Bitcoin Forum

NSFN stands for "not safe for newbies". If you're a newbie looking to earn your first merit this topic may elevate your blood pressure.

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This thread is no longer regularly updated. Shows data as of June 15, 2019.

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According to merit stats (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=merit;stats=topsend) we have sent ~20 thousand merits in 30 days between mid-May and mid-June.

According to ban and nuke stats (https://bitcointalk.org/modlog.php) over the last 9 months on average ~79 thousand merits per month^* are being "destroyed" due to permanent bans (see details below).

Some other data to put this into perspective:

• Coin-1's newbie rank-up thread (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5034141.0)
• Nikisa's rank-up list (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5024849.0)

tl;dr: many more high-rank accounts are being banned than new ones being "created".

It's quote obvious where this is going. We will have all merited users banned eventually and only zero-merit users will be roaming the post-apocalyptic ruins of Bitcointalk.

This is the data for ~9 months:


See month-to-month trends below. Each datapoint is taken around the 15th of the month, so for example May 2019 represents data from mid-April to mid-May. Click the charts for a higher resolution image.

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

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^* modlog doesn't have timestamps but I've been scraping it since September 22, 2018 and it seems to go back for another week so I have data since September 15, which is about nine months as of this last edit. This does not account for users that may have been unbanned but I would expect that number to be negligible.

Great part of these merit were never going to be given to legit users in the first place, but were mainly used for alts, so maybe is not as bad as it looks.

Well, most of it is airdrop too but still - what a waste. I wonder how much of that 600k (edit: wrong) airdrop has already been destroyed this way. 8 months x 50k per month would be 400k, unless the last two weeks was an anomaly of some sort.

So taking your numbers, and saying that airdropped merits were 10/100/250/500/1000 for ranks Member through Legendary, the amount of airdropped merit destroyed is


So, we have actually only destroyed about 1.2k earned merit. Yes, that's a lot of airdropped merit to lose, but honestly, I don't see that as a problem if the users are deserving of their ban.

Is that a lot of bans recently or just a normal about?

Not only merits destroyed but accounts..

93 Full Member
30 Sr. Member
8 Hero Member
1 Legendary

Are we replenishing ranked accounts at this rate or are upstanding accounts going to become as rare as merits?
+ all the accounts that have been scammer tagged in the same period, I doubt they are keeping up..

People have been talking about adding more ranks above legendary for a long time, this is going to solve that too..
They will be the same old ranks but get increasingly rarer and with a much higher barrier to entry..
Sig campaign pay will go up for those who deserve the privilege..


Is this counting the "airdropped" merits like the 500 I started for being a hero, or just "airdropped" smerits that were sent to these accounts?

I think this data would be most useful if it didn't count the accounts base merits they started with..

Waste, but that's why it's created, to point out the quality poster and those abusing the system.
If you check for plagiarism before you give merit, probably big part of those wasted by mistake will be saved.

Yeah, I would advise anyone to do this if you have the time. I tend to dedicate a certain amount of time now to giving merits when I know I have time to check for plagiarism or not strictly plagiarism, but something that has been repeated to death or has been discussed recently. A common trend among newbies is to back a few pages, and just regurgitate a good reply hoping for some merit.

It is a great statistics from where we can see the statistics, gift of total merit and also total destroyed merit. Still now it is good that many merit wasted for banned user. It is necessary and I think it is a note for all that earning merit is not all. To keep your account is more important than earning merit. Few people may earn merit by unfair means but there will be no benefit in the long run.

Just to clarify - despite the sensationalist headline I don't think that's a problem at all. I just would have expected this to have happened a long time ago (i.e. ban-deserving airdropped merits getting banned out) but apparently this is still a thing 8 months in. And after all this whining about how hard it is to earn merits you'd think they would be trying harder to hold on to high-ranked accounts.


The 23300 is airdropped merits (not sMerits) like your 500. The other 1.2k is earned merits since the introduction of the merit system. There is no easy way to find out how many sMerits everyone had at the time of their ban, if that's what you're after.

The 600k was sMerit, not Merit. I don't know how many Merits were airdropped.

Anyway, this is good news, we get rid of bad users and hopefully have them be replaced by good users.

You're right, and I should have known that because...


So the number of merits would have been ~3-4 million - the ratio of sMerits/merits was 1/5 or less depending on rank and activity IIRC.

Vod probably knows the exact number.

Most of them woupdnbe have been banned for engaging in unethical behaviour, in an attempt to rank up.
I've always wondered, could we have a scenario where only merit sources have smerits to give out?
If other users exhaust theirs, and it is prone to diminish, as each merit creates half it's value in smerits.

16,224 sMerit is held by autobanned users (including the initial sMerit).

https://media.giphy.com/media/DQs29VKi7atQk/giphy.gif

Maybe see the other side !
With this all , we have found a lot of abuser and spam shitposter and plagiarism copy/paste Users !
For that is what good and the banned one accounts burn too ! 

Short Forum cleaning !   :D

I dont really understand the second part of what you were saying.

theymos did just ad a bunch of merit sources something like 30, with a lower amount of smerit to distribute iirc.

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Honestly I dont see this as a worrying trend. It mostly points to the fact that a lot of people giant take the merit system (or the forum rules) seriously.

The sad part is that most people who see the value in the merit system already try to distribute them ad intended. The ones who are trading/selling/ farming will just continue to ad to the inferno.

" The first lesson of economics is scarcity: there is never enough of anything to fully satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics. "

I believe those account are ban they are also merit abuser. Especially newbie and Jr. Members. Because a quality poster shouldn't ban.  Those are baned obviously they are connected with corruption somehow. So it's not bad corrupted and abuser got ban. Never mind few merit are decay, they didn't used their smerit on good post. Here is merit source to recover it. I think smerit limit should increase for merit source.

I noticed that many meirt abusers are deleting some of their suspicious posts.
If Merit is deleted along with the deletion of the post, I believe this will be a very interesting thing.
Some merit abusers will delete posts in order to eliminate the evidence, but they have to lose the merit, which will be a very difficult choice for them.

Ironically half of the bans probably came from being exposed due to them meriting their own alts. We should rename merits as 'alt' or "friend" tokens.

I love how this (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5042247.msg46431959#msg46431959) guy excitedly boasted in Meta about getting merits, then as soon as I brought up the likelihood of him meriting his alts he quickly moved it to Off Topic and locked it  ;D. I think that tells you all you need to know.


I think this is why we should up the requirement to ten before they can have a signature because then giving out one bad merit here and there won't be such an issue. It's such a hassle having to google people's posts just to see if they're plagiarised, and if they're text-spun then you likely won't get a hit either. When one merit is all you need it's like Christmas come early for a spammer and you can get one all too easily and in numerous nefarious ways. Let's see them try to get ten on their dozens of alt accounts. It would make abuse much less likely to happen and also make it much easier to spot. One solitary merit will fly under the radar a lot of the time.

Just restrict signatures to members and above.

There are 2 major problems that make it as difficult situation:
- People try to earn merit as fast as possible because of how much signature campaigns willing to pay, it's quite high.
- When 1st merit system was launched, old members receive "airdrop merits" based on their rank. Some of the high-rank members think they don't need to contribute anymore, just use this advantages for earning money through signature campaigns.
Actually, buying/selling merits are continuing to happen, and it's more sophisticated.

Well that's exactly what I wanted in the first place. One merit is fine to move up from Newbie to Junior rank, but not to be able to get a signature and start earning here, especially when it is so easy to abuse. Anyone can beg, buy or trade a solitary merit but ten is obviously ten times more harder to get (or ten times more expensive). I think we should remove signatures from Junior members and see how that goes. If people are still abusing it en mass we can then remove signatures from Members eventually and then let's see how easy it is for them to beg or buy 100 merits before they can start earning here. Now that really would make a difference.

Updated the OP with ~3 weeks of data. 61k merits gone, 36k within the last week.

I may have helped this spike - had some binge reporting last week. Not sure how much of an impact that had though since I don't have a direct link between reported and banned users.

Just got banned one more legendary (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1926895.msg46675482#msg46675482) today, 1001 more merit to be added.
I've reported total of 2 Legendaries till now.

Over 2,500 newbies banned... Wow.

Pretty sure that the vast majority of signature spamming newbies have cheated their way to at least 1 merit now. Looks like high rank accounts are going to be destroyed faster than they are created now, 4 Legendary accounts wiped out, definitely takes a lot longer than 2 weeks to see 4 people rank up from Hero to Legendary these days.

Either way, merit destruction can be countered by producing more merit sources, or by more careful distribution of merit from current members.

They were banned in 3 weeks, but that amount of Newbies respawns in just over a day. So maybe 5% gets banned, while I don't think more than 5% are real valuable users. That leaves 90% of potential spammers walking free.

I don't think so, only a few thousand got Merit, and as far as I know many tens of thousands were demoted.

That's the truely good news! New spammers can't rank up, existing spammers are slowly being wiped out.

It could, but merit destruction is not a bad thing if it means destroying spammers.

Some of newbies are trying their best to engaged in this forum. They just want to work hard, even though some of them are not speaking English very well. Just respect them, they are working hard as like you do.
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But only a few do working for that, the most are only on the hunt for merits and are not afraid to do plagiarism for it to get it or else !

Sooner or later we will get everyone cheating!

Yes, you are right about that. Those who can write good English can easily get their merit in no time. Unlike people who can't even write a sentence without correcting their grammar will get caught and getting a warning for spamming the thread not knowing they don't have the intention of spamming it they just want to engage.

Or restrict lower ranked signatures to just one line of text - no formatting.  That is a traditional signature.

Is there any actual benefit to merits? Do higher merited users get more features?

No man, no extra benefits, the only benefit is that it allows you to rank up. The side effect is that you build kind of reputation of non-shitposter as the spam is a big issue nowadays.
You can quick look here > https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2534500.msg25841174#post_guide_merit
Check Extra info links too.

The forum is awash with merits that are waiting to be awarded. Who cares if some of them get burned as the rubbish is chucked out.

Hopefully we aren't chucking out the babies with the dirty bathwater, and the new merits will help to build healthy new babies here.

Actually the fact that you can wear more complex signatures is something you'd call it extra feature/benefit.
Newbies can't wear signatures at all
Jr Members (30 activity + 1 merit) can wear a short signature without links, special characters and colorful text.
Members (60 activity + 10 merits) can have longer signatures with links and special characters, but no colors.
Full Member (120 activity + 100 merits) can have even longer signatures and colorful text. They can also add an avatar.

I think the only difference above Full Member rank is the longer text allowed in the signature, nothing else.

Now if you're really a newbie here, you might wonder why people are trying to cheat the system just for a better signature. That's because our beloved ICO scams are distributing 0-value tokens to forums users who are posting (spamming?) in the forums with an advertising signature.

There are also legit projects though, but those few legit ones will filter the users manually and select only those with good history. The merits earned are an important factor for the filtering.

Aaaaand a question: What does "nuke" mean? I noticed the stats are mentioning "bans and nukes".

Merit alone gives you no benefits. As I mentioned above it helps you only to Rank-Up and all the benefits with the higher ranks are not only merit but activity related too.


Ban means that your post history will be preserved but you cannot post anymore/send pm anymore.
The Nuke as it sounds, in addition to the ban, wipes out all the post history so you end up with 0 posts and activity. AFAIK only newbies can be nuked, but I guess theymos and cyrus can also nuke higher ranked members.

Interesting post, great job OP.

I  did not find how did you get to this number- 61k merit wasted.  Did you calculate from banned users or is there statistics somewhere available?

The number was calculated by summing up the amount of merit shown on each banned user's profile.

Do you mean merit or their smerit?

For example, if Full member has 100 merits by default and we add them up, what does it mean- can we say that these merits has been wasted.
If this amount was airdropped to user, then it does not account to much
But if we would add up the smerits that would be more appropriate for  term " wasted"  since it is something that could have been used productively.

I don't think there is a shortage of merits waiting to be awarded, so the destruction of bad merits isn't really a waste. What is a waste is the time that was spent by mods in getting rid of them.

Has anyone worked out how much merit is available and waiting to be awarded?

I'm adding up merit. I can't see anyone's sMerit except my own.

We can debate if "wasted" is the right word but the fact is that we have hordes of shitposters complaining how hard it is to rank up and here we see what they do with those ranks. To me that looks like a waste from their own perspective. They are throwing away their airdropped/hard earned/bought merits by breaking forum rules and getting banned. Personally I don't have a problem with it, just like Jet Cash above. Merits are not scarce. The bad ones getting "wasted" is perfect. Allows the good ones to float to the top.

I don’t think that’s a good idea because when the merit system was implemented, juniors weren’t able to have clickable signatures, but they still had non-clickable ones, and many spamties campaigns were paying them to post crap with those signatures.

I agree with hilariousetc that signatures must be restricted to members and above.

Theymos airdropped about 600k sMerit, sources create 23k sMerit per month (but don't use all of it), 250k sMerit has been rewarded (which created another 125k sMerit), and some sMerit holders must be banned by now. My estimate would be that at least 500k sMerit (twice as much as has been rewarded until now!) is available.

If we add up all forum member accounts, there are at least 34k unspent sMerits, originated in the halving process that are ready to be awarded. That is based on the positive aggregate for all users of: floor(Received merit/2) – Sent smerit.

Nevertheless, there is much more as we know, since the initial sMerit airdrop was of 600K and so far, the total amount awarded is of 245,5K. On top of that, there are the up to 23k monthly sMerits in the Merit Source pool.

This could either only mean that we are sending merits to the wrong people or people who have farmed accounts are sending merits to their alt accounts. So many wasted merits but we cannot stop them all as they have the whole control on who will be the receiver of their own sMerits, this could drastically change if people know how to read the rules and mainly stop plagiarizing and start doing their own creative post. This thing is really avoidable if people are willing to learn they know what they will post on their own.

In the grand scheme of things we aren't sending that many merits "to the wrong people":

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=merit;stats=topsendban

~300 on average per month although these are just the top senders. But even if it's ~500 per month that's still just a drop in the bucket. And the farms will eventually dry out - there is no feasible way for them to replenish their banned merits.

Those are getting ban with merits, I believe there are more than 50% merit abuser. Most of ban are happening for plagiarism. I don't believe they have earned merits by quality post. Most of them has abused by trading or buy.

On the other hand, I noticed from my experience that most merit abuser has got red tagged previously. I have found few case that they are tagged before abuse. Most likely they sold merit. Especially after implement new merit system lately. It's become much difficult to prevent. Because those are already tagged they never care about rules and didn't worry about new tag.

Where do you guys find all these stats? I'm still new but like to see stats of before and after the rule change.
I'm looking for the pre-change stats most of all of how many members in each rank.
verus
after change rank standing
SORRY for the off topic
Thanks

Don't worry. It's related to the topic. I'm also curious btw, I'm not sure if they gather all the data from bpip.org.

This is good. Merit is going to be hard to find after some point. I have two very important and ideal suggestions to combat this issue:

My suggestion #1:
After sometime, let's fork the merits into MeritPrivate.  ;D ;D
These are merits that you can send and receive without any public log.
And at the fork time we send 1-1 MP (MeritPrivate) to everyone who has at least 10 merits on their account.

My suggestion #2:
I see that a lot of Legendary/Hero members are not very generous regarding sending merits to other users. They LOVE receiving merits but they do not care enough to send merits.
I suggest every member who has spent less than 10% of their sMerits get a "DICK" badge under their username.

But jokes aside, I know this is not related to the topic but what truly intrigues me is that 4 legendary members got nuked/banned during the past three weeks. Who are these accounts for? Why would they get banned after becoming a legendary.

I don't have much info beyond recent bans but there are some threads in Meta that deal with ranks:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4850225.0
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5037073.0
etc.


I'm scraping myself because I'm not aware of any other source for aggregated merit+ban data.


That's sexist. It needs to be "CUNT" printed in TMAN's accent.


Plagiarism most likely:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=485194
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=369702
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=207818
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=255259

And 3 more have been banned since last update:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=374823
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=61208
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=513294

Bump - updated for a full month.

It would be interesting to have a breakdown of the bans per generic reason (i.e. plagiarism, etc.), although since that information is not reflected on the modlog I guess there is no way of deriving it. The OP serves as a warning to rule breakers, and the numbers are not small, affecting all ranks when one would expect that Sr. Members and above would know better. Shame that many will not even see this kind of post and reflect upon it.

I'm sure plagiarism is the main reason. At least 3400 (of the 6700 total) have been banned after a plagiarism report. However:

 - I have no way of knowing if the report was the cause for the ban (likely though).
 - There is a good chance that many of the other 3300 bans also resulted from plagiarism.

Hello suchmoon


I can't send you a private message since i am now a newbie.

But this is what i wanted to send you :

Not all banned accounts are merit abusers. Not all newbie  and Jr.Members abused Merits. it is clearly stated that members should abide by the rules and regulation of the forum in other earn Merits. yes, Every New member in the forum aims to get merited from posts or comments either by hard-work or by crook which leads to ban if discovered.
A friend got Banned for making inquires of his previous Banned account.
 the Forum administrator can derived a means to retrieve sMerits from accounts BEFORE BANNING. my opinion to reduce Merit lost.

Forum Admin can create as many Merit as he wants. Merit isn't scarce.

That sounds like grave injustice. What's your friend's name?

Based on your characterization of the situation, LoyceV, I hate to observe that smerits seem to be based on a system that is resembling ethereum than bitcoin - which is that the forum system can print smerits as liked - so forum members  (or even members of the public) are never going to know how many smerits are going to be in existence - for example, 10 years from now?   :'( :'(


By the way, I agree with the overall point, that even though there can be aspects of decentralization in a forum like this,  with current systems, it would be quite imprudent (and perhaps irresponsible) for any owner to completely decentralize such a system.

Nice statistics breakdown of merit source and abusers. Now before earning a merit, you've to clarify in all reasonable doubt that your post worth it. I believe someday I will earn more merits like you bosses

Wouldn't it be more like NSFP (plagiarist) or NSFAF (account farmers)?

I used to have a spreadsheet with the users I was reporting and I was closing on 3000 merits destroyed based on their rank but I gave up since ironically I had to do a lot of copy paste to keep track of copy-pasters.


Would be interesting to find out how much sMerit they've sent before getting banned if possible...


I'll lurk in the shadows till very end, to witness the moment when Theymos bans Satoshi for plagiarism and then nukes his own account  ;D ;D ;D ;D

If you (or suchmoon) can get me a list of banned users (just the userIDs is enough, not the usernames), I'll tell you how many sMerit they've sent.

Unfortunately, I'm not the AI   :) capable of doing something like that so we will have to wait for suchmoon..or Vod as I remembered we had a somewhat related discussion about this elusive list of banned users.

Suchmoon got me data from approximately the past 6 weeks. I won't publish his list, but from 9539 banned accounts, I get the following results using last Fridays' merit data:

• 899 now banned users have sent a total of 7109 Merit to 2686 posts in 2892 transactions.
• 1054 now banned users have received a total of 8620 Merit for 2606 posts in 3366 transactions.

Disclaimer: this was a quick count, for which I didn't do as many checks as I would normally do.

I have updated the OP with another month's worth of data. Two months total now. The trend is roughly the same, except we're sending fewer merits.

Yeap, daily distributed merits decreased over time, and have been at  nearly the median since January.
Medians mean true means, somewhere around true means, and at bottoms, of course.
I made a time series plot on daily merits, which present the general decreasing trend.
Here you go:
Time series analysis on distributed merits in the forum (daily, weekly, monthly) (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5069140.0)

650 merits in total per day is current median, and I believe that it will not change significantly over time.
If Theymos will not implement something big in the future, 650 merits distributed over users per day will be a long-lasting figure.

Thank you for mentioning my thread. I will keep it updated. 8)

My analysis also uses the list of permanently banned users. To be honest, I look at the BPIP service made by Vod and then I manually add such users to the corresponding list. Undoubtedly, I need to make a modlog parser in the future. :D

I think I have passed the newbie level by a few steps, but these numbers still elevate my blood pressure  .

I don't understand the trouble here... Probably cause I'm new though  ;D

The only restrictions I see as being a newbie are about span time between posts or PM or whatever. That's a bit annoying but it's not DRAMATIC. It's not really important if it takes 3 years for me to go full member. Though it would hurt my pride a bit I guess...

So if the problem is with signature campaigns... Just limit signature campaigns to full member or senior members or whatever is needed.

I don't see what harm it could do. Less spam, less trouble and higher rates for the campaigns cause scarcity = higher prices.

Everyone wins.
Except for the abusers of course.

Did you not read the title? NSFN!

The thing is with signature campaigns is they are ran by the campaign managers and the campaign managers are the ones that decide on the rules of the campaign. Probably with approved by the people hiring them. The people wanting to advertise their project will not want to restrict their campaign too much because they want to advertise as much as possible. Lower ranked accounts generally earn less in signature campaigns which means they are spending less for the same amount of views. Although higher ranked accounts are much more likely to gain a click/sale due to people trusting higher ranked members judgement.

The way signature campaigns are going the payment for each rank will continue to go in a downward fashion due to the amount of people doing it and even higher ranked members not caring what they are advertising. You could probably do a social experiment and ask people to advertise a complete scam and I bet several high ranked members would gladly endorse it for some coin. The whole culture with signature campaigns is worrying to say the least. Look at the bounty forum and you will see hundreds of users willing to promote and advertise scams. Almost all of them are complete scams and doomed for failure but people are still willing to try and make a profit and do what ever they can for that. Signature campaigns will be worthless in a few years and hopefully then we can reclaim the forum back.

No trouble really. Just quite amusing seeing many users complain how hard it is to get merits and at the same time so many merits are basically thrown away.


I think for the higher ranks the payments might go up, depending on the market conditions of course. There is a very clear trend of high-rank accounts being destroyed far quicker than new ones being promoted.

Maybe but looking at some of the campaigns legendaries are willing to settle for sr member positions and only 20 dollars a week. I don't mind the signature campaigns gone to be honest. I think account selling will be completely eradicated if that were to happen. There are several abusers in campaigns and several legendaries sending out 50 merits for shit posts. Its a complete mess right now.

Bump... updated with another month's worth of data, three months total now. Added earned merits and average merits per rank.

The trend remains roughly the same.

Edit: I just realized how horrible the earned merit number is. In 3 months we sent out 50-55k merits, which includes everything - airdrop, source merits, and half-life merits. Shitposters destroyed 1/4 of that amount.

Bump... updated with 4 months worth of data.

What stands out this month:


If ~4200 new active accounts have been created in a month and 5000+ accounts have been banned then perhaps there is hope to turn the tide of shitposting.

Nevertheless, guaranteed full employment for years to come for anyone seeking engagement in such a shit posting battle.  hahhahahahaha   ;)

Assuming most of them were banned for plagiarism I wonder just how stupid they can be, there is no way they are going to get anywhere near that rank in the next decade. But probably a few of them didn't even bother to read about the merit system.

Still, this one is funny:

An average of 5 merits earned...unless there is a ranked up user in those which I highly doubt.

So it seems banned hero members were earning more merit than Legendaries.  ::)

Updated with new data.

Seems like reporters were slacking this month. Perhaps too engaged in the DT drama ;)

Updated through March. This will be the last update for a while. I might revisit it a few months later.

Hi!

Just quoting my post from another thread:

Would be interesting to see the spike.  :P

Updated through mid-June.