Topic: The new rule (1 Merit for Jr. Member) is already reducing spam (Read 3831 times)

As always, thanks for the information. 


That's a fair call.

There are 97 merit sources with a total merit generation of up to 21171 sMerit per 30 days.

A practical limit is the amount of time theymos wants to invest to assign new Merit sources, and probably check how they're doing once in a while.
I think the main goal of the Merit system has been reached: there's much less spam.

I don't know the number, but my understanding is it's around one hundred users are merit sources.  (feel free to quote to me the true number).  Perhaps there should be more merit sources that have a far lesser number of merits each week/month at their disposal (and overly generous merit giving should be heavily discouraged).


Nope, never said that.  Not even implied that.

what do you mean by "concentration of merit sources"
yeah, i do also think that having some "merit sources" is not good thing, if they are not trust-less, and they could not be trust-less, they have to have their own bias in rewarding users, since you reward posts that you find helpful, and that is different from each point of view, what one could find helpful, other person may not, but it is better with merit system, than without it

It doesn't sound like it - according to LoyceV's post just after mine there hasn't been a noticeable spike upwards this year.  I've always said the merit system is a good thing, but the concentration of merit sources is not a good thing (which is a discussion for another thread)

WOW.  That drop is astonishing to me--and the strange thing is that I hadn't noticed it happening except for two things:  

1) I have observed a decrease in shitposts in sections like Economics, which was getting pretty bad for a while.  I haven't been reading/posting much in Bitcoin Discussion, but I would think the quality has improved...?  
2) I've noticed that there haven't been as many new threads catching my attention for at least the last few months.  There's been much less drama, but there has also been a reduction in the number of good threads that can at least spark a discussion.

I thought I was losing interest in the forum for a while there, but now I'm starting to think that it might not be anything to do with me.  

I doubt it, but I agree that it would be an interesting question to answer with data and some research.  The reason I doubt it is because I think ICOs were doomed from the start.  None of the projects solved any real life problems, and while the tokens may have made a profit for some traders, there was no good reason for that era of crypto to have existed at all IMO. 

I think people wised up to the fact that most new ICOs were scams.  Bounty hunters weren't getting paid, or they were hit with KYC requirements at the end, and it was a 3-ring shit circus toward the end. 

Because they think their posts aren't helping enough, I have always think that posts in off topics are junkies types of posts, spamming ones that has no meaning in contributing to someone crypto life. How can a newbie user would ask 'which colour of wears you put on today, what can you gain from such discussion, so they probably feel they can post what comes to their mind in less constructive maybe one line sentence without mods deleting their shit posts. I can't even remember the last time I visited off topic section and I don't think I would.

I'd bet there's some spikes/ steady rise during the first few months

Twitter also flooded with hastag for cryptocurrency and seeing this happen in their platform they acted upon immediately banning user with cryptocurrency hashtags or promoting ICO projects or any related to cryptocurrency. They pretty much know that most of the user promoting ICO are making fake twitter account another reason for them to ban these users. If there is a rule here in the forum like this prohibiting the user to promote scam related links which seem to be lot in other sections then I guess many users here will get ban. However, that is not a small job for the mods to do I guess. Anyway, I am glad to see that the forum had improve and has way better today compared before.

Probably not, Twitter also started banning accounts for ICO spam, and after the large crypto price drop with 99% or more losses on BS tokens, I can imagine many people learned their lesson.

See Rapid shitposting attack.

I clicked on top posters, newbie, brandnew and their posts are in Off-topic. Why do they post much in Off-topic? 150, 200, 300 posts in 7 days. 

Which leads us to another interesting question: is the Merit system responsible for the demise of ICOs? Does this mean the Merit system has indirectly reduced the number of scams - supposing that genuine "honest" ICOs could survive even without bounty campaigns and Merit posters? Maybe that subject deserves a separate thread and study...

No. I stopped keeping track when the weekly number of posts dropped a lot.
We're currently at -87.1% of the 353813 weekly posts mentioned when I started this topic. I guess this result is a combination of the Merit system and the demise of ICOs.

For the last year, you can quite easily find the post count at the start of each week in my post archive. Without checking the data, I haven't seen much effect from the lockdown when I occasionally checked weekly data.

You can find the past 7 days data here. The post made in last 7 days is only 45543 which is very low as compare to the last data shared on this thread.

Source: https://loyce.club/active/7d.html

Sorry to necro bump this thread, have you continued to study the decline of posting over time?  It'd be interesting to see if there was a rise during the Covid-19 outbreak and subsequent lock-downs.

In that case, you can collect some data during ATH, during BTC at $10k and the current situation. Then you will have a little idea how much it has been decreased due to price crash and how much for the new 1 merit system.

Update:

Update:

The number of posts is still dropping, but less fast. I'm curious to see if it goes up again once crypto keeps recovering as it did in the past week.

I still think that it is, since I have also noticed the difference seeing threads with no more posts from newbies that might still be a good indication, you were right tho to just atleast wait for the price to go up but IMO your stats still relates to the current new rule.

If ever that the price will go up and the newbies will be swarming up again then that forfeits your data

It was good to reduce spam in the forum. However, if you will going to check and see there are still a lot of work to reduce those spam because until now the problem is still a problem. We could rely on the good results of the statistics but the posts that are visually shown in some threads were an eyesore to the eyes and it even contribute to almost 50% of it in the total number of replies in the SMT.