Bitcoin Forum

Just got to understand this new system and I like it, new winds blowing on Bitcointalk. Thanks to theymos for trying out new innovative things. But I see one issue and perhaps you can tell me where or why my thinking is wrong.

With copycat scamcoins like DeepOnion that have a relatively large "community presence" on Bitcointalk, a lot of merit points arrive at those very people's accounts who're widely considered scammers or not trustworthy. Simply because those communities are designed to shill the creators and high ranking accounts of the respective scams. If there were some sort of demerit points, the very same user's merit would likely even be negative, rather than high on merit points. Often times, the merit would probably become as negative or similarly negative as the already existing trust ratings. Now, though, you may even see users -16 trust rated, yet with a lot of merit.

I think there is a need for demerit points because of this reason. I see theymos said he can implement this easily later on.

Now I don't want more fights on Bitcointalk and of course demerit points can cause issues in the same way, for instance rivaling communities demeriting each other. So this would be a similar issue as well, perhaps even worse. I really don't know what's the solution. Do you have any innovative ideas?

Thanks for reading

We already have a thread for this :

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2821510.0

krishnaverma, thanks for letting me know. No need to quote my entire post.

However my post is far more elaborated than the one linked (imo). So what's your opinion on this matter?

You far more elaborated place would have the same importance in the first thread.

Sorry, I don't understand this sentence. Please stay on topic. If you have anything to say concerning the actual content I'm all ears.

Sorry I meant " You far more elaborated post would have the same importance in the first thread."

I don’t think being able to De-Merit would be a good idea, people who have certain rifts would just ruin it by adding loads of De-Merit points to each other. The system would be a joke & would likely be abused by alt accounts even more than the new Merit system might/probably is being abused.

Plus scammers can De-Merit all of their haters using it,
(scammer has a lot of account to bump and shill their thread)
we do not have many people who care about other people on altcoin board.
and when someone trying to expose them,
De-Merit will come after him,and guess what will happen to him ?
he won't bother with it anymore because it's totally pointless exposing them while in return he get a lot of De-Merits from them.
i am completely disagree it.
It's flawed system in my opinion

Personally, I'm against a publicly available demerit option. I think, as mentioned several times already, the abuse potential is just way too high.
People currently are worried about possible abuse with the positive merit system, add negative merits, there are many more angles for abuse and malicious actors.
This is however just my opinion and expectation.

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What I could get behind on the other hand is giving a few people the ability to terminate single merited posts.
We could call this group "merit patrollers" (the quickest way would be giving sources the option, but there could be an independent selection forming another group with different users).
This should be a limited ability both in availability (users allowed to do so) and volume (every patroller gets X terminations per month).
Terminations carry more weight than regular merit, and should thus be further limited (the average source size is ~200 sMerit per month, so termination could go at 10% of that, 20 on average).

What do I mean with "terminate"?
Right now, when I come across a post that is obviously spammy and was merited, I cannot do anything about it. I might spot someone farming merit with their alt account, or just giving it to spam posts to troll.
I can report that, I can investigate that, but I cannot do anything against the action itself, directly.
I might give the people involved negative trust for abusing the merit system, but that is only an indirect option and shouldn't be utilized, imo.
The merit is given, the result stays the same. I'm powerless there.

This is a huge difference to the trust system (I dont like that comparison, but it seems near), where I can counter positive ratings with a negative one and the other way around.
So what if I could counter merit? I don't mean giving demerit directly, but rather reversing a given merit rating from other people.

The way I could see this work is that when we have a spam post merited by one or more people, merit patroller have the option to terminate this post.
The merit received (and the sMerit) would at this point be taken away from the user that wrote the post, but not given back to the sender (as a punishment).
A termination would be shown right after the list of merits collected (example "Merited by TMAN (5), SFR10 (2), asu (2), TryNinja (2); Terminated by theymos (-11").
A termination would also mean that the post can no longer be merited.
However, termination are specific to posts, you decide that one post shouldn't have merit, not that one user shouldn't have it

Lutpin, I honestly think that this would be decent system, since it's both fair and quite hard to abuse. I mean, sure, you could find the most merrited post from a user and terminate it to prevent a user from ranking up, but that would still apply to only one post. It would be a waste of "merit terminations" and easy to track (since there is so little to go around).

I think De-Merit is Okay, but to prevent abuse, I think it should be limited to one De-Merit per user given to another user.  In other words, I can't go and De-Merit all your posts because you said something I didn't agree with ... or at least, multiple de-merits from the same user wouldn't count against the other person's merit score.  But if multiple people want to De-Merit a user, then it can add up over time.  

I see your point and the problem you are addressing is real. However how to ensure that the "terminator" would act according to the spirit you've outlined and not to his own personal biases?
I have to point out that this very OP is calling for a way to delete the merit that the OP of DeepOnion is receiving by its community. This is not exactly the case you have been advocating. You may like or not like DeepOnion, but that is not a case of accounts farming and the OP of their thread is not exactly irrelevant since it has got so much follow up. I'm using this example just to reiterate my question: how would you ensure that the "terminator" would act according to the spirit you've outlined and limit its actions to the sort of cases you've mentioned?
Which remind us of the old Latin quote: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? = Who controls the controllers?

I like this suggestion.

One question though - do you suggest this happen only with already Merited posts? i.e. if a 'Terminator' (sounds fun terminology!) sees a spammy/extremely low quality and irrelevant post, and it isn't Merited, can they still 'DeMerit' that post, so the total Merit of the account goes down? Or is this just for already Merited posts only?

If it's the latter, then may I present my suggestion from another thread - https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2828453.0. This will help the 'Terminators' police the forum much more effectively.

Being a terminator/merit patroller (I'll use terminators in my post) is a privilege, and can be taken away from you at any given time.
As there is likely a low amount of terminations (few people able to do it, with limits per person), there should be a collective page publicly showing all terminations (as part of the merit stats).
In first instance, terminators would regulate and check themselves. If a terminator goes out of line, the others report it to theymos and the position is taken away from them/their actions are being undone.

My reply is indeed only indirectly related the OP.
I took this thread to suggest the system as it is one of the threads currently discussing options to reverse merit or introduce negative merits.
It simply was the first thread when I opened Meta that discusses this, so I decided to post in here (instead of opening yet another thread about the same topic).

Theymos.

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No, this would only apply to merited posts. You could terminate a post without merit and thus keep it from getting any merit in the future (as long as you have the terminator privilege),
But keep in mind that the terminations you have are limited, so it would likely be a waste of a termination.
You could not remove merit from someone by terminating one of their posts that isn't merited in the first place.

Reading up on this, I like the idea.
I called the usergroup "merit patrollers" because of something like this. The Patrol page lets you browse posts from Newbies and is meant to ease up reporting/moderation.
A Merit Patrol page could be formed that shows merited pages and eases up merit-"moderation".

Giving anyone the ability to demerit a post would likely just cause absolute chaos among the users of this forum. I'm certainly not a big fan of that.

Lutpins suggestion is a pretty good one. Let's give the new system a few months to get used too and see how the sources are managing it. Then possibly selecting the 'best' or most active sources and granting them the ability to become "merit patrollers"

Sounds good, just give it to everyone. E.g. 1 "termination" for every 10 sMerits you send. Sure there might be some limited abuse but IMHO it's better than another centralized layer of patrollers.

Giving it to everyone would just be a bad idea. For example, Lauda and The Pharmacist and actmyname would be targeted by people they have found out. Although, I'm usually all for decentralization I just can't see it easily being implemented without a lot of abuse.  

However, the suggestion of getting 1 termination for every 10 sMerits you get means the account would at least need to be credited for constructive posts which might just prevent abuse. It would likely need to be set higher than that to prevent several alt accounts targeting certain users.

Yes, so far Lutpins suggestion is the best one, if there is an effective control over the fact that the Merit Patrollers use their power only for what it was thought for.
Giving anyone the ability to demerit on the other side would create a permanent state of civil war in the forum - I would really recommend to avoid that.

1:10 ratio wouldn't get those Lauda haters too far. Perhaps the airdropped sMerits should be excluded, i.e. only the newly earned sMerits would give you termination rights.

And it should be 1 per 10 sMerits sent (not just earned) to encourage positive merits before negative.


That's a big "IF". I'm quite certain that establishing a new caste of patrollers would cause more friction. There is already a lot of whining about merit sources and their selection process, not to mention the perennial butthurt about DT. Adding another layer should be avoided if possible. Otherwise just give the termination ability to the mods.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2015233.0
Above example is one of the "spamyiest" stuff One can find among the boards.
Above example makes me actual LOL, like every efing time ;D
Literal day-brightner yet obviously written with signature or activity bump agenda.

Now...who will decide if my potential merits given to such spam are legit?
Who has such power and authority to decide what poor poptok1 has to like and what he should not to like?
As you can see with above example, there still can be spam that could get likeable, there can be spam that is useful ( I know, no example here), life isn't black and white.  Likes terminator... wow, my dream job... where to apply?  8)
-I need your posts, your merits. and your accounts password.
-You forgot to say please.
I think there is no hassle, wait at least a quarter, like May maybe and than revise, inspect the data.

Without a doubt de-merit would just turn BCT into an echo chamber.

You say something an active group doesn't agree with? Demerit. I dare you to just try to tell the Bitconnect crowd something negative before the cards fell in a demerit world. You would get eaten alive.

Is it wise to do something that the authority figures here do not like ? I mean if you know what works here and you want to gain higher levels, it makes more sense to follow that. As a member of the forum, you have to follow the rules here whether you like them or not. And those rules are going to be made by a few people who own this forum. Even if the majority of the members do not like this change, the decision is not going to be reversed till it effects those people.

I think it would be very useful for staff to demerit certain members or maybe it's also given to just a select group of other very trusted users, but it would be abused hugely if it was given to everyone and people would just bot it or devote posts from anyone they just don't like, but maybe people could vote for others and only the most trusted/quality contributors could have the privilege as well. I think it would be useful for staff as I would rather demerit someone than give them a ban for stupid shit. Maybe people would learn to stop creating stupid threads about Pepsi vs Coke or Do you prefer your parents or bitcoin if they lose merit every time they do (actual threads I've had to trash both multiple times).

I was kinda challenged when this new feature merit appears and now there is a suggestion about demerit thingy, I know devs can evaluate greater things than this like what sir lutpin stated, but isn't that too difficult? We already have trust rating and merit adding, demerit option is god level, (bestow upon us thy mercy) However, superiors knows the best I hope that everything will be fair and square.

-
Merit (pump) demerit (dump)
Respectfully yours.

If it's based on the same sMerits (1:10 ratio or whatever) - is that really going to be worse than potentially abusing positive merit? Negative merit abusers would be more visible so easier for merit sources to notice and perhaps avoid spreading merits to users who abuse the system. Farming positive merits might go unnoticed much further. Either case would require the abusers to put in some serious work to earn those (probably very scarce) sMerits to begin with.

I'm worried that a centralized approach (via staff or select "militia") isn't gonna solve the problem and/or create some inefficient extra layer, like the Scam Accusations. Some parts of the forum are already pretty much unmoderated, unchecked by DT, and will likely have rampant merit abuse because nobody of the 20 or 50 "militia" users will ever set foot there.

Theymos already created a page that is de facto a merit patroller page.
It's the Top-merited recent replies (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=merit;stats=topreplies)/TMR topics (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=merit;stats=toptopics) statistics page.
A merit patroller doesn't have to browse all sections, they can browse this lists (although they could be made a bit more easily browsable (again, the comparison to the Patrol page comes to mind).
When they spot something that is out of the ordinary, they can read those posts in context of their respective threads/sections.
Should they think something is wrong there, they start investigating and conducting other patrollers for their opinion, then eventually take action.

So all I need to avoid detection is to keep my merit abuse under 30? ;D

I get what you're saying but I think you know quite well that with all the current tools in place - Patrol page, reporting to mods, Meta, etc - there are still shithole sections of this forum where anything goes. Altcoin threads for example. I can't see how adding one more thing to patrol is going to help.

Two more things quickly come to mind, ponzi scams being pushed into the IBG section instead of being outright deleted (yes I know, that is forum moderation policy and I have to accept that),
or the gambling discussion sub (which I partly suggested myself, but I'm not so sure about it's benefits anymore).

I think the moderators of those mentioned sections are doing a good job given what they have face on a day to day basis, so dont misunderstand this as me blaming them directly for the state of certain subs or sub-child.
mprep especially, I imagine has to have quite some patience and nerves to keep the upper hand on all the altcoin stuff going down. I've got mad respect for that.

Right, everything entirely depends on who the authority figures are. I guess I am old-school and don't really like a centrally controlled body policing what people have to say.