Topic: This shitty Merit System has ruined Bitcointalk and made it like Facebook - page 3. (Read 1276 times)

Thanks. And I feel kinda stupid for giving that guy 1 merit but it seemed like a good post and he "shilled" a Binance project, where the project itself does seem fine. I looked at the project not his post history or if his post was plagarized.

I agree on the Altcoin forum points you have made, and I understand the motivation behind there being no Merit sources because I noticed the Admin is really into Bitcoin (and I am too). But not everyone got many many Bitcoin from back in the day and so for me the best way was to buy cheap Altcoins and trade them into Bitcoin after huge gains, and this strategy has worked well for me.

I stand to the point you could be making quality posts in the Altcoin section for 10 years and not reach Sr. Member.  And in the last Bullrun and the months before, there definitely was more quality posts here in the Altcoin sections. Now you can hardly even get people to name some good low cap projects because they just spam the same ETH-related posts over and over.

Yeah, that post is not a good post by any means, and it looks like it's been trashed anyway since it was plagiarized.

This is argument for more reporting and more moderators, not an argument for abolishing the merit system. Without the merit system, an even higher percentage of posts would be spam.

I don't know if you remember during the ICO craze at the end of 2017 when every new coin/token was launching a signature campaign, but large areas of the forum were completely unusable due to the spam. Bitcointalk was losing traffic from real humans and actual users in place of more traffic from bots and spammers. The merit system has undoubtedly made things better.

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Having said all that, I don't disagree with some of the points you are making. There is far too much spam in the altcoin sections, and probably not enough merit circulates there either. Looking through your post history, you are not a shit poster, and so I've given you some merit. The reality is that this is a bitcoin forum, and the majority of senior and knowledgeable users (and therefore the users with the most merit to distribute) spend most of their time in the bitcoin boards. I, for example, have zero interest in discussing alts whatsoever, since the majority of them are outright scams.

I somewhere heard a story about a man who entertained people by drawing their portrait with toothpicks and he charged $100 for his work of 5 minutes. Once he was asked why dafuq one should pay this much money for a bunch of toothpicks that he/she would probably throw away after some time. Then the guy said he spent 30 years of his life in order to perfectly own his technique. So it's not about the result that you see at the given time, it's about the amount of effort and investment that one put until he got to the point where he/she is now.

"People with a lot of Merit" did not register their profiles with those "a lot of Merit" inside.

Really dont understand why are complaining about merit system. Those who want to rank up, still manage to do it. Just take a look on this topic [LOG] The ranked up members - Congratulations!. This proved that merit is distributed, and not kept to prevent others from ranking up.


But if everyone distributed all their merit to others and merit sources wont have merit limitations, this would created forum rank worthless. Everyone will be a Legendary and everyone would earn 1$ weekly for wearing signatures. Even accounts, that has only bounty reports in their post history will get Legendary status in two years. Is this what you want?

P.S. Ever thought why in Olympics only first place is awarded with gold medal and everyone else not?

Did you actually read what people have said or just saw they have a signature and then disregarded it?


They weren't ignored at all. In fact, some people agreed with some of what you were saying. The rest is just complete conspiracy theory. Do you really think people are hoarding their merit like it's some sort of precious gold? For most higher ranked users who already have achieved Hero/Legendary rank have no need for merit and I've never once in my life thought I've best not merit this post because my signature place is potentially at stake and I'm sure this is relevant to 99% of others. I think the only people who will be cautious with their merit and not send it are the ones who keep it to give to their alts or want to trade it with others in a merit for merit exchange or something but those will likely be in the minority. Personally I'm happy to give it out to anybody regardless of rank.


Most people here probably think you are wrong. You're making a biased argument from a point of frustration that you don't have enough of what you're complaining about. It's like complaining about greedy capitalism whilst in reality you're just annoyed that you don't have a mansion and Lamborghini, yet if you were in a position to have those things you'd have nothing to complain about but it's the greedy others that that are keeping you down and are to blame not you.


We have the merit system to try limit the abuse that you're complaining about and this has already been stated but I'm not sure you're reading what people are saying. Before it people were either manually or botting accounts farming them for signature campaigns. Tell me, if you were theymos what would you change to make the forum better? Do you have a solution to minimise botting and farming and shitposting whilst not punishing everyone else? Would you completely scrap the merit system or implement something else instead? At the end of the day the merit and even rank system is meaningless to anybody who isn't here just to earn. It doesn't stop you from posting at all. 


You can do this with as a newbie with zero merits. Be honest, this isn't really what you want. If you want a sig free discussion you can try the Serious Discussion boards.


I take it you didn't read my previous post then?  However, I guarantee you even if we did offer more affordable donator ranks that came with the benefits of Full and Hero Members people would still complain why do we have to pay for this, you're just being greedy, how can I afford this when I can't earn here in the first place and so on. Whatever we do we can't win and people will always complain.


Well of course they're going to give it amongst themselves mostly. If you're mostly posting exclusively in that board and can only speak the same language they're hardly going to be dishing it out to posts they either don't see or can't read/understand.

Looks like that post is copy/paste from reddit, here is the original that is posted 3 days ago (that makes it older than btctalk post) https://www.reddit.com/r/binance/comments/ld49ej/sparta_on_binance_smart_chain_the_next_snx/ so unless @Books4sale509 is behind that reddit account, this is nothing but a plagiarism case.

But generally you won't see many active merit sources in altcoin section and that's probably the main reason why even good posts there often go unmerited, or receive way less than posts in other boards, which is not a surprise as name of the forum is bitcointalk.

Yeah, a good example of a user buying an account, or waking up to post a "good" post three times in threads. Is it advertising or spam?

Here is a good example. This user wrote a good review/summary of a project 2 days ago.

No interest at all.
No reply at all.
No merit at all.

Until I just saw it.

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/get-this-extremely-undervalued-gem-while-its-still-under-1-this-is-sparta-5315277

Meanwhile 99% of the posts in this board are spam and 1% are good, but why bother make good post
when they just get ignored?

Bitcointalk keeps losing traffic despite getting so many clicks from CMC and other sources,
the Merit system has made it worse.

I wouldn't argue that the merit system is like likes. Although yes, this is how I feel about her. But here on the forum, everything is much more complicated. Newbies are looking for merit, sometimes buying it outside the forum. This is more like merit being treated as a local currency. Have you seen on Facebook that people accumulate likes and then arrange distribution of likes with an important air? Here, on the contrary, very few people just give their own merits. Everyone wants "valuable" posts.

On the contrary, if many here had a simpler attitude to merit, there would be no such excitement.

But judging by your convictions, will you do the same? In your opinion, is it easier to buy an account than to try to develop it? And if the first owner turns out to be not entirely decent? Are you ready to try on his reputation for yourself? If, according to your words, give merit, then only for posts that are useful, according to your rating system. But there are no criteria for everyone. People are different, they have the right to do whatever they want with their merits.
It's like arguing about tastes.

Keep it simple. Love likes, love merit, write good posts, and don't take on the role of a judge.

There’s also a bunch of contextual data to consider. I can talk for my local board (haven’t looked into others), with which I’ve been engaged with right from the beginning. Unfortunately, the active community is pretty small, with a couple of handful of regulars at best (on and off), and a few stray appearances. Those that are regular, are also generally decent posters, and help maintain the community active. In addition, most of the have no problem earning merits in the general English speaking boards.

Unfortunately for my local board posters, I’m a tad bit mean with my merits, and barely ever hand out more than 1 to those posts I merit (two is rather infrequent). Of course, I tend to posts there too, and every now and then, I receive some of those merit thingies. There we go, a potentially local board closed merit circle from an outside observer’s numeric point of view, but erroneously concluded if not contextualized as above. Actually, what would be seemingly wrong is to find profiles that go unmerited, yet post decent enough content (at least as decent as those merited).

I doubt that. Have you seen how many merits were sent by the most generous users? As you can see, all are top merit earners as well.

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Yes, unfortunately, this rant is pathetic, not genuine at all. I can't remember since I saw a good one. It seems that ages passed since wolwoo and the horde used to fill the forum with his rants, which were really nice to read. I was always amused when reading those posts. But OP is like a copycat.

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What club is that?

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"To gain the needed merit" - needed for what? Besides, why would you need 8 years in order to receive some merits (no matter what their purpose is)? A good poster can reach the Legendary treshold in less than a year. So why would anyone need 8 years to earn some merits?

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Why not?

It is true, one of my very few posts was in a (s)Merit giveaway topic. Still, if you look to my recent ones (and in the future ones) you won't see me interacting in the same manner. Why? Because I've been following the concept that one should focus more on actually contributing positively to the forum (either by posting, making useful threads, or threads that promote organic activity). The merit that could come from those contribution is a benefit, not an end goal. Not anymore. I reckon that I'm a different person now.

I really don't think that's a fair comparison. If you look to my thread I didn't included threads that just work on the basis of "It's my birthday, post for merit!", "I've got spare sMertis, come post and get some!", "Going to leave Bitcointalk, want to get rid of sMerits".

By contrast, each thread there OP manages to actually care about the organic growth of the forum and asks users to make something rather useful/positive either for the community or for the OP themself (learning to sign messages, learning Logic Gates and what not. Each of this actions contribute in a certain way to good posting, why it would be a bad thing?

I think you are right about this. In small communities, those that you help will tend to help you, and merit will be "circled" amongst those who are 'liked' in the community. This is a difficult problem to address because communities should have merit sources to give the community merit, and overregulation of communities can cause real harm.

Increasing the total sMerit available might somewhat alleviate this problem as sMerit will be less scarce, and there will be less of an incentive to send sMerit to only your friends.

Dont blame him. Its natural human behaviour to live in denial. In germany a huge supermarket chain (actually also popular in many other countries I guess, Lidl) after protests from farmers about low prices for meat, raised prices by 2€ per kg(2 pounds) for better treatment of animals.

These 2€ were to go to the farmers completely.

The result was it failed completely as people were not buying this meat anymore.

Despite in polls very large numbers of people like 80% say they are willing to pay higher prices if animals are raised better.
And nobody ever admitting they buy low quality/cheap meat.

That is how facebook has tricked the world and holds peoples reward system hostage. They abuse people living in denial of being
tricked, cheated and ruining the planet. Attention spans have sunk to new lows. Its very sad many forums do this too now like Facebook.

I saw in many local forums now (I wont mention names) people just keep giving each other Merit. And the more I looked into the
Merit system its a naturable behaviour. You will reward those who reward you. This does not improve forum quality at all.

Dont blame the users. Blame the Facebook-Likes-Merit system.

Says a person whose one of the firsts posts on this forum was in a merit giveaway topic
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.56053778


Then you make topic about other merit giveway topics . I like how you as new member give advice other new members how to get merit.That is classic merit hunting post.
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/--5314054


Solid tactic,pretending not to care about merit to get more merit.

So this is the reason? If you were to be leggy member yourself, you wouldn't be complaining here, would you?

There might be an argument that if users with <10 sMerit (or some other small amount) don't spend their sMerit within a certain timeframe, the sMerit will get distributed to merit sources.

Another possible way to improve the merit system might be to make it so that each merit source gets a percentage of a merit source pool instead of a fixed amount of merit. The size of the merit source pool could be a function of how many sMerit was sent in the preceding month (or another time period), and possibly involving the number of users who are active (by some definition) in the preceding month who have received at least x merit. This would mean that as more people who have received merit are active, the larger the target total sMerit transactions will be, and as more sMerit goes unused, the source sMerit of the merit sources will increase to encourage more system-wide merit spending.

I mean it sure did slow down the ranking progress but it kind of reduced garbage copy/paste posts slightly. I've been here for almost a week after taking a long break and I still see those generic 0% thought process siht posts almost everywhere.

I don't have a problem with merit as well, it's called merit for a reason, but imho the lack of definition on what makes a post meritable is a bummer.

Tho I'd love to see the most merited post among 20pages at the top, because if it's an answer or a solution for something, would be nice to have it at the top.

There is nothing preventing that from happening, certainly the merit system is not preventing that. It's not going to happen in shitcoin/bounty boards for obvious reasons, nor in Meta. Go to technical boards and have at it. And moderation there is uber-strict so no shitposters.

Once Bitcoin started becoming popular the amount of people joining this forum started to increase exponentially. It was expected that the quality would see some decline because not everyone is a tech or finance nerd and is interested in the technical aspects of BTC. The quality of posts was already going downhill, the merit system isn't a perfect solution but it's a whole lot better than allowing any random person to easily rank up and spam the hell out of the forum.