Topic: sMerit Senders & Receivers – Weight of top 100 and 200 weekly contributors (Read 640 times)

I have a less than average amount to send then.

I've never been out all source merit, so that's not possible.

Perhaps at some point in the last 30 days you sent some of your earned sMerits.

Well I'm obviously a junior merit source. Obviously I need to do more work, and make less noise.

I would say my quota would be the amount left, plus the amount sent in the past 30 days. If I count those, my current source smerit is 20 higher than what I expected. That means I either remember the wrong value, or it went up by 20.

I don't think my quota is as high as that, but I don't know how to check it. I'm not sure it is relevant anyway, as it depends on the amount you award once you have received your initial allotment.

The average Merit source has 2785 Merit per year to spend. That's only enough to give a few people a high rank, and a large part of the available Merit goes to users who don't need it to rank up.
I don't think more sources will be a problem, Merit isn't supposed to be a restriction for people with good posts.

200 merit sources is a lot and is more than double than the current number of merit sources (84) we have and I do think this will give more harm than good to the merit system. With these number we can expect that the 18,292 receiving with at least 1 merit be more than doubled if that happened. Still with the process we have via screening I don't think we need to jump in that kind of number as we still need to know who is deserving to become a merit source as we cannot really put the role as a merit source to who can abuse the system.

I created a board that was designed to help Italian members to produce posts that were worthy of merit on the international boards here. I did this because there were complaints that the Italian members were being under-merited. I had absolutely no interest, so I have now removed the board. We are now in a global world, and, whilst it is important to preserve national sovereignty and identity, it is equally important to be able to communicate internationally. Like it or not, English is the only possible lingua franca, and it is the language of the Eton/Oxford created Deep State elite.

Merit trading accusations shouldn't just be based on the transactions without checking the actual posts. As long as the posts are worth it, that doesn't matter. My name has been on lists of accounts sending reciprocal merits too. Check BPIP: I've received 25 Merit from Vod, and sent back 12. I don't think that makes us alts or Merit traders

I think you misunderstood what I mean by "care". What I really wanted to say is that even though there are a lot of good posts, most of the time they just read it and don't give a damn about meriting those posts. Another problem that I just realized recently is they're afraid of merit abuse accusations because the members who deserved merits at the moment are limited (probably around ~60). Basically, it is impossible to avoid reciprocal merits in my local section IMHO. Which is why Indonesian members rely on their mods to get some merits as they're the only sources at the moment.


I saw them in Telegram group for bounty hunters, many times. Sometimes I got a pm asking to trade merit for money, or asking to give them some smerit that I have to help them rank up. They're seriously sick.

 

This i believe is happening in each local section on a different scale, in the Italian one we have a lot of legendary users which are probably sitting on ~400 sMerit each, but right or wrong that it is are not giving them away and there are plenty of chances or reasons to do it imo.

Centralization of senders is kind of expected. ~80 merit sources (if they're all doing their jobs) would be spending 50%+ of merits by definition.

Centralization of receivers is a bit worrying. I'm trying to send merits "blindly" without looking at the person's name/avatar/etc and it seems to be working well (500 or so distinct users merited so far) but that's still just a drop in the bucket.


To clarify this - there is no great strategy here, it's just math on how many posts I have time to read and how many sMerits I have available. Theymos has strongly suggested to not hoard them so out they go.


That appears to be the case, yes.

Vod uses Recent merits to update on the fly.

Right, thanks for that. I often switch between IPad and Laptop and it is as you say on the Laptop (IPad doesn’t).
By the way, it’s really great how data gets update on the BPIP site on-the-fly. I was checking the mouse-over feature and some data on my merit data was updated on the BPIP that wasn’t even on my Bitcointalk session like a minute before.

Yep.  Some people just don't care about the merit system, and others may not even know that much about it--it depends on how much bitcointalk means to you and why you're here.  And then there's the people who have sMerits and sell them or give them to their alts or friends.  I suspect the former group of members isn't trivial.  Those are the people who know how valuable merits are to people and mean to profit from it, and they're the ones who don't give a shit about the merit system except to the extent that they can make money.

You don't see threads here offering merit for sale, but I've heard it happens off-site, and we've certainly seen threads naming merit sellers and traders here, so I know it's happening. 

I don't merit posts because I care about the people posting, I merit them because I care about the forum. I've just merited your post, but I don't know you, so why would I care about you as a person? But, you made a valid point and a decent post. By rewarding that, I help improve the forum.
Meriting people you care for could easily become merit abuse.
I think it's safe to say most users don't really care for the forum, other than using it as an ATM.

I still give only 1 Merit most of the time. I just did the math: I've only given 92 more merit than I would have been able to give without being a source. I've never been able to completely empty my source merit pool. Even worse: I've received more Merit than I've sent! I'm slowly catching up though.
I'm pretty sure theymos increases a source's merit supply if he spends them all (wisely).

I don't think the 460k "active" members are all that active, and many will be alt-accounts. But on the other hand, this also counts users who only received 1 Merit in half a year, including Merit trading and merit alt-accounts. The sad truth is that most users post crap, but we knew that already, and that's why Merit was introduced in the first place.

Me too, it keeps piling up, and I haven't even touched my earned sMerits since May 17.

That's admirable, but I don't do it. I only Merit posts I stumble upon anyway. You should probably do the same, considering how much frustration it gives you searching for that rare good post.

I am an affiliate marketer so I do build my email list. Normally on a list when you blast an email, 3 to 5% click thorough rate¹ considers a healthy rate. Depending on the marketing skill and managing the  email list a person can increase it to huge level. I have seen 89% CTR for an email list of over 400K emails.

I understand activities for an email list and for a forum is not something that you can compare however looking at the ratio from your data - it seems to me that no matter what platform you are in, a community tends to follow a rule of 3 to 5% response rate.

¹ _{Number of clicks you receive on a link that you have on your email.}

I'm seriously considering the reverrse of my ignore list - a list of members that are worth checking for meritable posts. Obviously this will lead to further centralisation of merit circulation. At the moment I've got over 200 sMerit to award, and that's after I gave away a few this morning. I started a couple of threads which I hoped might create some decent replies, but this is a bit of a thankless task, as they usually sink to the secondary pages under the weight of bounty spam and other rubbish by those desperate to increase rank.

If I get time, I spend an hour or so going through the 4th and 5th index pages looking for decent posts. The pickings are richer there, as all the low lifes tend to keep the rubbish floating on the top.

I'd say that all the factors you mention combined are what’s going on our local board. There aren’t too many people active lately, and those that are good enough in English do tend to post more often away from the local board. Actually, most of these members conform the nucleus of good posters with only a couple of exceptions posting exclusively on our native local language.
We don’t really even have too many spammers (yet) in comparison to other sections, so there is an issue of overall activity, which is way less than I’d expect for one of the most spoken languages in the world. I doubt that merit is the cause behind, since that would imply researching before joining which I figure seldom happens before joining.