Topic: The merit system, as laudable as its purpose is, is flawed. (Read 478 times)

The growth and adoption of blockchain technologies have exceeded the forums moderation capacity at some point like in other fields the most common one being exchanges where to many people were joining and got stuck in a backlog. With too much information it became increasingly hard to filter and moderate quality content especially in areas that have seen exponential growth such as Altcoins.

There are a lot of real viable projects that have the potential to scale and are worth vesting or looking into and good low level members who explain the utility of their systems in ICO threads for example. That said because there are so many opportunities I completely agree it is incredibly difficult to keep up to date on every topic and board and Bitcointalk was originally designed to mainly focus on Bitcoin.

Over time the natural extension and the central focal point of the forum has made it so that the focus steadily but surely has moved to blockchain
and to act as a role of navigators and investigators who collaborate and work together in a moving ecosystem to filter content.

Centralizing a reward system does make it much more difficult for individual users to grow if the network of users who can moderate and nurture quality content creators is too small as the pool is limited to the capacity of any individuals empowered in the organization, and among those that can curate they may be selectively focused as a group to particular sub-sections of the forum and thread topics leaving a large niche of content unseen or viewed by rewarding eyes.

In the long run an agglomeration of posts in meta regarding good content does seem inevitable unless an organic growth mechanism is enforced and created, limiting the utility of Smeta will just further highlight and create issues.

The merit system is new depending on how these issued are addressed it can become an organic system that fuels and fixes itself or a rigid enforced system it all depends on who is left with the keys to moderate it and the favoritism or generalization towards certain individuals in the system.

In regards to old quality posts in essence the merit system did acknowledge that however by sprinkling starting merit based on ranking.
I agree though there are a lot of old users who delete their posts and their ranking did not represent their contribution at the time of implementation although we will be able to measure if the system works over time based on activity merits rewarded and content generated.

From what I have seen so far though not that many merits seem to be given out in a day when you consider how many users there are in activity.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=merit;stats=recent

Sorting by recent posts just today there are roughly 50 posts per minute with 1 merit given out every minute with large gaps of 10 minutes where no one is merited and periods where a lot of merit are rewarded in a minute. Kind of like mining ha-ha.
Whether that is a good reward to posting ratio or if 98% of user responses are considered low value posts well that remains to be seen in aggregate.

Right - it's totally understandable that posts made before the merit system was implemented are unlikely to receive merit now, but I've read several very good posts today that were technical in nature, rather than just opinions I agreed with, and not a one of them was merited. I think DarkStar_ identified the culprit - a lack of merit sources in that dank basement of a subforum that I tend to frequent: altcoins\mining. 

Perhaps a post from a mod in that subforum explaining about the new merit system and how/why to use it would correct that?

I should note that I am not anti-merit, per se - I think it will actually reduce shitposting and, hopefully, curb signature campaign abuse (I have nothing against those, either, as long as the person hosting the sig can actually explain what it's about) - I just don't want to see this forum turn into another bodybuilding.com...

It's problematic because posts pre-merit implementation will get less (or no) attention from people who are prospective sMerit users. In that regard, you will only see the most notorious old posts being merited (i.e. thread-starters of large threads, old quotes from notable members, etc.)

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It's not just you. Think of the merit system as kind of like rewarding active constructive posters. Sort of in the same vein as the activity system but requiring constructive posts.

IIRC theymos has a much lower threshold for quality posts. Something along the lines of, good posts are 1-3 merits, excellent ones are 10/20+. The problem with this idea is the huge limitation of sMerit income, as there may be plenty of these 'good posts'. Personally, I believe that using merit in this way is unsustainable. I'm quite frugal with my use of it but I do sprinkle some around when I find nice replies.

Damn you for giving me merit! Although I guess that post was fair game...

But, yes, virtually all of my posts are in the altcoin\mining section, and that is where I have seen lots of laudable posts which, sadly, go unmerited. Hopefully as more time passes more people will understand the new system; I had a head-start on it from another forum I used to frequent which relied heavily on merit (and part of the reason I quit frequenting it is because everyone was obsessed with merit [or, in that forum's case, rep]).

I think the root of your issue is that there aren't many (or any) merit sources in the Altcoins (Mining) sections, which seems to be where all of your posts are located. Hopefully theymos fixes that as time passes.

Yep, I totally agree with this - it will be much harder for those who consistently (or, at least, mostly) write quality posts to move up in rank.

I may be deluded - entirely possible from all the magic smoke* I've inhaled - but I think I am the proverbial poster child for this: nearly 600 posts - most of which took considerable time and/or effort to create and are informative, rather than interrogative - and just 9 merit received. I invite anyone to look at my post history and judge for themselves but PLEASE DO NOT GIVE ME ANY MERIT! This is not a thinly-veiled begging thread! And the previous two disclaimers were not thinly veiled deflections that actually meant "give me merit" - I really don't care about merit at all and I don't want any from people reading this post, but I do think that most of my posts are substantive and generally lean towards giving back, rather than taking, and I am presenting them as an example of a broader problem, and one that I only noticed when I noticed another newish member hadn't received any merit even though her/his posts are almost always useful: few merit-worthy posts actually receive merit.


* - that would be the stuff that makes electronics work, and not the /other/ kind of magic smoke your dirty mind** thought of.
** - not that I have a problem with that magic smoke, either - I'm hard-core Libertarian like that.

EDIT - Damn you all who gave me merit! You're undermining my credibility, what little of it there is! 

This is assuming that all those 892303 accounts are active. Shave off the bots/inactive users and that number will be higher. Next, remove all the farmed accounts, and if we check out rizzlarolla's list then we can see that there's going to be a large number of farmed accounts. Those are the ones that have been detected thus far. Now, think about how many have not been found. And then if you want to remove over 50% of the forum members who are spammers and don't really help the forum then we're getting somewhere.

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Point is, it should be difficult to gain merit. It means that being a "Senior Member", being called "Legendary" should actually mean something. Not just a fake rank, like Executive Assistant Managerial Custodian.

That is a limited list. You know not how many users have sent 100+ merits.

A lot of those accounts are probably inactive. If you're banned, nuked, or don't post at all, you don't need to rank up. The number of active users is likely more in the 100k range, or lower. Out of those active users, not all of them post quality. Many just enter spam megathreads, repeat what's already been said, and don't deserve merit. Those that deserve them should be getting them.

My ChipMixer campaign analysis is a good example of this.



Is there a page 2 of that? The lowest on that page has sent 124 merit, so there could be lots of people who sent 100 or more. Some people have also spent their source merit slower, as 30 days haven't passed either.

I will talk about two points:
1. we have 65637 merit was sent in the last 30 days and about 892303 number of accounts.
With a simple calculation I think we will get on 0.07 merit/account. Really
2. theymos talk about 57 merits source, if you check this https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=merit;stats=topsend will find less than 50 member send 100 merits.

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I don’t know but a simple calculation will get into "Deadlock zone" [No account will be rankup].
80% of total accounts get 30% of all the required points.

This kind of system already exists lol. Report a post and it gets flagged for review by a moderator.

I wouldn't be against reducing activity for spammers, but it's a rather inelegant solution that will require a lot more hands-on work by mods, and they seem to be short-handed enough as is. Merits are pretty awesome in that it will completely stop spammers from ranking up, therefore de-incentivizing shitposting, and doesn't require too much moderation. The only problem with it is that it also makes it much harder for regular users to rank up, which is probably against theymos's intentions.

It would be best to give it time as it will probably be polished in the future.

Activities abused, trust abused, then abusements will come to merit points. That is normal evolution, the forum has to grow to deal with the fact. Merit system have to and will be adjusted in the near future

Merits or Demerits, are basically the same. Both system can be abused, well actually almost all system can be abused if an individual wants to. Both have the same purpose, to reduce spammers and account farmers by either giving merits or demerits. And let's say that both have limits in sending merits/demerits which accounts the abuse part.

In my opinion, one thing that made merits better than demerits is the approach of it. People would love to be praised rather than be noticed by their mistakes.

I would rather have preferred a demerit system instead of a merit system, where users get fixed demerit points to give out to users who are abusing their bitcointalk profiles for posting waste messages just to complete their bounty requirements! Once a particular post gets 5 demerit points from various users, the post should be flagged for the admins to review, if everything is right about the demerit system, the admins should decrease the activity by a value of 28 to make sure the user posts good posts and not just say thanks, looking forward, when lambo etc.
I myself agree merits system being flawed, but if it really makes the bitcointalk forum go for informed posts and less like reddit, i am all in!

Don't worry little Pinnoy fella, I will hand you out a merit, for the Don to see that I understand and know how to support the family. I'd put some merits in you and you could put some green trust in me when I have joined the family.

I was talking with theymos the other day about rewarding the top merited members with a hefty Bitcoin amount in about 7-10 months from now (note that I'm lying, theymos doesn't talk to people like me a.k.a lowlife low levels of society).

I don't. I'm personally not giving out many merits to Legendaries as well, because they don't *really* need it.

I am not a merit source and do not wish to be, but I'm trying to use up all the merit points I have on members who are below legendary rank.  In the beginning I think I gave out quite a few to legendaries and then sort of realized that they don't need them as much--except recently I realized members like DarkStar_ are using merits to judge post quality for sig campaigns.  That makes sense, and I tend to find that higher-ranked members have survived long enough to achieve that because of good post quality.  Not all of them, but a good majority.

Also a notice to the lower-ranked members I give merit to:  You don't have to reciprocate.  That's happened recently and it gives the appearance that we're trading merit, and that isn't the case.

Oh, I did not know that. I sticked to theymos' post about it.
I took a quick look and things were not indeed as bad as I assumed, but 11975 merit per month doesn't seem a large number to me. According to https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=merit;stats=topsendat, 64493 were sent in total and the system is pretty recent.
Maybe it is theymos' objective to reduce the available merit to efficiently get rid of shitposts and highlight quality posts.


Yes I am aware of that. And that's why I pointed out that the new system could seem unfair to newcomers.

To be honest I think that there already is a certain part of abuses of the merit system. As long as they are a little bit smart, abusers won't get caught by a simple top compilation related to the subject. Admins surely have a lot more tools to monitor abuses, but there is always a way to slip through the cracks.

A lot of the users have ranked up by simply being here, since you didn't need to post quality posts or anything constructive to get a rank, you simply have to be so mostly, ranks earned in previous year were how long have you been here.

Also, regarding the merit black market, more hacking,etc... no problem, someone might hack the system or even find some glitch, who knows, but that given merit amount will be shown in here and will raise some eyebrows, therefore possibly getting that account banned.

There are merit sources on the forum, which are people chosen by theymos. Those people get a continuous supply of sMerit, where any sMerits they spend from their source comes back in 30 days.

Can't say anything about spamming Meta for merit in the future, but you don't have to touch Meta to earn merit right now. I'm currently running the ChipMixer signature campaign, and I'm keeping track of participants (58 people right now) and their merit count. These are people with good posts, and they have earned a decent number amount of merit considering how new the system is, all of them have not touched a merit review thread, and most do not or rarely post in Meta.





Obviously, the campaign does not represent the forum's "population", but it is a decent sample of quality posters.


The end goal I assume for theymos is to have decent representation of merit sources in all sections. Hopefully this becomes a non issue in the future, and I don't think it's too much of an issue right now. You can't expect to gain merit in the Games and Rounds section (mostly giveaways) for example. There are also merit sources in local sections.


Hard to tell without more time.


More merit sources will be added as time passes. We started with I believe 50 merit sources, now we're at 57. I don't think any merit sources would be involved with merit black market stuff, as it's pretty obvious. The people doing the black market stuff will run out after time.

My point is that the current merit sources will never compensate the inital smerit quantity induced by ranks.
There HAS to be future merit sources. Otherwise I can see a lot of consequences, such as rank up rarification, involving a huge boom in really high ranked signature campaigns payouts, merit black market, more hacking, and so on...