Topic: Theymos, why are you hoarding your sMerit? (Read 1121 times)

I know, is was supposed to be a bit of a joke but...I'm not a native English speaker so, nevermind...

They are almost all in the same thread....and the OP made this thread weeks ago...

Actually I was holding on to my smerits becaouse i wanted to give them to new users for good topics because they would aprreciate them much more than older memebers who already have lots of smerit. But I have not yet had this kind of chance and I started to give them for posts which I appreciate even if the OP already is a Sr or above memeber.

I think in case of Theymos , it would be easier to give bigger chunks to users who contribute to forum and then they could give smerit to other topics since they have time to do so. Theymos certianly does not have time to do it.

Maybe he did listen to Vod after all
Almost 200 in 5 mins

Making a meritable post from lower or mid ranks is feasible as can be seen on the BitcoinTalk Merit Dashboard. I’ve just modified it to show the percentage of sMerit received and sent by ranks:




19,41% of total awarded sMerit has gone to Full Members, 22,24% to Members, 7,64% to Jr. Members and 2,83% to Newbies.
Ok, newbies is very low, but hardly anyone who is a newbie is going to really put too much effort into their posts until they realise the need to do so if they want to rank-up. By the time they become Jr. Members they start to understand they need to post more meaningful content and thus we see a certain degree of sMerit going their way. And yes, being a heavy bounty hunter is very often going to run against their interest if they want to earn Merit. Each one of us is free to choose the path he wishes to follow, but merit and heavy bounty reporting are rather much divergent paths.

As seen above Jr. Member is 3 point below Hero Rank in terms of received sMerit. Fine, the population is greater on the Jr. Rank than the Hero Rank, but merit required by the higher ranks is immense in comparison: A Jr. Member move 10% closer to Member for each sMerit he receives. A Hero moves 0,20% closer to Legendary for each merit he gets. That’s quite a gap there to think about too.

In terms of lowering the expectations for post from the lower ranks, I believe many do, even if a post should be meritable with disregard to the rank. What is true is that new content is not that easy to generate. We often see posts and guides that verse on the exact same topic that has already been treated before. Second and subsequent iterations of the same kind of topics are likely to go unmerited, so a bit of effort must also be made to try to bring something either new or with a different perspective/approach.

I started hoarding my smerit i guess? Aside from the fact that Most of the good contents are from the older members who are already on the hero or legendary ranks. I also doesn't feel like giving it to them since there is no point specially for the legendary users. Theymos might not bother searching for posts to give smerits i guess?

Most of the merits are with the hero member or above and most of the merit source are also hero member or above. They are here from the beginning of the forum and they are very much efficient and knowledgeable in the cryptoconcurrency/cryptotechnology. They are very mature in their writing the post,So their requirement for the merit giving  is very high. They want post like their quality.So it very tough for the newbie and jr.memebr to earn merit. WE cant match the post quality with senior members (hero member or above) .

Criteria for giving merit is different for newbie ,jr.member ,member,sr.member,hero member and legendary member.There should be less expectation from the newbie,jr.member at the time of merit giving.


Another reason is that,most of the newbie and jr.member,member are doing only bounty campaign,due to them most of the senior member(hero member or above ) do not want see the post of newbie and jr.member,member.They ignore all the newbie,jr.member and member due to them.

Better to hoard them than confusing people, honestly I thought marlboroza is his alt at some point because he sent him 50 merits once, given the human nature I thought he was abusing the merit system.

Only when you have some merits to actually give it as thought. I just had my moment now without those though.

Checking through the sMerits awarded per TX, the numbers tend to be of up to 5 sMerits on their own by nature in roughly 95% of the TXs:
As a curiosity, multiples of five are more favoured is terms of awarding than the surrounding numbers (so 5 is much more awarded than 3,4,6,7, 10 much more than 8,9,11,12 and so on). Our mind seems to favour basic numbers (1,2,3,4,5) and easy patters (multiples of five).

I believe thast the reverse is better. The maximum merit to be awarded by one person for a post should be reduced to 5. If the post is any good, then it will receive merits from multiple members.

What do you assume will he do with hoarded merits ? Do not tell me that he plans to sell them for a living.

If I was at his place, I would been meriting posts with another profile.

I am surprised to see some of the comments here.

If I am not wrong, he was the one who coded and introduced this system, so it is immature to doubt his intentions for not being able to spend all his merits.

I think the minimum merits reward should be increased to 10merits per post that way when you merit a post or comment it will add value to the owner.

Just read through the comments and found out some very important and interesting contributions, but notice they where getting just 1-2merits. It's discouraging.

Theymos, the forum admin, has actually allocated thousands of sMerits to merit sources.
I have also seen Theymos sent his sMerits away to deserved guys who posted constructive threads/ topics.

---

I am not sure the statistics of @Vod is right or not, but it it is right, Theymos definitely should give his sMerits away more regularly.
Unfortunately, I guess our prestigious admin has been very busy to do this on daily basis.

Looks like it has the same odds as winning the national lottery as to squeeze a merit out of GrumpyKitty. 

Perhaps having sMerit where you can choose to use it as a +merit or -merit is the answer.

Asking him to spend his time spending his merits is like asking Mark Zuckerberg to spend his time liking pics of Facebook users.

Forget about theymos smerit, he is much busy. We can't blame him. Here is thousands people more holding smerit and never want to spend it. For that reason merit system is drying.


Honestly want to say, I think you don't have much time to a look who deserve merit. Many quality & useful post here behind of shitpost, some people are spending too. Unfortunately wherever I seen merited post ( English board) some limited people merited there. I don't know they are source or what.  

He gives more sMerit in his second account.

@theymos_away https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=merit;u=349090

But I still think it would be better if sMerits could only be used in 60 days. If not used, they will go back to a pool and send to random users or merit sources.

Thanks - I probably shouldn't have mentioned the Talk merit thing, I just wondered why the comment was there, but it is obviously outside the scope of your report. I just wondered if that was the cause of the 2, but obviously it isn't.

No.  It takes the total amount you have received, divides it by two, and subtracts what you have sent.  If the number is positive, it lists it.  Simple as that.  Once Theymos posts inital merit, obviously I'll be able to calculate better.


2 is positive.  -2 would be negative.  Maybe I'll add color into those numbers to help.


Not sure what you mean... BPIP is not tracking forum comments yet...  ?

I checked my listing, and I've got a couple of questions.

It doesn't show my sMerit total - is this because I'm a source, and Theymos isn't?

I've got a worst trust rating of 2 - is that positive or negative? I've got a comment about my admission that Talk Merit is an alt of mine in there. I'm not sure why that needed to be posted, as the association is posted allover the forum. I think it's even in my profile.

UPDATE:

https://bpip.org/profile.aspx?p=theymos


This time, I believe my numbers are correct... 

Yep.  Got into my database and deleted my primary table.

I have to figure out how they did it.  

It may have been QS or it may have been Theymos as a revenge for this thread.   

Thread locked.  Please see
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/bpip-problems-3321563

Not the fault of anyone
Many people keep a lot of sMerit, but they have very little time to put it into quality articles, every day there are many posts posted on the forum.

The pleasure that is brought to me on a daily basis, by seeing the frustration all those spammers and BS posters are experiencing right now, exponentially ranks out my own frustration for remaning at my current level.

That - an sich - is a perfect reason to give the creator of the Merit system a nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize.

I just updated @Quickseller's profile and the 'el1t3 h4x0r' rank it's not there anymore.

Also back to the old -113 trust.

Lol, that is really there.

For the record, I had nothing to do with that. But it looks like someone might have hacked Vod's website

I agree with this. I think it was an extra job for them to read all the posts/replies then analyze if it was recommended for merit. Be like " What would I get if I send him merits? He'll rank up and ruin the forum"

How does your website calculate the trust score? I couldn't help but notice that according to your website, Quickseller is the most trusted user on Bitcointalk:

https://i.imgur.com/DNM3ub7.png

IMO the administrator of this board should be stingy.  He should be impressed only by the significant comments, and spend his energy on Administration. 

Ouch.  I'm not that far into despair yet lol.  

This forum could very well be my purpose in life, so I am attempting to use all my sMerit in a responsible way.  It's just taking a lot of time I don't have at the moment.

Even Theymos realizes how bad the quality of posting is here--that's why he implemented the merit system in the first place.  It's a bit ironic that he's being stingy with his sMerits, but not surprising.  He probably sees the need to merit people who have some ranking up to do, as opposed to Legendaries, but is having some trouble actually finding posts worth meriting.  

It's a maddening problem, even for him.  It's not that he's hoarding sMerits--he's just giving them out slowly, very deliberately, to members who deserve them.  That takes time, and it doesn't help that people keep meriting Theymos and thus giving him more sMerits to "hoard".

Ironic but not baffling by any means.  I really think people should stop sending merits to Theymos and start giving them to people who need to rank up AND who write well.  That's not easy, but giving merits to Theymos is kind of a waste, even if you appreciate what he writes.  He's got so many sMerits at this point that they're just going to sit in his account.  It'd be much better if all of those users who give them to him would find people in need and who deserve them.

Ok, I don't want to turn META into a troubleshooting board for my app  so I'll just post this last thing.

I recently refreshed my merit database with the database dump from Thursday night.
https://bitcointalk.org/merit.txt.xz 

The probability is 57820/58119 (99.5%) that your problem lies in those records.

Well I do have only 154 merit check my profile, received 144 and 10 initial (I was member when merit came )

So I guess there is something wrong with the calculations.
When I get back to my PC I'll investigate it.


Edit: updated the two new merit.

iasenko's merit score was actually 152 (now 154 after your 2 merits), not 175, so something is wrong for the counting of received merits.  What I do not understand is that I think iasenko's sMerit balance was 152 / 2 - 51 = 25, but he wrote he had 21.

How can that be?

You have received 175 merit means you have 87 sMerit, of which you have spent 51.

I parse the new merits from here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=merit;stats=recent

It doesn't show WHO the merit is sent to, so I have to calculate that.  I hope there isn't a bug.  :/

I'll make a link to show each individual merit rating.

While 777 sMerits (btw lucky number!) must be the largest number, it seems many people including me are hoarding sMerits more or less and cannot find appropriate good quality posts, so theymos may be going to introduce the system for decaying sMerits and then magnifying past Merits mentioned in the quote below.  The strategy is similar to magnify the amount of sMerits for each submission in the future suggested by Vod above, but in this way theymos was planning to magnify the Merits already sent in the past as well.  It seems this could be a resolution for the current situation.

---

There is a link for "Update this profile now" at the left top, but after update it still says "Has at least 36 sMerit available".  It seems that "Has received 175 merit" is wrong for some reason as your Merit score is actually 152.

And you are right, maybe you can save those sMerit too.  
Because poor-quality content will increase and sMerit still save. But, it depends the people want to give it or not.
And, may i know what do you mean destroy merit option?

Sitting on 99 sMerit, who wants to impress me

Come on guys - if Theymos is a merit source, and I'm sure he is. Then if he gave himself 1,000 source merits, he would need to award all of those before he got close to his sMerits. Don't forget that source merits are replaced every 30 days, so he would need to award the replacements as well.

Worthy contents it is. IMO Only few people is really reading threads and post per post, I will not deny that even me is guilty of that doing. Nowadays I only read threads that was discussed by high ranking forum members because most of it have interesting topics and these threads that they made are already have merits so I'm doubting to give them sMerit anymore as I know that they don't need it anymore(am I selfish by this or not using sMerit in a proper way?)

source merits are awarded before sMerits, so just because a merit source has sMerit to  spend, it doesn't mean that he isn't awarding source merits. To get the full picture, you need to read about the merit system, and to look at the number of merits being awarded.

Very few people seem to understand the merit system, maybe I should add an explanation on fit to talk, or maybe I'll create an audio file about it.

Theymos was the main proponent of the merit system. I think having such numbers of sMerit doesnt mean he was hoarding. Theymos was also sa main merit source. Just think before you post.

He can give those smerits to anybody that gets His interest, but sure he'll be picky, and giving His smerits is not that an easy task, He is the administrator so He must choose the best of the best. However,  the distribution of smerits are getting lesser from time to time, it's not just only admin theymos that Hoards smerits.

@ACvinegar

You need to read about the differences between merits, SMerits and source merits.

It looks like your numbers might be a bit out of date.

Hmm, I tested my account but the calculations are not correct,
http://dev.martinlawrence.ca/bpip/profile.aspx?p=iasenko

It says that I have at least 36 smerit but I actually have only 21.

I'll upload a screenshot for proof when I get to my PC

Maybe theymos were reserved their smerits for some purposes, because I believe that time will comes smerits will be eliminate.

In my opinion time will comes and smerit will be vanish! I'm sure that in the near future, limited accounts were rank ups and most of that accounts are in the lower ranks. Imagine 2:1 merits/smerits so there's a possibility that those accounts who cannot reach the legendary will stock on their current positions. Because as per computation:

For example:
1,000 Legendary accounts with 1,000 smerits each
Total smerits of 1,000,000 if they distributed it into other accounts it will turns to 500,000 almost half of smerits will vanish and if it is continue distributed that will be happen:
 1,000,000
 500,000
 250,000
 125,000
 62,500
 31,250
 15,625 until reach the "0"

So there's a possibility that the newcomer are not to ranking up or they cannot meets their target smerits to rank up.
I have a question if time comes that smerit turns into "0" did smerit refill to sustain the merit/smerit system?

I have not worried myself much on getting merit or not but I have been on the view that merit shouldn't really come when you have made a screen filled post that will gulp one hour of reader's time to read and assimiliate or a post filled with copied links. I have believed in sensible and reasonable post.

However, I also submit that Theymos and the likes might not have given out more merits than they have got because they are actually busy but some very high ranking and known members can't give because they are more like waiting for a post made by nullious and the likes as if every member is equally gifted.

I was not surprised to see that I got a merit from a legendary member, I only knew the post has been read.

I've read a number of Merit sources saying they can't find enough good posts to Merit. I think a combination of the existing Merit sources giving more Merit per post and increasing the number of Merit sources with less to give out each would be a good approach to take.

I couldn't agree more.. Like me, I don't think of it much not like when it was first implemented. To be merited or not is not my priority now in thia forum. I may not rank higher than where I am now but atleast there are still bounties that need my focus more than brooding and brooding about how to get merits. It's here, live with it. Focus more on what's necessary...

I understand smerits is a reward to evaluate the contribution to the forum, but I really can not imagine where someone smerits to store and can use it as well. For example, I have two smerits, which one is in my wallet? How can I use it? Have you participated in a senior forum that can help me explain this?
thank you

This is not a problem with the merit system, this is a problem with the quality of the content and the sockpuppets. For reference: I have around 300 sMerit right now and nobody to give them to, nor do I plan to look through garbage to find someone. I'm still waiting for a destroy merit option.

he might be busy, or he just don't want some hassle. he has a lot of work compared to us.

I agree.  I have to struggle to spend more merit than I take in.   It's not that there is no worthy content, it's just I am busy, and being fair in rewarding merit takes time and resources.  :/

I am going to have to increase my merit amount per submission.  Inflation I guess. 

Theymos isn't the only one guilty of this.

The truth is that the sMerit rain has ceased. The initial excitement around it has died down. Now, most forum memebers don't remember it even exists or to give it any more.

Is he really hoarding it? I don't think so or maybe got no time for giving that much of sMerit to those who deserve it, after all he's still a forum member(admin) that's capable of receiving merits and we can't do anything about it  .

Only if he wants to cheat the system.

Interesting how your mind comes to that...

He actually has unlimited sMerit.

http://dev.martinlawrence.ca/bpip/profile.aspx?p=theymos

Shameless plug I know, but 777 sMerit?  Wow!