite the issue.

January 2013 was a bit before the introduction of Activity, back then some were Hero Members just because they spent a week spamming 500 posts. Giveaway threads also weren't banned. Signature campaigns were nowhere near as common, though.


 

Are you aiming for some sort of merit-per-post or merit-per-activity-period metric? It might be more useful than an absolute number of merits however there are exceptions to that as well. I don't want to trigger some known trolls with examples but let's just say that merit farming does exist.

Who is the most "merit-able"?

A)  a person with ten thousand comments/tips&tricks/how-to's/etc on common and basic subject(s) that are commonplace

B)  a person with a few good comments/tips&tricks/how-to's/etc on a single complex and important subject that effects most in one way or another

Hmm. I did not digest the retrospective aspect. Poor show.

I would've preferred a totally blank merit slate for everyone with existing ranks intact. Whatever 'work' you put in for you rank would still exist. To get further you would've needed to embark on a different type of it just like everyone else.

Where it's can get confusing is that there's no delineation between merit shoved up you in the first place and that that you've earned. That should've been dealt with from the off.

I guess everyone still needed a pool of merit to get rid of in the first place but that didn't need to show up as awarded merit too.

I think ranking up for the lower levels should've been harder, easier for the mids and the golden heights are about right.

Ironically some posters here don't seem to have read the OP

ibminer doesn't have the authority to change the merit system nor is he trying to do so as far as I know. He also posted a clear disclaimer that this has nothing to do with ranks. It's a question about an event that already happened two years ago and I think enough time has passed to take a good retrospective view at it.

If it helps, split it into two questions: (1) does someone with 100 (or 500 or 1000) airdropped merits and 5 earned ones really deserve 105 (or 505 or 1005) merits; and (2) was that a majority of members in Jan 2018.


Damn, I though you were honestly trying to solve to unemployment problem.

I voted other.  

some People like me should have been give 2x the norm maybe 3x.

All idle members should have been given ½  maybe ⅓ the norm.

I figure my 9 threads in alt coins were worth 500 to 1000 merits The first 6 had zero as they were before the merit concept started.
Many people posted really good info from 2012 to 2018

people that post "Airdropped merit should totally be erased. It serves no purpose other than giving false authority to farmed accounts over those not in the know.

If someone had a good account that hasn't been back in two years it's still a good account. The ranks can stay if need be. The merit should go."

[Note: gentlemand just posted that]

 are just as guilty as the original problem of giving the merits in the first place.

an "all or nothing mentally"

BTW Theymos was guilty back in 2018 of giving them away
just as gentlemand is guilty of saying drop them all now.

The proper way would have been appoint a few people to judge and decide who sucked and who did not.

I figure it was about 1,000,000 plus posts that needed to be looked at and then decided on how much effort is that>  I could do 1000 posts a week so  in 20 years I would be done grading  them.  So hire 20 people at $20,000.00 each and maybe they would be done in six months.

@ Theymos
@ gentlemand     since you would be yin and yang on the subject I used the two of you in my example.


Please read fine print below:

To anyone that recognizes I am kidding and it is my attempt to make you smile kudos to you.

Airdropped merit should totally be erased. It serves no purpose other than giving false authority to farmed accounts over those not in the know.

If someone had a good account that hasn't been back in two years it's still a good account. The ranks can stay if need be. The merit should go.

I'm voting undecided, and I'm choosing not to make a decision.

Merit spending is said to be subjective and one can give it to any post they think deserved it. If we are going to question whether or not the early posters (individually) deserved the airdropped merit then we can also argue on individual merit transaction done after the launch of the merit system.
Some users contributed immensely to the growth of the forum and some chunked out shit posts and raised their activity. Even though it's more difficult to rank up now, some would argue that merits still gets given to undeserving posts.

Someone may have done it differently if given the opportunity, theymos chose the algorithm that most suited the system at that time. It was/is subjective.

Anything a scammer wants patching needs careful examination.

Why does it " need" patching mr atriz 50 merit trader and abuser? Where 80% or more of your merit comes from 20 ppl Lol or is it 10 ppl?

I see no "need"  

What would it achieve? How would it solve the insoluble problems merit has created?

I would say many legends deserved 1 million merits in the fair context of the likes of pharmacist loycev nutildah

I would argue that Cryptohunter deserves 2 billion merits for months of battling lauda the scammer  who was lying there was no premine for months until he was crushed and cryptohunter forced a 2 billion dollar compensation offer you tried to prevent.

What have any of these high earned merit cycling dregs ever done here but drain and milk this forum for every sig dollar they get for themselves. ? Nothing that is what. That's when they are not busy scamming, extorting, auction scamming , crushing free speech??


Go ahead prove me wrong? Bring their achievements here. What are all these 1000s of merits for? Bring me their 10 original thought inspiring posts that made any difference here.

Tell me more about this vital patching that those giving merit to each other think must take place and why?
Sounds like an attempt to centralize control further.

You go through each member 1 by 1 lauda and we will compare their posts using lfc bitcoin and pharmacist/ hugeblackwoman and tman as benchmarks of earned merit.

Measuring against these brilliant posters ( with 1000s of earned merits) of regurgitated crap,  scammer  supporting and memes we will mark down and delete inferior airdropped merits?

Get on it.

Deleting airdropped merits is laughable unless done  case by case. For some 1000 is an insult for what they have contributed in the context of tman lfc pharmacist micgoosens loyce ( imagine no merits to analyse )

To actually delete cycled new merits would be far more sensible.

Allow only 0.5% of merits to come from any other single member that may help for those over 1000 earned. Or work out something that prevents them being chipmixer collusion credits or political points.

The whole system is based on subjective opinions, and according to the above way of thinking then we might as well drop it completely. This is a well needed iteration of the system. Why should we not patch something that is partially broken?

You can add Legendaries to your ignore list. If you don't feel that their posts are worth reading, then just ignore them - no need to change the system for some subjective opinions.

I remain neutral on this issue as a number of users did fill the forum with usable content before the merit system was introduced, for which they were rewarded. But in many systems there are errors. In this case, they are shitposters, trolls, etc. Many of these people have sold their accounts or lost them due to abuse.

Interesting argument, to some they would feel they deserve the initial Merit while to others they would not feel they serve it.
So let see it in this way even as they got initial Merit still those that contributed and not content with just the initial Merit are the once doing well and as such still getting merit - this in a way can show does that truly worked for it even before the merit system came-

We have also seen member that benefited little or none from the initial Merit still surpassing those that did benefit @Ddmr Ddmr for example and they are respected.

Let say the initial Merit was like a bonus to early users like we see some other site or establishment do. Initial Merit aside we can see people do nasty things with merit, like giving it to those that supports their claims, trading of merit, giving Merit to there alts. but if it's not truly deserving it won't achieve much.

Those that truly deserve it would still stand out from the crowd.

Most of them not really deserved to get such merits especially the farmed accounts but I don't care about the ranks of people, if they make a meaningful post in my point of view and they really need merit then I will give it to them. Since merit is also not moderated here then it highly subjective to the users and what they see while reading those posts.

You may be talking about the state of the forum members in January 2013, definitely not 2018. In 2018, the overwhelming majority of all ranks were shitposters (and are to this day).

Yeah, I get it but none of it was earned merit so I don't see it as an issue of whether any members who received airdropped merits were deserving of them.  It was just a mechanism to grandfather in higher-ranked members and (speaking for myself here) that initial amount of merit isn't indicative of quality posting. 

I'd say that most of the Hero and Legendary members in January 2018 were the best posters--and that's obviously comparing them to the lower-ranked ones, which is where the problem of shitposting was all along.  If I agreed that your question is one I could answer, then I would have to say yes.  There were--and are--certainly garbage posters among the higher ranks, but in general I think they "deserved" that airdropped merit.

I have voted:

However, how this was implemented is a grave mistake. This has primarily caused selling of merit and creating abusive farms. What theymos should have done is that the starting merit for all older ranking members who earned next to no merit in the following 12 months since introduction (next to no being a proportionate % limit of what they had, e.g. if they had not earned at least 10% of what they had) would have been wiped out (0, including smerits). This would have helped the forum considerably and caused next to zero damage to innocent users.

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This was my thinking, and I have yet to find some use cases where this would cause more trouble than benefit. Satoshi and similar very contributing posters would be unaffected. Occasional contributing poster that is inactive for half a decade would be affected, but who cares? There is no actual damage done there (and we can resupply the cases which we find with merit afterwards anyway).

Maybe a few users should have received more/less than what they got. Maybe there could have been an algorithm to determine the amount of merits a person deserved, based on time spent, posts made, et al. But right now it doesn't matter, cause there is no going back. Even if there is, its not worth it.

I do feel like, majority of them deserved it, a lot of people spent a lot of time getting those activity points, and waited years to get that activity, not getting that airdropped merit might have caused more members to leave, it could have become too demoralizing to be fair. I know, there are lot of shitturds out there that used their merit in not so right way, but we have to just live with it and let it go, as we don't love in an ideal universe.

You have added a point I wanted to include in my initial post in this poll, my choice/vote in this did not include users who are no longer active or who post sparingly, not at the rate or frequency they did in the past; my choice in this poll is based on users who are still active, and posting the same way they did before the merit system. And also users you mentioned like Hal and Satoshi have "earned" so many merits, far more than a lot of users today.

I second this ^^^

I know I earned my rank (before the new merit system).   I developed, contributed, answered, reported, and have been an overall good contribution where I have been on this forum.  Just about everything I have done in the crypto world has been for free, for request with offer for payment or just for fun and self enjoyment; under the condition that it remains exactly that.   I believe knowledge should be shared for the betterment of everyone.

Not everyone can say: "I earned my rank" and actually have something substantial to back it up.

Seeing the merit above the "airdrop";   just is only an indicator of how active they have been compounded by the number of persons impacted by their contribution since the "airdrop".    Food for thought.

To be more clear, I'm not saying there is any issue that I have with the forum providing or not providing initial merit.
This is information I'm seeking for my own research.

And I realize some deserve it and some do not.

I guess a better way to put it is... I'm looking for whether you, as a forum member, think the majority from pre-2018 deserved it or the majority did not.
If you do not care, or it is too close to call, then that is fine too.

Sounds like the system works good as it was created for.
Please don't say about new ranks that will put me under lower position in the hierarchy of the rank system. It will take me years to have 1000 merits in my pocket.

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!