Bitcoin Forum

I was thinking about the economy of the merit system today. Lately, I have been seeing some posts or responses that are high quality with no merits allocated. I am wondering if unspent merits are an issue? Imagine, how would someone feel if they spend 20-30 minutes on a well thought out reply and did not get acknowledged for their effort? I know users should theoretically be here for the love of the community, but we are human after all. The merit system gives users a little appreciation for time well spent.

I usually spend smerits soon after I receive them. Why? why not, right.

Would a good plan be to have a time limit on smerits? That way the user will feel there is a time limit, and understand that collecting them is useless? We all know that it's in our nature to accumulate.. lol.

By doing this we could:

(1) Allow a tighter control on the economy of smerits and the merit system.
(2) Encourage users to spend smerits before they are lost to them. Give is better than losing.
(3) Re-enforce users efforts on creating quality contributions.

Valid argument or not worth it? I would love to hear what an economist that knows "game theory" would say on this matter.

It's good to see you have spent your merit. However this matter discussed on several time on forum. To be honest mist of people's even never use his/her airdrop smerit. They just busy with signature spamming. They don't have time to read others post.

I believe most of people's never read even main thread so how they will read replies? We can't expect from them. If you question about merit source then they are receiving only limited smerit. If all smerit holders don't spend his/her smerit then meeit system will dry slowly. Only source will unable to keep live merit system.

If someone is posting expecting merits they're doing it wrong. Also I'm gonna call BS on the bolded part. As per my signature I've been trying to give merits away for this exact reason and the results are abysmal. Either there are no such posts or it's easier to complain than do something about it.


Merit sources already have a sort of a decay built in. Imposing a time limit on other users could hurt those who are not hyperactive on the forum and I doubt it would do much in the way of encouragement to spend them. We're already being reminded on the merit page that we shouldn't be hoarding.

BTW your post title doesn't seem to have anything to do with the contents.

Rather than adding a time limit to smerit, I'd suggest giving reward sfor someone who spends merit.

Maybe they should give 2 smerits every time someone spends 10 smerit in order to keep it flowing and have it increase expontentially from there up until it gets to a point where you get 0.5 smerit for 1 smerit sent, I thinkn that might be a better system (merit sources have their own inflationary rates so I don't think they should get this bonus)...

2 merits or 2 sMerits? If someone doesn't care about sending sMerits then giving them more sMerits probably won't help much.

But giving extra merits might be an interesting idea. Could encourage those who want to rank up. Which now that I said it doesn't sound so good either :)

I think that’s a really good idea. I have noticed that since theymos’s last air drop receiving Merit has been a lot more scarce (more difficult). A month or so ago it was getting sprayed around the forum like confetti, it’s dried up a lot now imo.

I spent my source Merit pretty quickly too so I don’t always have enough sMerit to allocate to good posts when I see them which is a bit disappointing.

Thank you for your input. The effects of reallocating the smerits are listed 1-3. I just thought this would be a way to incentivize posting quality.

Instead of worryng about people who don't award sMerits, why don't we give awards to people who make good posts, so that the merit awarders can actually give away their quotas.

Oh wait! aren't those awards called merits. :)

After I posted that I started thinking this would probably open some new ways to abuse the merit system and it may make some shitty posters look better than they are. Perhaps it should be limited to received (non-airdrop) sMerits only.


See my sig.

If you’re constantly low on source merits, I reckon shooting theymos a pm and asking for an increase can’t hurt anyone...

And I meant giving more smerit. If I got an smerit every time I gave 5 merits, I’d clearly be able to give a lot more without having to take on the responsibility of being a merit source.

    I would disagree with the OP on this one.  The merit distribution have been almost perfectly balance across all board on the forum.

The merit sources has been very active in terms of merit distribution regardless of if the post is one the concur with.

There is no need bring up this topic why do you do this little background work
 

* why just don't you do your survey well and notice that good and helpful post get merited
*check if your definition of a good post is actually correct
*or best still apply to be a merit source( your might cure the forum of the illness it never suffered)

Communism at best  :P
Re-allocating unspent merit to everyone spending smerits isn't a wise move and will especially be welcomed by abusers...
The merit system is working good imo, it only requires more oilfield diggers.