Topic: Reducing (removing) airdropped merits for those who didn't earn 1 single merit - page 3. (Read 1246 times)

Deranking a user with purely airdropped merits would do more harm than good, IMO. They were earned legitimately at the time and those users were also influential in the growth of the forum.
It could also bring a debate of whether earned merits should be removed if they are believed to be given to undeserving posts.

If the goal is to prevent their joining signature campaigns, then, top managers already have a system which prevents spammers from joining their program.
Instead of deranking maybe removing some privileges, like what was done with the enhanced newbie restrictions.

I have mixed thoughts about it. Probably most of us agree that users who didn't got even single merit in almost 2 years don't deserve their rank. But before Merit system has been released, they ranked up in legitimate way and it would be little unfair to de-rank them. Offcourse, newer members will say that's unfair thst they have to work hard to reach high rank, while someone reached it just by spamming. But these older users have advantage because they came here earlier. It's similar like to complain that early Bitcoin adopter bought it at $0.3, while you had to buy it at $6600.

Of course, he wouldn't have to announce the move before making changes 
That announcement would definitely cause a lot of panic and merit selling among account farmers prior to the changes

Yes, But the lower their income is, the less they spam.
If there is no income and there is no benefit in spamming, they will leave the forum. They are here only to join campaigns, spam and earn money.

If Theymos decides to make changes, I don't think he announces anything before that.

Can you imagine the amount of merit selling will happen once theymos will drop a bomb for something like this? Once the news will come flying that there is another change in the merit system for the ones who haven't earned a single merit I can only imagine the same thing that has happened when theymos required 1 merit for newbies to rank up, suddenly a lot of newbies are insanely getting a lot of merits. Of course the only ones who will be affected here are the ones who aren't buying merits or who don't have any alt accounts to send them back merits either way it will really just affect a few persons here.

It would be possible to combine this idea with merit decay. Remove all the airdropped merit, let everyone who was grandfathered in to a rank keep their rank, but remove signature privileges from ranks and instead link it to earned merit.

Satoshi is the 8th highest merit earner on the forum, with 2145 earned merit.

The issue is not their income; I couldn't care less if these altcoins all turn out to be worthless (and most do). The issue is the spam they create in pursuit of said income.

The problem with the merit system is that it is subjective. It is given freely by those who have sMerits to give, for whatever reason, or for no reason at all. It is "human controlled". There is no objective method of giving out merits, the closest would be some sort of AI that parses posts to check for quality and grammar according to certain rules. That will eventually be exploited and abused as well.

The forum changes or adds a new system, but you can't just retroactively remove some things as that's going to break a lot of stuff or have unknown consequences, which I'm sure the forum admins do not want to deal with.

A forum is a forum, but with plenty of metrics involved, it becomes a race to "level" up just like any other massively multiplayer online .. forum.

There is no doubt the merit system is more in favor of old members. Now they are benefiting because they knew the forum earlier.  I expect this to be finally changed (I don't think it happens in near future). I don't think 5 years later, some users have a special privilege only because they registered earlier. Theymos will decide. All airdropped merits may be removed in a second, they might be decayed over a year or there will be a complicated formula.

Anyway, now thanks to signature campaign managers, there isn't a big problem. A legendary member who hasn't earn any merit is not qualified for participating in a good signature campaign while there are users with member and full member ranks that are participating in good campaigns.  There are many legendary members that are wasting their time in altcoin bounties without any income. Now having an account with a higher rank doesn't increase your chance of participating in campaigns.

This would be a terrific idea to remove all the airdropped merit from people who didn't earn any merit yet. When Satoshi Nakamoto will look at his account, how will he feel- hellllll, I am a newbie Just kidding. But there are numerous number of people as you mentioned who aren't active anymore, it would hurt a lot to them; they will create chaos around. I would prefer sticky with as it is now.

If you're talking about Ddmr's suggestion of a double entry, I don't like that idea either.  Obviously it's not up to me, but I don't like the idea of any indicator denoting earned vs. airdropped merit.  A badge would be the worst, as it would start to look like a yellow Star of David armband, in my opinion.  It's not hard to look through someone's history, or look up their profile on LoyceV's or Vod's websites.  If you care to know who's earned what and who hasn't, take a moment, made a small effort to find out.

It's unnecessary and would create more than problem than it resolves.

If the main goal is to stop signature campaign spammer, then i have another idea such as :
1. Signature limitation based on your merit amount, not your rank
2. Signature only enabled for those who earned x amount of merit within y last month

Hello DireWolfM14, I respect your opinion and thank you for sharing it.
But it's not about "punishing" someone. It's just about debating if any action would he necessary. Action doesn't necessarily mean punishment. Let's take, for example, Ddmr's sugestion.

You are right Ddmr, sorry for the typo. But it's not about precise numbers, it is about speaking of thousands. Those numbers reflected only two ranks, just to have a little idea. But I am sure the numbers of all the other lower ranks are way, way bigger. And the numbers go bigger as the rank goes lower (eg. 800 Legendaries, 2500 Heroes, [maybe] 5000 Seniors and so on).

@OP, good discussion, but I'm going to agree with The Pharmasist and partially with the Troll Formerly Known as Cryptohunter.  Merit is a funny animal, in many cases I believe they are distributed among folks that are friendly with one another.  That's not to say that those posts don't deserve merit, but it can be subject to biases that develop in any community.  On the other hand I believe most merit sources are clever enough to avoid these biases, and I've witnessed one of the more prolific sources give merit to posts of people with whom she often disagrees.  I've even seen her giving merit to a post and then go on to dismantle the post with her argument.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that even though I agree the system is working, I don't think it's perfect.  I started here after implementation of the merit system and during that time I've seen the quality of posts going up, while the quantity of shitposts go down.  So it's been a net positive for the forum.

To retroactively punish those benefited from the system before the change would be wrong, in my opinion.  They may not have earned a single merit, but that could be due to a lack of activity since the change.  Or it could be due to the type of activity; they might be mostly active in the altcoin sections, or gambling sections, where merit distribution is notoriously low.  I'm not concerned about all the airdropped merit, and it sounds like Theymos doesn't think of it as a priority either.  He may choose to revise the structure when migrating the Epoch Talk forum, but for now, I don't think it's something that needs any modification.

This is a pretty sensitive topic, and normally once one achieves something (i.e. rank), taking it away is like a whack in the noble parts, followed by a stampede over the ego area just above.

Removing airdropped merits and/or decaying them for all profiles would likely do more bad than good. Many profiles would be de-ranked in any scenario, even more so in the second one (decaying merits), extending over to native Merit System born accounts too (i.e. Jr. Members with 1 Merit or Members with 10 earned Merits could be re-ranked.)

Ranks will have many different stories behind how they were obtained. Some are long time forum and Bitcoin contributors, others are posters that had an easy path merely by posting little more than "good project", and newer ranks have likely has to put quite a sum of effort into their posts, and so on.

A rank really has relative value, and what is more appreciated is the person behind that account. Eventually, we all build a persona, which is above the rank for those who know one, although rank is the facial value one sees on a profile as a newcomer.

Personally, I would go with a simple double entry for the merits, displaying total and earned.

Note: The amount of Heroes that have not earned a single is around 2,5K (the OP states 3,5K). See numbers in PMs to verify this assertion.

You are perfectly right about these members, this is why I wrote at the end an issue of note:

I agree that separating the "farmers" from those who brought quality in the past but became inactive would mean an almost impossible work, unfortunately, as there are thousands.

OK, so this is what this all boils down to I guess.  And as Leo said, this has been discussed before and I'm not sure Theymos wants to do anything about it.  It isn't uncommon in other things in life for people to get grandfathered into certain positions, and whether they did or didn't, it would seem unfair to either side depending on the case. 

I don't happen to think members who haven't earned even one merit should be stripped of their rank.  That would be a kick in the pants to a lot of inactive members who were otherwise very constructive members of the forum and who probably would have earned at least one merit since the system started.  Just because there are hundreds of such members, it doesn't mean they're all shitposters IMO.  Some of them certainly might be, but I just don't think those airdropped merits need to be taken away from everyone if they haven't earned any more merits.  Obviously if Theymos thought everyone should start over again, he wouldn't have airdropped any merits.

Oh I understand you now. It seems that you understood my point, but it was I who didn't understand you

Well, this is an interesting idea as well, and, after all, this is the purpose of this topic:

- to see if others agree / disagree with the merits "worn" inside the forum by those who received the airdrop but didn't offer any quality afterwards (as they didn't receive any single merit), or even before the airdrop;
- to share ideas of how to proceed;
- in case many people here agree with the OP, to see about how many (and viceversa, of course).

And thus, theymos would have a more clear idea about members' thoughts and he may (or may not) take an action about this delicate subject.

I appreciate you didn't mean both those suggestions at once, but I was talking about all forum users, not just those who hadn't earned merit. I don't think we should be decaying airdropped merit (either completely or as a percentage) for users who haven't earned a single merit, while leaving the airdropped merit intact for those who had earned some merit. It would just lead to even more confusion.

If we are going to decay airdropped merit, I would propose we should decay it uniformly for everyone, regardless of how much (if any) earned merit they have.

Hi o_e_l_e_o, about what you quoted from OP, I didn't mean to apply both things (to remove a percentage of merits [to some] and to remove completely [to others]; it is an "or" between the two options). That's why it wouldn't be  a non-uniform decay, but an uniform one. At least that was what I thought (maybe I didn't explain clear my ideas).

Off topic, about TOAA, as a matter of fact and only by chance, I read many things about him here, while I was reading various threads. However, he never appeared in my topics before. But I understood clearly what he is doing. After all, although it seems hard, he managed to have a -18 trust in just 8 months of being here, which is impressive, in a way. Even if I wouldn't have seen his previous posts here, I wouldn't challenge someone with such a reputation. It's obvious he got it all wrong or he tries to derail the thread, that's why I didn't write anything after his reply. However, thank you very much for warning me I was fortunate though to read myself about him and thus to be able to have a clear idea (determined only by my thoughts and not being influenced by someone else) about him.