Bitcoin Forum

1.   Introduction
This is not an in-depth analysis, but rather a specific focus on three basic elements that I regularly monitor and publish on the Merit Dashboard (https://public.tableau.com/profile/ddmrddmr#!/vizhome/BitcointalkMeritDashboard/GlobalSummary) (Global Summary Tab – Weekly Ratios). Nevertheless, when one charts the underlying data, it sometimes becomes more comprehensible.
What worries me is how each month that goes by, less merit is awarded, by less people, to less people. There are multiple reasons behind this, which I do not wish to depict now, but rather focus on the fact that participation in the Merit System shrinks continuously overtime, be it as a merited or as a merited person.


2.   Awarded Merit
https://i.imgur.com/PNLrJtZ.png
This is not new really, as coinlocket$ (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=1339716) publishes a similar graph nearly every week on the  Merit & new rank requirements (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2818350.msg28856522#msg28856522) and the Merit Dashboard (https://public.tableau.com/profile/ddmrddmr#!/vizhome/BitcointalkMeritDashboard/GlobalSummary) tracks it too in a tabular manner. Nevertheless, it gives us context to the charts below. The reading is that the overall amount of awarded sMerit declines as time goes by, not as steeply as during Q1, but never reaching a zone where we can say it is at least stable for a few months in a row. Q2 ended with a 28,4% decrease in sMerit awarding comparing the quarter’s beginning and end weeks, and likewise Q3 (not ended yet) is down 19% so far.
The additional Merit Sources added over the past few months probably have stopped a stepper decline though, but even so.


3.   Senders
https://i.imgur.com/lGPKR1s.png
Logically correlated to the above, the total number of merit senders per week declines as time goes by noticeable. This is for me a rather significant fact, since it means less people have the capability or interest in awarding sMerit.

The nFrom column shown the number of forum members that have awarded sMerit each week. For the most recent complete week this September (03/09/2018 .. 09/09/2018), only 657 people awarded sMerit. That must be very far from what the initial idea was I’d say… Two months before, the figure was around 834 people, and two months before that 946. That’s around 30% less people playing ball as sMerit senders in four months.

The nFromNew column represents the amount on people that are new in the sending role; that is, that have never sent sMerit on a previous occasion. It therefore represents the set of forum members that join the game of merit sending. This number was of 129 people on the most recent complete week (and probably many of those run out soon enough of sendable merits). This logically also decreases overtime, but I wonder just how much this factor can go down before practically having an irrelevant role in the scheme of things.
I’ve also checked out of the 119 resent senders how many of those have never received sMerit before, and are therefore airdrop-only senders for sure: Nearly 40% (same results roughly on average over the last month). That means that every week, as of late, we get around 50 forum members that start meriting for the first time from their initial airdrop. Better late than never, but there must be thousands of accounts that, having airdropped sMerit, have not entered the game be it because they have no wish to, or because they are not active.



4.   Receivers
https://i.imgur.com/cbO9qU2.png
sMerit receiver trends are similar to the above both for the total amount of people that receive sMerit on a given week (nTo) and those that are new and have never receives sMerit before (nToNew).
The number or Receivers is greater than that of Senders as one would expect (merit sources are few but they award sMerit to many), but the overall figures are low: For the most recent complete week this September (03/09/2018 .. 09/09/2018), 876 different people received sMerit. Out of those, 198 were merited for the first time. Basically therefore, we’ve got as of late around 800 new people being merited per month. That doesn’t sound too bad, but since the sMerit/TX is really low, the base of receivers widens but with little awarding capabilities.


5.   In summary
My basic concern is focused on the sender’s side, since they are the origin of sMerit TXs. These numbers shrink week after week, so less people are factually playing this vital role in the system and, as side-effect, Merit Sources become more and more important as time goes by, with a very vital role concentrated on a small subset of forum members (see sMerit Senders & Receivers – Weight of top 100 and 200 weekly contributors (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4837924.msg43643466#msg43643466)). In my opinion, this trend has to be closely monitored and ideally flipped around, getting more people participating as awarders and not less week after week.

I might be guilty of this. I'm having a major sort out in my personal life, and I'm gettng rid of some of the shackles from the past. I spent yesterday scrapping one of my vans. It should have been an easy job, but anything that could go wrong did. I got up at 5am today to finish it off, and it's gone now, but I feel a bit tired. I didn't use the computer at all yesterday.  Hopefully I'll be back to normal tomorrow with loads of sMerits to give away.

It would be pretty simple for sources to realize this and start awarding 3X-10X the merit they are awarding, just type in a bigger number..
Instead of awarding 1, 2, 5 merits, which seems to be the norm, they could take the lack of merit in circulation into account, and award 5, 10, 20 merits instead..
It wouldn't be any more work and would get more smerit flowing out there..
The sources do basically have a surplus of smerit to send don't they?


I understand it's pretty easy to decide what posts deserve merit, but how do you decide how much merit they deserve?
Obviously more merit for better posts but how much is a lot and how much is so small it's just insignificant?

I guess you would have to decide how much the person deserves to rank up VS how much merit it takes to accomplish that for them..

Theymos awards many 10, 20, and 30 blocks of merits, maybe he is trying to lead by example?
In comparison if you look at LoyceV, this person awards merit a lot, but they are almost all just 1s and 2s..
Jetcash, almost all 1s 2s and 5s..

Why not 5s, 10s, and 15s?
If it's worth your time for the clicking and deciding isn't it worth more than just 1?
Trading with satoshis is fun but it doesn't get you anywhere quick..

Also, how good does a post really need to be to be worthy of merit? I guess atleast worth your time to click the buttons (which could possibly be more efficient)..

But I mean, with the average quality of posts around here, how much above and beyond a non-shitpost does a post need to be to be worth merit?
If it was an easier one click deal, just simple constructive comments may be as worthy of a merit as a simple like click on youtube..

Maybe someone could come up with a little bot, script, or browser extension or whatever, so when you click the +Merit button it automatically just sticks a 2 in the box, clicks send, and closes the new tab that popped up..
So you could just set that mofo to full auto and one click, bam, 2 merits, and you could merit a lot more posts small amounts of merit more easily..
To bypass the bot and award a 10 merit block, right click the +Merit, open in new window, so the bot doesn't act on it, and fill it out manually, but have your 2 merit on speed dial..

Maybe something like that would let them put down a lot more volume of merited posts if they like their 1s and 2s so much..

I think suggesting to have it changed in the forum software is eh, maybe after a long time..
I would almost like to suggest activity period smerit airdrops similar to the original airdrop but I don't think suggesting changes to the forum itself is the answer.. We should try to do the best we can with what we have to work with, imo..


suchmoon is the most generous.. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=merit;stats=topsend
This source seems to be awarding all 4s, previously all 7s and before that all 5s..

2nd is chimk
all 1s, 2s, and 3s..

Foxpup @ 3
1s-6s

qwk @ 4
mostly 1s and a few higher here and there..

Are 1s even worth clicking for?

It would be pretty easy for any of them to get to the top of that board by doing what Suchmoon does, awarding all 4s instead of so many 1s.. Or even higher..

Some sources increased their default amount, suchmoon (http://loycevsbasement.privatedns.org/Merit/history/234771.html) for example went from 1 to 5, then 7 and now 4 Merit most of the time.
I still believe Merit is supposed to be earned from as many different users and for as many different posts as possible. It doesn't feel right to bump a Newbie to Member-levels if he makes one decent post.

I've never been able to empty mine, although it's at the lower 25% nowadays.

I don't want to be the one deciding this, I just want to give a small part of the total Merit each user earns. By receiving Merit from different sources, personal bias is averaged out.

I started with small amounts long before I was a Merit source, and continued like that. I believe in meriting more different posts.

---

I'm still trying to get my source Merit under 10 or even at 0, I have 300+ sMerit "of my own" left to give, and haven't touched them in months.

Though you don't clearly state out but I think you have the same opinion with me: there should be more merit sources. I see some nice applications out there but unfortunately no one has been approved yet.

I wish that all of the merit sources will be as generous as you are but I think the number of merits awarded each time greatly depends on how many smerits one merit source has (different merit sources are allocated with different number of smerits, I think). Besides, each merit source may have to balance between quality and quantity. If he is too generous, he'll run out of smerit soon and hence, the number of merit receivers becomes less.

@DdmrDdmr

You're maybe making it more difficult than it is in reality. It isn't something worrying in my opinion. A simple reason could be thay a lot of forum users have already sent their available Smerits and with a 1/0.5 ratio, it is normal to see a trend like this one. If the senders don't deserve to be merited they can't have any more smerits to reward.
Also, you can't exclude (?) the users with several accounts who self-merited their own posts. Your stats could show that the abusers have, at some level, finished to self-rewards their alts. If then you compare from March to now it is regular

what u think

I think to compensate for the lack of s/merit a 1 merit : 1smerit rather than .5 most of the time. In my opinion, this will give more merit sources a bit competitive to the demand of it.

Edited: To shorten the thread with many replies.


The temptation of sending merit to an alternative account will be higher and will always open weaknesses /mistakes on their part. So it would be an easy policing.

Quote:
”They generally avoid temptation unless they can't resist it”.

That would be a good idea but it depends on each individual. On the contrary, adding more merit sources can be done by theymos and that would increase the merits in circulation as well.

I think what happened when the system started is that many people didn’t understand the system well and were awarding too many merits for simple post. Some people thought that they would get more fresh smerits by default every month. I’ve seen some people rank up who got between 20 and 50 merits for one post, which clearly didn’t deserve that much.

Another factor was that those of us who are not merit sources got an initial amount of smerits depending on the rank, so the first months we were spending those but when we run out we could only spend if we earned merit.

And then, as it has been mentioned:


I think the best option that can be implemented today and doesn’t depend on people’s will is to add more merit sources.

By the way, it is quite a sarcasm that you are asking for posts to be rewarded for 3 to 10 merits and up till now you only got three single ones for such a well-researched and explained post.

That would still present the problem of rewarding account farmers.  There needs to be the reduction to .5 so that merit swapping can't occur; without it one could farm an account with 1 merit going back and forth.


It would be interesting to see how many sources do not make it through their allotment each month; or what their average distribution is. This might show that it's less about the number of sources and more about finding posts they seem worthy.

I hear what OP is saying here, and it's a valid point.  I tend to agree that there isn't enough merit flying around bitcointalk and I'm sure there are members who deserve it who aren't getting it--and that's been discussed before.

On the other hand, I'm very glad there are members like this fuck (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=1381990) who have an activity of 210 and are still a Jr. Member.  That's a win for the merit system.

As I've said before, I try to give out my sMerits fairly quickly and I can usually find decent posts in a short period of time.  I'm not a merit source, though, and I imagine it's much harder when your sMerits keep getting topped up to the max.  It isn't like even 1-in-10 posts are worthy of merits.  It might be more like 1-in-50, depending on which section we're talking about, and I don't think anybody ought to lower their standards just to get rid of the sMerits they have. 

I'd give more, but I don't actually have that many.
Also, even if I had more, I'd probably rather go through my list of previously awarded merit and double up on them before I'd start awarding 2s to new posts. Which would result in a huge number of 1s again. That's just my fairness nerve tickling me ;)

I think theymos increases the source amount if sources empty their supply. That would explain why the top of the Most generous merit senders, all time (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=merit;stats=topsendat) has sent such a large amount.
I'll try something new: whenever I have more than 10 source sMerit, I'll re-merit posts I've merited already. That shouldn't take too much time. I'll do that right now, starting with my merit transactions (the posts should still be relevant). Okay, it took more time than I thougth, but I've unloaded 17 sMerit.
Update (a day later): I now finally have less than 10 (9 :D) source sMerit left. I think I can keep doing this.

Theymos doesn't sent Merit often (source (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3078328.msg45710025#msg45710025)):
Maybe he's trying to make up for that by sending larger amounts at once?

I've just checked my wallet, and I've got 191 source and sMerits to award. I really like to give them to people who initiate good discussions, or who make helpful and well informed replies. I'll have a look at the JetAid thread tomorrow, and see if I can give any away in that.

I believe there should be more merit sources to at least improve the coverage on all boards and lessen the work load for the current merit sources. In this way if somebody is busy for a week or a month there shouldn't be any great impact in the total circulation

Then all the process to select a merit source would need to be simplified and faster, since the way merits are getting assigned are under the eyes of everyone, so there is no chance for funny business.

merits are hard to hand out, I want to help newbies out - even started my own threads, but after a while its a tiresome job dealing with the Pajeets. Unfortunately 1 in 10 (total guestimate here) are legit users who are missing out due to all the shitters in this place.

For me handing out merit goes in bursts, checked now and I have plenty to hand out - but I dont have the time now to score through 20 threads with a shit ton of crap in them, so I hand out to people I know are deserving, OP cos all his data threads are awesome and TPT as he always hands out merits fairly and should be a source (sorry if you already are)

as JC always says handing out merits isn't easy and does take time if you want to do it fairly

Given the exponential decrease as merit is distributed down the line (1 -> 0.5 -> 0.25 -> 0.125 -> etc), it is entirely expected that the total awarded merit would follow a similar exponential decrease curve following the initial airdrop.

I'm not convinced we are still decreasing. Numbers for "nMerit Awarded" for the last 6-8 weeks have been within the margin of error for a steady state, but we would need more data to confirm or refute this.

The question is whether we are happy at the steady state level we are at, and I think the general consensus is no. I don't think we should be forcing people to give out more merit than they would otherwise - better instead to make more merit sources and therefore keep the merit system as decentralized as possible.

Regular members should have more merits to spend (x merit/month) and merit sources ( we need more of them) should give more to high quality posters this way they will have more sMerit.

Perhaps the merit system has just been implemented, many merit sources may be too harsh for Smerit's send, only demanding high-quality posts, have to say that some posts may not be of such high quality, but these posts are indeed In order to help others, it may be these posts may not be helpful to others, but it is more important to consider the motivation of the poster, rather than seeing if the post is really helpful, as long as the poster’s motivation is to help others, I think merit sources can give merits.
Should change the concept, think more about the purpose of posting, rather than just looking at the post is really helpful.

I've almost run out of sMerit myself, now I kinda wish I hadn't merited a lot of those overview threads or the many historic threads, since they might have received a bit too much.
Especially in cases where the author isn't even active anymore on the forum.

I try to focus more on giving out merit for posts that have helped me personally.
Could be anything really, even if it's just an interesting article someone's posted.

So reguler members should have sMerits per month? I dont understand this idea of yours.

Should you guys, who are merit sources, make a same standard on how to give merits to a post? Maybe some standard on how much points to be given to a post too ? This statistics given by DdmrDdmr is worrying and it can lead to an abstain of giving merits in the future.

This is the reason we don't need more merit sources. I often look at the purpose behind a post, and it may stop me awarding merits.

We should always look at the posts, and use our opinion of the post to judge its quality.

As always, good post from OP, thank you for your work.
Here is my analysis from your graphs and it's just my opinion.

At the beggining of the merit system, each forum user was rewarded with merit depending on their activity. Therefore there was a huge pool of merits to distribute. As merit were new to them, forum users didn't know the value of merit, how it will lack or not and how fast merit source will generate and distribute it. Therefore they distributed all their merits quite fast and the month after the cascade of distributed merit was the main source of merit distribution in addition to the merit from the source. But now a huge part of the initial merit pool as well of the cascaded merit pool.
After some time the main part of available merit was the pool from the merit sources. And that correspond to the floor that we can see on your graphs.
This phenomenon of flooring in sent merits is also not helped by some desinterest on the forum (and on the crypto in general lately) due to the bear market and less and less posts on the forum as shown on the graphs of the OP on other posts.

If the forum team want to increase this merit floor (I dunno if they want that or not) I don't know which solution is the best to make this floor higher between allow faster regerating merit for each source or to add more sources. 

The role of merit is definitely getting more and more important, especially for new people on the forum. Add to that more and more new signature campaigns began to ask a minimum number of merits as necessary to have to join and this minimum is raising. That's why I decided to give merits only to ranks under Hero member to help them.

There are a few dimensions to the problem that are interrelated yet distinct:  sMerit in circulation (in a given period of time), the number of Senders that participate in the Merit System and the number of Receivers.

The sMerit in circulation has got to do with what forum members have, their meriting standards (and the evolution of the standards), the amount of time they can spend playing the meriting game, and what’s on the other end of the TX: the decent to good post, sometimes well placed and visible, others hidden under a pile of debris/detritus. Topic and degree of technicality also plays a role. This dimension determines both the number of people that can rank-up, and the speed.

The sMerit Senders are a critical dimension, since they are both a player and a referee at the same time in the game. There comes a time (and we may be there right now) when the number of players get too low for what was set-out to be a fairly universal game in principle. The Merit System I figure should be played by more than 657 players per week. For the size of the member base of this forum, the number of players is weak. Fortunately, we have some real heavy players (Merit Sources) here, but the set of eyes to scout and merit is pretty small for all the posting that goes on. This is for me a key aspect: increasing the number of eyes in the game. If they end up meriting the same guys as before, so be it, but I’d say they will bring more merit Receivers into the game which should be good.
Increasing Merit Sources and placing them strategically in the right places (and that is the most difficult part) would be part of the process, but the ultimate goal would be to get more people into the game of sending, not “just” Merit Sources.  

The sMerit Receivers are the active/passive dimension to the game. Their role is to create content that is decent enough, distinguishing their post from the cesspit of spam. Increasing this dimension is an ultimate goal of the game, but that depends on the personal intentions here, the innate capabilities one has, and how well the other two dimensions are balanced and dimensioned.
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Yes we concur here, but as part of the path to get more players into the awarding game. The trends shown in the OP on the Senders chart are increasingly descending, granted that at a slower pace in Q3 than Q2 and Q2 than Q1, but still descending 19% in Q3 so far. That does not strike me as too great.

The reasons you say are true, but what I’m stressing here is that the Merit System should be played by more people on the sender’s side, to give everyone a healthy chance at being merited if they deserve it. The more eyes on the board the easier this should become.

With regards to the Alts self-meriting, these will logically have done so by now for the most I guess, but I can’t back this up with data. What is a big question mark for me is what could happen with all the sMerit from the initial airdrop that has not been put into their first circulation at any point. The quantity of such is way above what has actually been awarded in total so far, so that is a potential pool of merit abuse that can be slowly leaked into the system at any time… or not. It’s just that there is a lot from the airdrop that is stalled, and you never know how it could be played with if at all.

That is my main concern really, getting more people into the awarding game in order to give potential board-wide forum members a decent chance to be spotted and merited. That dimension (Senders) is decreasing quarter after quarter in two digit figures. The second concern (in a lesser degree than the former) would be quantity per TX. This latter affects the speed of people ranking (you only have to see how the Ranking-up pipeline is clogged on the Merit Dashboard).

That is something I personally try to correct, although it is not that easy. I find that my criteria evolves over time, but try to change the mind-set when visiting sections such as the Beginners & Help. What I do find is that things tend to be repetitive to some extent, so it often happens that the early worm gets the bird and that later replies of a similar nature in other threads go unmerited.

Good read of the situation. My only additional comment is that Merit Sources should be a booster to the Merit System, but really just a steppingstone to getting more people into the game.

Heroes have an urge for merit too really. Currently there are 426 Heroes lacking merit to rank-up, 406 of them have only between 40% and 60% of the required sMerit (that is, most of it is originated in the initial sMerit airdrop).

In my personal case, I’ve awarded less than 20% of my 363 sent sMerits to Legendries. Really, if campaigns signatures start demanding earned merit as a requirement more often, they too will need it to participate. What before seemed conceptually unnecessary (but served as a means for recognizing their posts), could soon turn 180 degrees and be a necessity for them too.

The reason behind the weekly decrement of participation in giving away sMerits might be the increment in the spamming industry of the forum. People tend to find high-quality posts to give away their sMerits, as theymos himself said:

So, I think people are taking that very seriously and that might have affected the circulation a little bit.
Other than that, as someone else also said in a post earlier, the system is designed in a way that such changes with time are not really surprising. Getting 1 Merit produces only 0.5 sMerits for you which means only 50 sMerits are generated from 100 Merits given away. That is also one of the reasons of why this is happening, I believe.

If only the max merits we can send was set to 2 and 20 per month for each user, we won't be seeing this fast downtrend of merit circulation. Maybe theymos should review those merit source applicants, but I'm not yet sure if trust is the issue or he might have a better plan.

Few more months and these merit sources are becoming more like  __________ for bounty hunters. There must be a balance, and the forum must also benefit from these bounty hunters.

Still waiting for the data I asked to someone(my subconscious is telling me that I shouldn't have) and I hope that he would accept merit as a sign of gratitude, if ever it comes out.

@DdmrDdmr congrats for reaching Sr.Member.

Even mid-quality are candidate to be merited I’d say, not just high-quality. Although this is totally subjective, anything that stands out from a one liner non-contribute post, and that is rather well constructed, has a chance, but there need to be enough eyes out here to see them, and that is where we are falling short.
The sMerit halving is logically part of the reasons behind it all, but that is known from the design, and the system should have the means to equilibrate this factor. Merit Sources are there for that, but my stress again is on the decreasing amount of people that, as a result of it all, are able/willing to play the meriting game. We don’t want to end-up relying only on Merit Sources and little more …

Thanks for the congrats. I don’t get what you mean throughout all your post, but I’ve taken a look at the part that is clear.
Going over a recent period (14/08/2018..13/09/2018), the total amount of awarded sMerit has been 15.736 in a total of 8.162 TXs. 84,15% of those TXs are for 2 sMerits or less, but they represent 51,79% of the sMerit awarded in the period. So most TXs are of a very small quantity, but some are larger and represent half of that awarded in terms of total sMerit.
Is that good or bad? It depends where you are sitting. I like the to use following example: 2 sMerits for a Jr. Member represent 20% of the sMerit needed to get to Member rank. Those same 2 sMerits for a Hero represent 0,40% of the needed merit to reach the Legendary rank (from the baseline). Large quantities in my opinion are not an issue (except for cases of merit abuse), and 2 is rather low really.

As to receiving a max of 20 sMerit per month (I figure you mean as a limit per person, where the limit is now of 50), that would barely do anything really. Even if you meant delimiting to 20 per month per person in total (adding all TXs received from any person), the total of people that have more than 20 sMerits during the last month is 6,52% out of those awarded sMerit. Placing a limit would make the richer less rich, but would not lead to much more really.

 

When sending 4 smerits or more will help rank fast starting from member to legendary as it needs a lot of merit required before ranking up as we know. Even though merit sources or generous merit senders able to send smerits but most post nowadays are not good enough for the merit to be rewarded to posters especially newbies, jr. members like me and some higher rank that doesn't even care about the forum. So, most users are not good posters enough to receive merit and even the senders send 10 smerit but not all would be able to receive unless he/she will create thread or reply to a thread that is worthy of merit and the merit circulation will remain as it is not because of the smerit senders but the posters post quality.

This is interesting, what do you have for stats on this? By quantity of dormant smerit and % of accounts that have just never used their smerit?

How possible do you think it is that a good portion of these people are still unaware of the whole merit thing and don't realize they have them and should be giving them away?
What if they just don't know?


A reason I suggested what I did (giving higher numbers), not that I think it's the best action possible, but it is a readily available action that doesn't require asking Theymos for anything, which would likely be a nonstarter..
Maybe more sources would be better, but it's not something that can just be done..

Less than 1% of all 2 million+ accounts has ever sent or received merit. Theymos said about 600k sMerit was airdropped, and currently just over 200k has been sent. This partially came from sources, and generated another 100k+ sMerit.

My guess, since must users only spam for earning money, is that most users don't care about sending it to quality posts. Even worse: I'm pretty sure they don't even bother reading anything in their click farms.

Maybe this is the root of the problem. Don't forget that only about half of the awardable merits come from the merit sources. The other half comes from the merit receivers. Maybe we should be discussing their involvement in the forum, rather than just creating more sources who may not be recivers. Encouraging the creation of good threads for discussion will attract merits, and the result is the potential for more members to award merits. Those will aspirations to become merit sources can start their career as merit receivers.

Regarding the amount of dormant airdropped sMerit, it’s as @LoyceMobile said. It’s an extremely large figure that more than doubles what has already being awarded overall (223.051), and on top of that we need to consider that the 223.051 total comes not just from the initial airdrop, but from Merit Sources and generated halving’s.

Determining the % of accounts that still have not spent any airdropped sMerit is not feasible, since we do not know how much each account received and who infact did receive it (the formula as per theymos’ description is based on activity in the year prior to merit system kick-off and rank, but we(I) cannot derive the activity in order to backtrack the initial amount per user. A wild linear guess based on actually distributed merit vs the 600K initial airdrop would say that only 1/3 have played the game, while 2/3 are stalled.

What I can tell you is this:
Out of all the 19.453 sMerited users, 2.666 have received at least 4 merits (therefore have at least 2 to send) and not sent any at all. On top of that, they may or may not have airdropped sMerit available. That’s 13,70% of all merited users just there, adding up to over 17K aggregate of sendable sMerit.
Fine, many with a small chunk may be holding it back as a treasure in hope of an advantaged use is some sense or other, and I’m not even taking TX age into consideration, but it gives as un idea that even within the merited users, nearly 14% are not playing ball yet.

If we perform the same exercise on those that have gained at least 10 Merits (that means at least 5 spendable merits in their account) and not sent any yet, we get 1.319 forum members (6,78% of all the merited user base).

That is part of my concern. "Don’t know" is probably a lesser case than "don’t care". That is, many of the potential dormant sMeriters may not regard merit as a personal need, are satisfied with their rank for their purposes, and not care much for it really (if campaigns start to consider earned sMerit as a general requirement then this may change). Others may not even be active really. Remember the airdrop formula was based on activity during the prio kick-off year. Many of those may not be active at all really.

The two key features to address are Ranking-up speed and number of regular sMerit participants in the game.



Sure receivers have to do their task, and sub-standard posts should not get merited in any way. But my main concern here is that, as weeks go by, less people play the sender role, so less eyes on the board (less scope of vision) and less diversity in criteria for meriting.

Also the ranking-up speed is pretty slow. That could be partly strategical, but if not, the low amount of merit per TX or low number of meriters per post could become a demoralizer for those that, posting decently, improve their position at a rather slow pace. I mean if we take away the top 100 merited people, what’s left is a pretty slow moving ranking-up pipeline for the most …

Well good thing you are here in the forum that could change that descending graph of meit giving. I know you JetCash on how you put your effort to get a good and health environment for the forum and you even posted that you are sad by those members who are not following rules and regulations and just spam there becuase they are complying bounty campaign rulings on the numberbof post needed to get a stake. Anyway goodluck on your scouting and giving merits that is worth of your time.

Actually moderation is also part of the problem. I've had some posts deleted or moved, and they were ones that I thought would help in the improvement of post quality. As a result of these deletions, I decided to use off forum domains to build the help pages. There is quite a bit of work involved in building the pages, and deleting them, or allowing them to sink into the spam mire is a massive disincentive. Of course, one result of the move offsite is that members can't comment or add to pages to help the forum.

Speaking of Merit Sources does anyone of you here knows what happened to QuestionAuthority? The last merit he has sent (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=merit;u=72795) was on August 14 which was more than a month ago. Sorry if I had to bring this up over this topic but I think it is related to what is happening as QuestionAuthority is one of our top 3 merit senders and he suddenly stopped sending merits for some time now and it might have somehow affected your results.

This also shows how merit sources (especially the top ones) are important to the community as they are really the ones who are sending most of the merits to new people and although they are not obligated to flush out all of their new merits it shows here how it affects the whole community as a whole.

You are well known member here and I was surprised that even some of your posts got deleted.
I agree about moderation problem of the forum, some boards seem really abandoned or a moderator just doesn't make its work good enough due to missing of time and a lot of topics to check.

I think that laziness also has something to do with that. I haven't been posting a lot recently, but I can tell you in short what I've noticed.
When the system was introduced people were eager to check it out and started to merit each other. It quickly went into what I'd call "the abuse phase" when people noticed they won't rank up without merit and started making new ways of meriting their alts, friends, making money selling merit. This made people start to pursue ehem and counter it. Some people got banned for it, some got scared, some had their alts exposed.
I think that it was the main reason for the constant and steady decline that went into "exhaustion phase". Jet Cash for example said that he's tired by trying to merit people who don't care about the quality but focus on quantity and many people who had a lot of merit got fed up with going through hundreds of posts just to award someone.

How can we change something? I guess by not trying too hard. By finding the time to press that merit button when we see something interesting. Maybe by awarding effort, even if the poster lacks knowledge, experience, proper grammar.

Well personally I have been giving out all my smerits but obviously you start with a lot at first, now I can only send 1 for each 2 merits, right? So it's hard to send when you don't have. There should be some way for high rank accounts to get more smerits to send.

In my opinion, the downtrend of receiving and issuing Merit is a normal situation and there are several explanations for this:
1.  As well as everywhere when give out something new to them actively use. So we enter new rules with the introduction of merit was given to all the old forum members the number of merit proportional to their rank. Accordingly, as can be seen from the graphs, the users in the first months of actively spent and gave merits for good posts.
2. From thousands of users registered and active at that time, many lost accounts were hacked or just left the forum due to the changing situation in your personal life or even worse their diseases or even death from this, though small amount but also decreased participants able to give merits.
3. Every month, the forum is growing with great speed and the number of users having the right to give merits if it is not growing at a pace. Information on the forum to become a huge amount and normal messages, or just get lost in the flow of debris or are skipped between the lines, because as you know all senders of merit simply are not able to see all dostoinye messages.
4. Posts worthy of merit in my opinion is also becoming less as the a lot of important and interesting information has already been written, and all the similar is perceived not so.
5. The new positions of the forum participants are often simply not assessed as can be seen, at least these posts and worthy of merit, on the contrary, we have increasingly practiced the transfer of merit from high grade to high because people know each other and he wrote "Normal" post. In the same situation, the same position is written with the novice or younger participant just will not appreciate.
Maybe to change this trend, participants more actively giving merit should receive a little more merit at their own expense?. Because many sources of merit are not active on the network and go just for reporting

I don't think there can be any involvement of greed for something that benefits you in no way even if you keep it with you all the time, and if someone thinks of collecting sMerits and keeping them as a collection, that would totally be an idiotic mindset to have. I think just because the spam has taken over the complete forum (Bitcoin Discussion might be on top 5 of most corrupted (by spammers) boards, but the whole forum is bleeding, TBH), the posts that are actually meant to be Merited are mostly missed because of the excessive spam posts submitted after them, and are that's why not seen by people who are willing to give away their sMerits.


What about the accounts that are inactive from before the system was implemented? There are hundreds or thousands of accounts that are not being used anymore. Some because the people using them have left the forum, and most of them because they had been red tagged and left unused after that by the signature spammers. All of those accounts must have also gotten sMerits from the airdrop, but since they have not been used, the sMerits are frozen within those accounts. I think those frozen sMerits would probably have made a difference assuming the inactive accounts would be quite large in number.

I presume that most of the merits have been given out to people are for people who:
-  are not interested in the system
-  are now inactive
-  want to sell them
-  pass them on to the alt
-  are banned
- want to bring merit to the grave.

The main driver is the Merit File that is published every Friday, with the Merit TXs for the last 120 days (https://bitcointalk.org/merit.txt.xz). Since only 120 days are provided, some of us (@LoyceV, @Piggy, @DdmrDdmr, @Vod, @coinlocket$ at least) have created our own cumulative databases and thus have the whole set of historical sMerit TXs.
Data in the file is limited, so anything not in the file needs to be derived from the pages on the forum itself, using the appropriate extraction tool… then add quite a bit of time and thought to the equation and voilà/hey presto!

I was on vacation for nearly 2 weeks. So I figured it's better to send out more merits to catch up instead of letting them decay, hence the temporary bump to 7. In the long run the formula is like this:

merits_per_post = smerits_available_per_month / 30 / meritorious_posts_I_can_reasonably_find_each_day

I'm not worried about a grading scale. Everyone gets merits_per_post other than a few exceptionally brilliant posts that I may merit with 10 or 15. In the long run the cream will rise to the top. Outstanding members will get merited more times and will accumulate more merits.


I have slightly different approach. I'm meriting posts, not users, and I'm trying to ignore the ranks. I may take a look at poster's history occasionally (mostly to check for other meritorious posts) but that's about it. Because in the long run - see above.

The airdropped amount of sMerit depended on the activity gained in the previous year. Especially the lower ranks got small amounts, even if they were active. See theymos' formula (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3342949.msg35131159#msg35131159).

As always, your article only makes me move forward. But I have a question for the participants of the Legend and Heroes.
Why do I notice that you reward each other with merit, Sometimes seniors. Why don't you notice the good authors with the status of Member or Junior member.
Here now I read 3 pages and noticed that 80% of all merit, has put the heroes and legends to each other. It's unfair.
I not so long ago on this, forum, but I try to help other members. Answering their questions. But alas, the merit were not added.

There's a sad fact that high ranked members come up with high quality post much more frequent than low ranked. Yet there's still good post from Newbie or Jr members but it's hidden under a deluge of junk posts. That's why topic like this (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5015731) showed up, but to be honest, results were not very positive. 

You're involved too much in Altcoin Discussion, which is the favorite board of those Newbie/Jr spammers and hence is not regular destination of merit sources. Try other some more serious boards.

In your case, I think it's completely fair that you haven't gotten your posts merited, since most of them are short, generic posts written in what's obviously not your first language.  Why in the world would you think any of your posts stand out from the rest of the garbage in sections like Economics?  Answer:  they don't.  Not at all.

Also I don't even think your post above deserved the merit it got, since it was sloppily written and was basically whining about what you perceived as unfairness.  The fact is that the posts that got merited in this thread were well-written and constructive.  Yours, from what I've seen, are generally not.  None of that has to do with rank. 

Look at the merit I've given out and you'll see that I do merit ranks lower than Legendary all the time--the very members who need merit to rank up.  Stop complaining about the system and look inward.

Your work on data that you presented on different posts seems to have been fruitful and have been heard by Theymos it's seems!

Good job OP, I am eager to see those decreasing curves invert in the future with the addition of 36 new sources

I know my English is lame, but that doesn't say I'm not trying to get better and write better and benefit other people on this forum.

You say my posts are short. I don't write posts shorter than 100 characters (very very rarely)
In what section write, to was useful bitcointalk? Prompt I will be very grateful to you. I really want to benefit the forum and raise your rank. I'm not complaining, I want to be useful, and be seen among the bitcointalk community (You and another hero and legend)

I'm not only in this thread said that legends and heroes are each other's reward merit.
This observation is not one day

Good posts don't have to be long.

Just like several new channels reporting the same story, you cannot disregard an authentic news from a channel because someone else reported it first.

The reality is, there cannot be only new and unique comments on every post, however some users will add  a better insight as compared to others. But it is not all of them that get rewarded with stakes.

One thing I noticed however is, top members from Senior members, hero, legendary etc are more open to giving each other merits than they are to junior members and members.
Very true, a post doesn't have to be long before it can be considered to add value

You really made a point, new people join bitcointalk on a daily basis and they are been faced with one challenge or the other, most of them bring it here on bitcointalk to seek the opinion of the members and i think credits should be given to people who attended to them because the best way to get cryptos to main stream is by educating more people about the crypto space. I think the length of a post doesn't matter but the message it is trying to pass it really what matters. Some people might not be good to created a long quality post but they might be good in helping and attending to people facing one challenge or another, and credit should be given to such people.

I think the descending trend is normal. Every merit has a 0.5 sMerit.
 Therefore merits will decrease as time goes by.
Unless the source of merits could compensate the decayed merits, then the graph is conclusive that few are practicing of merits giving.

With the new rules today I want to follow up in this thread about our recent discussion of the matter..

New conditions of the merit system have been implemented similar to what has been suggested by many in this thread and I will be especially interested in continuing to follow the data presented in the OP of this thread as it continues to develop, to see what effect it has..

And I found this, check it out..

It seems Theymos is onboard with a broad variety of our opinions on the matter..

The most popular opinion I believe was more sources, and it has been done..
Their has been a lot of talk about those with a thousand posts and not a single merit, and offence against such has been taken..

In Theymos's message he iterates that even a standard acceptable post is worthy of a single merit while not having to be overly extravagant or incredibly beneficial. Really, how knowledgeable and capable of being extremely beneficial would you expect a Jr. through even full member to be? Everyone doesn't have to be a nullius..

The 2nd recommendation from Theymos basically outlines another point some of us have been making, as to the scaling of how much merit means how much, he recommends possibly increasing your number in attempt to get more merit flowing in the economy..

Even beyond what I said earlier, he recommends to use ALL of your merit, as if he means for the amount of source merit he has given to be input into the economy to flow, possibly as if it's a calculated amount that he wants to get out there but that is speculation..

Theymos agrees with almost all of us well intentioned commenters so maybe this will sooth a lot of the "Theymos doesn't listen to us/care about us" crowd..

Lets watch the topic data of the OP develop from here while hoping and working for the best..

What merits are largely transferred from a senior member of the senior even if the post is worth notice many users and I believe it is also not fair. Your top-down thread is directly connected with this situation, because old users, as bad as it sounds, simply do not want to transfer their services to new forum participants because they turn into competitors. And the increase in the number of senior members also reduces profits in the subscription campaign, though all shout that all newcomers are only because of the money.

Damn, LoyceV broke my nice streak of 4s...

https://meem.link/i/a/cH83pP.jpg
Edited 2020-11-29 to fix a broken image

Which brings up an interesting dilemma - is it ok to send merits to LoyceMobile after this?

Monitoring the results of the changes is a must. I've given it some thought on what needs to be adapted in the Merit Dashboard and the Cumulative Database from where I derive all my stuff, and for now I've listed:

- Snapshot of Jr. Members (last Friday's version will have to do), to see how many/who has been demoted (I show a demoted tab on the Merit Dashboard, so it will fit in there).

- Up-ranked from Newbie to Jr. Member (or any other rank). This has some twists, but I think I've got the idea of how to track this.

- Copper Members may increase noticeably. Maybe I should try to virtualize the rank for copper members and add an attribute that say copper yes/no (i.e. a Copper Member with 10 Merits would be a Member really, with a copper attribute=’yes’). The idea would be to treat copper members as regular ranks, and not a single group as I do now.

- and a few more…

Of course, we may also expect to get more volume of data, so things may take a little longer. In summary, I’m on it …

I don't think so.
You might forget that you already merited him for a specific post and thereby give him double the credit he deserves :o

I think the trends you have highlighted in the graphs of the OP show that what is a potentially great system aimed to promote sensible and constructive participation amongst the members is not really performing as expected. I can fully appreciate you want to cut out inane comments such as "Great project", "this will moon", etc etc and the concept is one that we should all embrace but the practical application of the merit system does not seem to be working.

The ability to distribute smerit is in very few hands and at the end of the day I am sure those people can often feel over-obligated to be awarding merit, it's not unlike a foreigner visiting America for the first time and feeling often pressured with the expectation to tip the right amount to his bartender, or waitress or cab driver. I support the idea that a sensible system of encouraging quality posts is required but am not sure that this one has ticked all the boxes so far.

Work in Progress?

I do wish people wouldn't keep saying this. Half of the sMerits to be awarded are in the hands of the community, and most of the abuses seem to be as a result of this. If this abuse continues, I can see Theymos blocking the generation of sMerits, and leaving everything up to the merit sources.

Not sure what your question refers to. If it’s related to the Merit System, it has recently evolved as I’m sure you are aware of, with actions taken on two fronts:

-   Increase the amount of Merit Sources (thereby more eyes on the field). Collaterally, since more people should be merited, we should get more meriters, and thus increase those figures shown in the OP (as has already happened this week as can be seen here:  sMerit participants – A quick follow-up after the changes – Good so far (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5034149.msg45969883#msg45969883) ).
-   Increase the requirement to become a Jr. Member (+ demote non-compliant accounts).

The merit system is certainly not perfect, and plays out better in theory than in practice. It could be much tougher, but it normally leans towards being rather benevolent in an environment that is delicate to manage, and where the attraction to campaigns for many is viviously interpreted as a free pass to spam your way through the day, with minimum effort and engagement.

Ideally, Merit System should not exist, and it does kind of bring on a cognitive dissonance, where by one believes the system should and shouldn’t exist as contradictory simultaneous believes, albeit one being on the theoretical plane and the other on the practical one.

Yes I know it has recently evolved and I would like to think that these changes will mean more people getting noticed for posts that offer some level of contribution, but what I mean by work in Progress if it has evolved then it clearly needed tweaking. We won't know if the tweak will be the last until it's efficacy has played itself out so in that respect it is still in development.

Ideally, Merit System should not exist, and it does kind of bring on a cognitive dissonance, where by one believes the system should and shouldn’t exist as contradictory simultaneous believes, albeit one being on the theoretical plane and the other on the practical one.

Two words:- Shrodinger's cat!  ;D

Sorry :P
I only saw this now. Since you've hit the limit, you should/could make your own version of the Vulpine Order of Merit (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4661300.0). But wait until I no longer qualify, I don't want to suggest this so that I'm the first to reach it.

I think the limitation was meant to limit abuse, so you can't instantly bump a Newbie to Full Member. Assuming that's the reason, meriting an alt account shouldn't be a problem.
But LoyceMobile doesn't make many high quality posts. Mainly because I really dislike typing on a phone, editing quotes is terrible, and it keeps writing stuff I didn't intent to write.

If you put it this way, it sounds bad. My interpretation was that suchmoon would merit a post that deserves it. An alt-account's post shouldn't be merited on behalf of a post made by the main account, that would be bad.

That was the reason for my question, yes. What if I see a good post made by LoyceMobile - should I refrain from meriting it because the person already got 50 merits from me?

This is further complicated by the fact that I actually negged one user for using alts to bypass the 50-merit limit (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4508271.msg40853761#msg40853761), although that was a slightly different scenario - multiple alt senders.

Anyway, I decided against doing that. Sorry LoyceV, you're gonna have to make do with only 50 merits from me...

<Thread about descending merit participants..
<Talking about Maxing out merits given from one legendary source to another, long time consistent merit participants, and their alts..
<Serves no purpose other than to halve (1/2) the amount of smerits that could possibly be sent to new/periodic participants..  

I'm pretty sure I can get my source sMerits increased if I manage to spend them all, so I see no reason not to send them to higher ranks. In the past days, I've emptied my source sMerits for the first time ever, I now have 345 sMerits "of my own" to distribute, and if I ever manage to do that, I'll PM theymos and ask to increase my source amount.

People send you plenty, more than enough, don't they?
Not only are they halved, they are sitting in surplus..

I don't mean at all to say you don't "deserve" them, because you posts and work are awesome..
Just pointing out the deflation aspect, and this particular case is just an example..

Merits are for good posts. If LoyceV makes good posts he gets merits. I've sent merits to perhaps 500+ different users, who in turn could distribute them to thousands more users if they wanted to, which I would not be able to do alone. That's the purpose.

Merits are not scarce, theymos can produce any number of them at any time, which he did just recently.

"only" :D
Just a thought: if you were to send 40 Merit to userX, and then send 12 Merit to his known alt, you're exceeding 50 without getting an error warning.

I can't complain about a shortage of Merit indeed :D I must admit hI've always had a hard time sending out more than I receive, but I'm working on tipping the scale.

Make that 698 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3078328.msg45988216#msg45988216) as of last Friday:
See suchmoon's full Merit history (http://loycevsbasement.privatedns.org/Merit/history/234771.html).

This is indeed a common misconception. I think (but I'm not sure) this is what eddie13 means too.

I think members of this forum either ignore or don't pay attention to merit someone's post even its worthy and informative.Mostly people here merit posts from legendary members/staff/Administrators/Moderators or any famous manager who managing bounties.Its my observations only and it can be wrong too.

Not really:
https://i.imgur.com/F1XB3iE.png

The above is the overall sMerit sent from one rank (left) to another (top) (**). Look at it in detail and you’ll see that for example Sr. Members (38.244) have received more sMerit than Heroes (25.291), Full Member (42.830) than Sr. Member (38.244), and Members (51.601) more than any. Of course one has to remember that the number of people in each rank decreases the higher the rank, but even so, the assertion is not correct on aggregate terms.

It’s better to look at it on Merit Dashboard (https://public.tableau.com/profile/ddmrddmr#!/vizhome/BitcointalkMeritDashboard/GlobalSummary) (Tab labelled From/To Ranks), where you can filter by dates and delimit the above data to recent months for example.

Note (**): Ranks are current ranks for each user, not ranks at the exact time the merit was awarded (not feasible with currently available data).

I get so tired of reading this rubbish. Do your really think that I go through a thread reading the posters column, and only read a post if I see a certain rank in the poster profile? When I look through a thread, I read the replies, and I ignore everything else, including the signatures. If a post ticks my merit box, then I'll have a look at the poster details, and I might then check to see if any sMerits he picks up will get distributed in the underworld. That's really the only thing that will make me change my mind about awarding merits.

Actually, the opposite holds true to a certain extent.
I tend to give less merit to a good post by a Legendary, especially when I'm low on sMerit.
Simply because he won't need it as much as an aspiring Newbie / Jr. / ... / Hero.

OTOH, many Legendaries tend to make more relevant, insightful, helpful posts.
Simply because they tend to be a lot more experienced and usually are well beyond the "chatter childhood" of new users.

Actually he is right, but the graph is infuenced by merit source (most of them are with very high rank), also last update I made was around 2 months ago
As we can see people tend to merit rank similar at their rank.

https://puu.sh/BBRN6/4d6d986606.png

I see newbies get most merits from other newbies and juniors. That would tend to confirm the spambie promotions of alts and bots. This is another reason for being extra careful when awarding them with merits.

Yes, it's completely wrong. This lazy drive-by yapping about undermerited posts needs to stop. Go ahead and post your merit source application, show us those "worthy and informative" posts that deserve merit.

With each month to get the merit is becoming increasingly difficult. It's hard for me to understand how constructive and good a post should be to get at least 1 merit for it. I want to develop on the forum, but I don't know how to receive merit at the initial stage of existence? Few people will give me a merit, because I have a newbie's rank, and few will take my words seriously. Even staying 1-3 years on the forum is very difficult to get at least the rank of a full member, and it's scary. It would be desirable, that, users with an initial rank could receive a merit easier, than the skilled users who constantly receives it.

It is important for beginners to get a merit, because this motivates them to further develop on the forum.

The decision to remove those user who operate multiple accounts by system of merit is good idea but somewhere it also effect the number of people in the forum.