Bitcoin Forum

Guys, I've got something in my mind. Keeping merits in my account is useless for me as well as it always remind me of my responsibility that I am currently able to give them to someone who actually needs them.

What I wish to know: If I allocate some or all of my merits to a person I feel that they deserve it and that they should rank up, is it really fine if I do it like that way?

I was doing everything in favor of low rank members until I saw this:


It's a quote from a thread by QuestionAuthority, please visit it as it won my heart and changed the way I used to think. Please don't come up begging for them, and also, please don't post stupid comments like: "They are your merits, it's your wish, you can do whatever you wish to." As I'm looking for some factual comments here and suggestions as well, please be fair in your words and let me know whether it'll be fair enough if I do it like this way?

I'm also scared of one thing that when we give higher amount of merits to users, others start backbiting and say that this user is an alt of that and blah! blah!

Is it not unfair with people like us who are trying to help?

If merits are mine, can't I decide whom they should be allocated to?

Personally you're free to give to whoever that deserves them.

Every opinion is subjective. Just because someone doesn't like how its posted, it doesn't mean its bad.

As long as you're not simply giving them to copy-pastas, personal attacks, short one-liners and spam, there's nothing wrong spending them your way.

Basically you dont want to hear that its your merit and you can give them how you want. But in the end isnt that what it is? There is no right or wrong with giving out your own smerits and you seem to have thought about it how you would like to do it.

IMO If your judgment is based on their post quality, then you can do it. Like it or not, there will always be someone who questions your decisions, but as long as you give it to decent post (not one line garbage, hard to understand post, plagiarism, etc) then I'd say you're safe. Don't forget to see their post history before you decide to give them a huge amount of merits, because some spammer might change their posting style in order to get merits but after that they'll turn back and start spamming again.

I'd argue that most of the time, we can generally agree whether people are abusing merit or not. So you don't have to be afraid. Best of luck.

If it is a good post then you will not be questioned. Since you talked about QA in your OP. I think this thread (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5050263.0) will be certainly of your interest.

It's pretty simple. Deciding on what a "good post" is, is hugely subjective; like some people in this thread already said. As long as you think the person deserves it, then go for it. I just don't think you should give them hundreds in one go. Probably only give them a decent number of merits, depending on how useful their posts are. If you think a certain person actually deserves the rank up, probably spread the merits out on the person's posts.

Yes, you are to decide to whom to give the merit to. But if you give merits to people who don't deserve it but you just wanted to help them, then that beats the purpose of why we have the merit system in the first place; to potentially prevent spammers for joining campaigns, and or to prevent spammers in general.

I believe the new system only allows you to send 50 merits to a specific user within a month, so that's the highest you can award in a post.

As to whether it's right or wrong. That's not a debate, that can be conclusively defined. There's a reason members ration there merits; so they can have some more to give if they come across another deserving post, and except you are a source your sendable merits is limited to how much you can acquire. And there is the likelihood of you running out of smerits when handing them out in very generous amounts


There already are members who do that (complain about members merit sending habit), but, if you are consistent in your distribution that would answer any query anyone might have.
But this is the Internet, there would always be trolls.

We need to get away from the idea that if a person only has one leg and a pregnant sister, then we need to award merits. You are only doing it so that they can spam the forum, and earn a bit of extra cash. Merits are for people who support the forum, and provide helpful and informative posts.  This doesn't mean that you only give merits to posts that would win a Pulitzer prize, but they should certainly be above average, and of benefit to the forum. For some time now, I've been looking at the post histories of some members, and where they make consistent posts that encourage further discussion, I've been awarding merit for posting behaviour, rather than just for individual posts.

Giving a huge number of merits to one post may have side effects.
Your intentions may be good and you want to help him to rank up,
but, as you said, 90% of users will think it is your alt and such they will avoid dealing with him.

If he was able to create such valuable post, he probably has many of them, you can give few merits to each one.

If I may ask: why do you want to get rid of your sMerits?
just keep them and whenever you find a good post, give it the amount it deserves.

Sending merits can't be reverted, what if you give all your sMerits to one user than discover that his post was copy pasted from someone else!!

I second you on this. I also put that into consideration when it's someone I haven't merited before also I have merited users for following post rules when quality was average for keeping the forum healthy.

@Stedsm, you can try increasing the amount of smerit to the quality posts you merit maybe that'll solve your having much smerit issue. Notice you didn't merit any user  between November -December last year and your first merited user in 2019 got 15merits (and receiver is using it for a good course)  so you're good.

Based on your theory, should only members with higher ranks or at least Full members with high activity be looked in, to see if they've got something informative and helpful to the forum? As almost 99% newbies are completely new to this concept and many of them don't even know the basics of Bitcoin, how can we expect such above-average posts from them? They can learn and say something in their words but most of them fail to make it look a well-said post.

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Noted. That's the reason why I created this thread, to know whether the community will support this or not.


One more good point noted.


I've never said that I'm in any kind of a hurry to give out my sMerits to anyone at a stretch or in a single shot, but rather look for better people who deserved good amount of merits on their posts but didn't receive. This plagiarism is one such issue I'm scared of, and if I accidentally (not intentionally) give out merits to such user who copy-pasted content from someone else's, will I also be blameworthy with that user?

About all of your sMerits in one go (assuming they are between 20-40), I would say no.

About some of them, yes, if:

1. The user is in a rank where he requires a few more Merits to rank up, and the post in question deserves to get that many Merits.

2. You are not showering him with Merits for only that particular post and passing him to the next tier, but you are sure of his post history being constantly constructive.

..Then they don't "deserve" merit? I'm pretty sure the system was/is intended to work this way.

I agree though, for the average newbie, it's not going to be easy to rank up.
When placing myself in their shoes, i'm pretty sure i would've not received any/a lot of merits either for my first half year of posting here.

If you're willing to shake off probably a dozen allegations of the account in question being your alt (As i'm pretty sure no user has ever received more than 250 merit in 1 go..?)  sure.

I think this other post by theymos answers most of your questions:


It's fine to merit any post you like, and it's fine to give as many merit as you want to a post (even 50).

I have much different criteria for meriting newbies compared to senior members. Yes, the vast majority of newbies aren't contributing anything particularly new or groundbreaking, but if they are making an effort to contribute something, learn, ask, discuss, etc, and not just spam, then I'll considering throwing a merit their way. But no, most newbies won't rank up because most newbies are only here to try join bounty campaigns.



No, you will not be held responsible. Probably every merit source has merited users that have since been banned for plagiarism. It happened to me just a few days ago: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5093301.msg49088232#msg49088232. You can also see a list of "Top merit senders to permabanned users" here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=merit;stats=topsendban. There are some very senior members on that list, including several staff members. They are not held responsible. If users were held responsible, the entire merit system would grind to a halt as everyone would be too scared to merit anything.

I don't think it is good to give a large amount of merit to a post except if the post is really high quality but if you give a large amount of merit to low-quality post they will think that you are alts of the account.

Some trusted and well known high-rank members here in the forum are giving merit randomly even the post is not helpful or high quality.

So it depends on you if you can give them merit or not but don't give a high amount of merit to low-quality post. For safety purposes.

Merits have been given in large amounts on the forum,both deservedly and other wise,and most times thats for the merit awarded to decide,i have seen a one line post,with ten merits or so,go unquestioned,so why not 20,30 or even 40 for those in which a little effort is put into it
Definitely you wouldn't be giving out merits in that much large amount,except you're a merit source as you'll run out of them sooner or later,which could come back to bite if you come across another worthy one
Thus it's best to keep it simple and give a high amount to high quality and a fair amount to averagely quality posts

I agree with this and would like to add the following. Since theymos mentioned that some users got "screweed over" with the invention of the merit system, maybe it wouldn't be a bad idea to give those users a certain advantage when you are handing out merits, since they were close to gaining a higher rank and missed it by an inch. I think I saw a table about unlucky users who got affected by the merit system or sth like that but I cant find it now. I am sure there could be a way to check that though.

@o_e_l_e_o
Thanks for sharing that quote by theymos, it is encouraging that he would support such a decision if the merits are given to quality posts.

Merit it's self should be seen as a big deal a holy grail something that is of good value.
We have great post and posters in this forum and in my own opinion a user getting as above 20merit from a particular meriter would be definitely undermining the value of merit
"well only if the post is a successful suggestions of how to get bitcoin to reach $50k" lol

But on a serious note once there is a very good post it catches the eyes of various possible meritters.

Merit should not be given because of ranking up, name, clicks, countryman, friends e.t c merit should be giving according to that particular post that was made turning blind eyes to what the merit can do for the user  

Merit isn't only meant to limit ranking up, it's also meant to highlight good posts. I wouldn't send all merit to just one post, make the amount appropriate to the quality of the posts. I first did that here:
This was my Merit spree:
By spreading the Merit over many posts, you also get to read them and make sure the user deserves it.
A week after I did this, theymos doubled my source sMerit, so I assume it's approved :D

I made another "targeted Rank up" here (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5054291.msg47098127#msg47098127) and unloaded some more here (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5093301.msg49099290#msg49099290).

However, I wouldn't have done this if I wouldn't be a Merit source. Do with my opinion what you want :)

The maximum is 50 per post, and 50 per user per month.

That list doesn't say anyting about the posts, a banned user can still have good posts (let's ignore plagiarism for this statement :P ).

Oh, for sure. And the actual content of some plagiarized posts can be really rather good. I was just using the list to highlight the fact that many users, including senior users and staff members, send merits to members who are then banned for a variety of reasons, and no one ever tries to seek retribution on the merit-sender.

Any one can make such mistakes and it is OK if he is just sending a couple of merits or he is a merit source and meriting on a daily basis, but here we are talking about sending all your sMerits to one post. You should, at least, take few minutes to check the posts history.

For the majority of those who consider Ranking important to themselves, ranking-up speed is pretty slow and the perspective is to take quite a long time to manage to move on to their next rank, especially for those in the mid-to-high ranks. I recently took a look at the ranking-pipeline, and summarized it here: re: Isn't this merit thing getting more monopolistic politics? (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5093115.msg49060742#msg49060742) (a more detailed vision can be obtained using the Merit Dashboard (https://public.tableau.com/profile/ddmrddmr#!/vizhome/BitcointalkMeritDashboard/PersonalSummary)) -> Go to the "Ranking-up" pipe-line tab).

For example, under the Merit system, 24 people have managed to rank-up to Hero Member status, but there are currently:

-   1.137 Sr. Members that have the activity and lack merit to get to Hero
        11 have >= 80% of the require merits
        89 have 60..80% of the required merits
        1.037 have 40..60% of the required merits (that is, not much more than the airdropped amount at best).
-   12 that have the merits but lack the activity
-   5 that are nearly there
-   801 that lack both activity and merit.

Now obviously ranking-up is now not a freebie that comes with just posting, but that now requires a certain degree of decent content as a fellow companion. Depending on the board sections one posts in, the path to ranking-up can be more cumbersome (specially on local boards).

On my local board there are a few posters that create good enough content and I regularly merit them because of that content (not because a particular shine to them nor local board patriotism of the sort). I tend to merit them with a few merits on the posts that I see fit, but not with a large amount.
In the past I’ve seen some large amounts being awarded and having reputational issues due to that, so I normally stick to awarding lower amounts per-se. A sudden 15 or 20 merit award on a single post would look odd there, and the help I can manage to give them is by reading their posts and awarding a few merits to each one that I consider worthy of it. It may also stimulate to keep on posting good content, but over a fair share of posts.

The sMerit in my opinion was not meant to be a push mechanism to get people to rank up quicker, but rather a reward system to give acknowledgement to high quality individual posts. If you want to "push" someone, then I would suggest scrutinizing their post history and just giving sMerit for the posts that deserve the sMerit and not all the sMerit for one single post.

I have also seen some posters with a high quality post and I re-visited their post history to see if the post was a once off or if he/she posted several high quality posts like that before.

A single post with say 50 sMerits will draw negative attention from other members and will be frowned upon.  ::)

Merits is for everyone who really deserves it, ofcourse their post must be in relevant to the topic.Lets help each other because we're all started as a newbie. And I'm sure most of us deserves merit.Spread love guys, smerits is not your gold to hold forever.

I never said that (bold part in your comment), but all I asked here was should above-average members (like Full member and above) should be watched more? I never said newbies don't deserve, but it'll take some time for them to come in the category of knowledgeable people who already know some bits about the technology, and even if not that, at least they are able to "speak" something in their own words instead of using Google translate to mess it up in jumbled words or just committing the copy-paste stupidity. If I feel I'm not seeing any such good/better/best posts by lower ranks, I spend my sMerits on high rank members who are active in spreading those merits to newbies and show their utter generosity. Hope even that's (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5093301.msg49130325#msg49130325) not wrong.

Why not just compound the merits on multiple posts which will be given in several days? Therefore you can still monitor and judge that person if he/she has been consistent in his post quality. With this technique you will also not over compensate him with a big amount of merits with just one post. You will also know if the member is really deserving to receive a considerable amount of merits from you.

I beg to disagree with you on this, there are members who are really a good commenter and some aren't, but once in a while they could also posts a very good comment. So it is not right to compound the merits on muliple post. Even yourself cannot post a 100 % good comment.

Many meriters adjust their personal meriting standards when the post is created by one of the lower ranks, especially in the Beginners & Help board. Although the conceptual theory goes that you should merit the post based on the content and not the associated environment variables (username, rank, posting history, etc.), a content that postulates to being merited may be checked against variables of a kind, and ultimately tip the balance in one way or another.

The main drawback to meriting Legendries, is that they themselves currently do not receive a personal benefit by the received merits (i.e. they don’t need them to rank-up), whilst only half of what they receive may be resent as sMerits by them (due to halvings, as happens for every profile).

Nevertheless, earned merits are slowly becoming necessary for certain forum features (i.e. participating in some of the top campaigns, getting into DT1 as we saw yesterday (in an indirect manner), appreciation for the post’s content, etc. And who knows if another rank will eventually be created based on merit. Therefore, even if it is currently more efficiently used on non-Legendary ranks (meaning it contributes to rank), it should in no way be barred from mind at all.

Simplifying it all, just merit what seems fit.

Since you are giving it out to those who deserved it is not a bad move ,that's what every merit owners should do and we newbies should work for it instead of begging for merits

The greed for merit is like plague since the existing...

This is good way to support all users in here, but it will be add more spam and maybe they'll PM you to give their Merit. I think you can give Merit Challenge to see experience every member in here in Crypto

I think this is quite simple, you don't need to think much, all opinions are for reference only, you don't need to worry about them. Give certificates of merit to those who make a positive contribution to the forum and ignore meaningless judgments!

This is good too support newbie like me  ;D but i think too much user will do spam and send you PM for need Merits

Since you're kinda busy having no time to merit others,  you can choose some deserving members and award the merit to them.  Just like the 15merit you sent to the user meriting only newbies to rank up. Lets say you have 30smerit left,  you can choose 3 users or any number more than 3 that a post they have made deserve meriting and they need the merit too for ranking up. Before awarding them the merit you can do a little background check to verify they're truly contributing in the little way they can to the forum (this should be done to avoid regrets). Then after sending the merit you can send them a PM advising them to merit deserving members with the 5smerit they each got.  By so doing you have given the responsibility to others and your conscience will be free.

BTW I don't think 10merit for a post is much, suchmoon is sending 7+ daily.

No, it's not just good for a specific category but I'm interested in helping who actually deserves the merits to rank up, but they didn't as none merited them. That's what I think, others have different mentality so things will differ for everyone. I don't say that merits are for ranking up purpose only, but it's one of the major reasons why everyone needs them.

I'm posting a user's profile address here with one more question:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=2268017;sa=showPosts (Posteralley is the name of the user).
Now, as most of you guys can check, their posts are really worth giving merits (at least few of them can be considered to be merited). What I don't understand is:
If such users go dormant and stop using their accounts, should they be merited at first place? Most users (like me of course) are lazy enough to check the complete profile and/or their posts history (I know that's not a good practice, which is why I give most of my merits to those who have better standards set for meriting others), and just merit them based on their "current" post that they watch. So, what about such merits given as we don't really know whether a user has come here just for the sake of exchanging information and will no more come back? I mean, should there be such standards set also that we need to check how active the user has been, before giving merits to them?

You can decide by yourself,but make sure that you didn't hand over any merits to the wrong hands.

Just because this is not a self-moderated thread and you literally turned my mood off, here's a Valentine's gift for you:

https://thumbs.gfycat.com/CaringFloweryKentrosaurus-size_restricted.gif

Shut the fuck up, stupidobulously fantashitty person!  >:(

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I recently chose the right profile (based on my own views) and tried to get them rank up. Those, whom I think (obviously based on some standards and complete checks) deserve my sMerits and deserve a better rank, will definitely get them from me. Thanks for all your support.

It is not unfair to give merits to whom you think it should be allocated. If you find a thread and you think that deserves merit, then instead of just giving a higher amount of merits to that single thread, I would suggest you check other threads of that user and analyze if he is really posting good contents on the forum or it's just one thread that he posted is good. By doing this, you will have clarity about the user's contribution to the forum and how much he deserves for that merit.

Also, if you feel if his other posts deserve merit, then you can distribute the merits among different posts.