Bitcoin Forum

This whole merit system reminds me of communism  ;D

But seriously, I've posted here about the whole revamped ranking up system in short sentences to I thought to start a topic and get some thoughts on it.
(https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2827352.msg29136789#msg29136789).

Why do I think that voting up + merit points as a meter would be great:

1. account farmers couldn't vote up constantly their own posts, they could technically, but it would be available to see that constant upvoting from the same accounts and therefore get banned. Also, if someone just goes and upvotes all, it would have any direct impact on ranking up until the min number of upvotes is met.

2. 10 votes (idea) for merit points because that would lower the price of voting points because they would need a lot more to rank up and it would be practically nothing, unlike like this where someone can post on some obscure board and someone would merit him max merit for quite a sum of money.

3. it would be more known to community since I'm sure that most of you are visiting some website like 9gag or reddit where you can upvoting of content, therefore people would probably be more engaged in it.

4. the risk of abuse would be significantly lower. Example: 4 good pals on this forum go around and give each other merit, getting closer to the next rank with every week/month but with the voting up that wouldn't be of a use since they'd need more people outside of that circle to upvote it to get merit, making planned deals obsolete.


Just an idea, suggestions and thoughts are welcome.

Don't consider Theymos an idiot; I'm sure he has noticed any sources that have been sending merits in large quantities to friends.  He may make changes.

Give him a chance!  :)

haha absolutely not, but this is just some sort of idea that came to my mind. Don't doubt it, it wouldn't be implemented if it didn't show to be good enough.

If one is already selling his sMerits, he can possibly obtain ~5-10 votes too, shouldn't be too hard, but it does make it more detectable.
Not a bad idea, makes it a harder to farm.
As Vod said, theymos is a smart guy, he'll figure it out if someone is abusing the system.
Let's not chase him to make changes to it right away  :D

What would be the source of these upvotes or would they be unlimited? If they were unlimited then it would be very easy for an account farmer or spammer to simply make many accounts and upvote his own posts?

To me it sounds like they'd be unlimited and that goes against the whole point of merit, it has to be somewhat scarce or inaccessible to everyone or else anyone can 'boost' their own accounts or their friends accounts. I'm sorry if I misunderstood that part somewhere, please correct me if I did.

I don't think you've understood that well. You can upvote every post here if you want, but it would have no effect at all since a few more people would need to upvote for that person to get merit points and he would get the amount of merit for the amount of upvotes of 10+. If someone would want to boost their own account, they'd need 10+ of accounts to get merit.

I think it's a better idea than actual Merit system.
But how do you prevent someone that has 500 fake accounts and makes 10/20 upvotes with random account?

big cheaters/spammers can avoid this system aswell