Bitcoin Forum

I have gotten accustomed to the bitcointalk forum to certain degree since my time here. I have noticed something in the forum, I won't be pointing fingers at anyone but I believe most will agree with me that there is a high probability factor that people give merit to those who merited them in the past, therefore creating a merit ring. You can easily discover such people from their merit summary. This could simply be a coincidence or I'm just imagining things. But if this is true, then such individuals are cheating the system and us unfair to others who take time to put in the work to develop good discussions and topics. Reading this (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2818350.msg28856522#msg28856522) there is no clear or postulated rule that credits a post merit worthy. The system only demands quality spots, and quality posts is subjective to the reader. I think this is misused by those farming accounts. Without the merit system, I can't imagine what the forum would look like. There won't even be any interesting subjects to talk about just shit posts flooding every board.

If you suspect a user is farming accounts, you could avoid sending merits to them to not support them, but besides that, it's no longer a major forum issue. Such members would eventually run out of merits to cycle as it progressively decays.

About meriting someone that merited you in the past; users are free to use their smerits the way they please, as long as it's not sold, they are not cheating the system.

That thread is clearly an exception. The merit system was just introduced and the readers earnt some merits that they instantly spent. That's my guess. I haven't seen such thing again so intensively.

Can you share us some merit transactions that do what you wrote?

The system demands meaningful posts, not necessarily high-quality. A funny and one-line post may be merited, but it can't be considered high-quality.

Account farming is a hard thing to tackle imo and was the original reason for the merit system.

Familiarity and appreciation could also bread positive feedback to a user. For example: user A gets merited by user B so user A naturally obtains a more positive affinity to user B and enjoys their content more. This may be an unintended consequence of the merit system (but it might also serve to increase engagement and quality discussion).

There's going to be a fuzzy, hard to detect line between the above and account farming, especially on local boards or smaller communities - which are generally good to keep active to show new users from those countries that (1) they're welcome in the crypto community and (2) they have a way to get a fast, public response from people.

Yeah, if you look at my merit history you might think I'm trading merits with quite a few members--but I'm not.  I've never asked anyone to merit me, or to trade merits, or indicated to anyone here (or elsewhere) that I'd accept anything in exchange for merits.  Some people have found my posts good enough to merit, and sometimes they happen to be the same people I've merited.  But I generally don't often look at where my own merits are coming from, and it wouldn't matter anyway.  As a merit source, I've given merits to a lot of different members.  Some of them I've given quite a few--and in a bunch, too--because they've asked me to review their post history.  I don't know if that looks suspicious or what, but that's the reason for it.

That said, I was only talking about myself.  I can't speak for anyone else, and I'm pretty sure there is some merit trading going on here on bitcointalk.  Sometimes it's blatant, and in the past members would get tagged for obvious merit abuse.  That stopped a while ago when Theymos gave the community his opinion on the matter.

LOL.  You should have seen it here prior to Jan. 2018 when the merit system was rolled out.  It was non-stop shitposting, and no sections were exempt from this.  And after the merit system was introduced, there were so many threads in Meta about merits started by low-ranked members it was ridiculous.  All the account farmers and those who thought they'd be able to easily maximize their earnings through sig campaigns had their dreams go up in smoke overnight.  It was beautiful to behold.

I agree with you that I may have merited others in the past and may still merit them in the future but that doesn't conclude that we have a merit circle. The thing is that we may have boards that regularly visits or a favorite thread to follow. Your sMerit, your choice who to send to. From the last sentence of your post I guess you're in good terms with the way merit was introduced, correct me if I'm wrong.

The merit system was the way to clear them up. It was a real mess during that time and when the system was introduced these spammers, activity farmers, and account farmers got messed up too.

Merit data is public so you can go ahead and prove it instead of speculating. However: merits are not scarce and the way the system is set up each individual merit sender is supposed to exercise their subjective judgement as to what is a good post, which given hundreds if not thousands diverse merit senders makes it extremely unlikely that "good discussions and topics" would get cheated out of merits. If you do have such examples you can bring them up in the merit sorcery thread (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5093271.0) or directly to theymos so that he could appoint more merit sources in certain areas.

I wouldn't hold my breath that some complicated rules would be established as to who can send merits to whom and for what.

This may easily happen indeed. Just imho the reason is not friendship or whatever strange relationship you'd think, it's more like certain people discuss mostly on certain boards and that's where they give and receive merit. Clearly they'll give and receive merits from other people with similar interests.



While it can easily happen that some would cheat the system here and there, I don't think that it can happen at a large scale, since people will notice more clearly and the scammers would get tagged.



You're right. And this makes more wide the reasons people would merit a post; some would merit even a post for being funny, for example. But the main reason for merit remains the usefulness, which also may be seen different by different people.



Not all spammers care about merit though. Hence we still have a fair amount of spam/garbage.


You are imho too focused on what others do, while your goal seem to be to receive yourself more merit. And then I'd say that you may be doing it wrong.
Posting more useful stuff - from tutorial to spot-on answers to people needing help - could get you more merit than threads like this. But you have only 43 posts, so there's still plenty of time to improve.
The forum is not perfect, but it's great. Enjoy your ride!

It’s not always that easy to determine whether reciprocal merits is something that takes place in order to farm accounts, or whether there are closer circles of content and/or social affinity, or small sized community subsets. The merit numbers serve as indicators, but the interpretation should be derived from the content of the merited posts, and the context where they are posted (and even so, it’s not a trivial task, and often non-conclusive). In addition, Merit sources tend to be some of the better posters, and often cross paths, which leads to them meriting each other.

On a smaller scale, take for example the Spanish Local board (which you also roam). There are say 10 more or less active posters there that provide content, and most of them know how to post fairly well. The local community, being small, will inherently tend to merit each other due to two factors: some merit sources roam the local board (which is pretty essential), and the content is provided by a small selection of people, meaning that there is not much competition.
The above has personally made me wary at times, and I’ve often refrained from providing more merits in the past due to this fact. Now if we take a look at the content of the posts, a fair share of the merited posts would be postulants to merit on any of the general boards, probably with higher rewards. Nevertheless, I believe people there are rather more focused on trying to keep the board alive and kicking through providing content than anything else.

Small time farmers may be easier to spot, and often merit acts as a lead, and the content leads to making connections. Again, easy to suspect, but not so much to prove.


I used to have a Tab on the Merit Dashboard that indicated everybody’s reciprocal merit with every other account, but I deleted it due to it slowing down the Dashboard (Cartesian product stuff). Alternatively, this view is interesting, and can be used to see:

-   How much one account has contributed to the merit of all other accounts (parametrize From User Name).
-   How much other accounts have contributed to our merits count (parametrize To User Name)

https://public.tableau.com/shared/R8SXH8PMG?:display_count=n&:origin=viz_share_link

You could look at it in two ways.

• There is a merit ring
• The ones being merited are awesome posters

Obviously it's the latter on it. You don't need to point any fingers because everything can be seen here and you would notice that a lot of receivers have great quality of posts. If you find some kind of suspicious activity like someone unexpectedly receives high merit with a shit post, then there could be something.

You just answered your own post in a way. There was a time where merit was non-existent and there are still campaigns that accepts newbies. Those are a couple of years ago and the forum is better with it.

Without having s a merit source in this circle, getting a huge number of sMerits requires creating high quality posts. Believe me, most of those who sell these accounts are for low quality accounts and you probably won't get the chance to participate in a good signature campaign.

In general, unless the case with hundreds of merits, scam, spam, banned accounts and others all you can get is a negative trust or red flag against them. create a topic  and some trusted members may interact with you.

I gave Jack 50 merits to stimulate this thread.

Now I need to look and see if he has ever given me any merit.

Who's to say they weren't... New accounts that spend 50% of the time fishing for merits and the other 50% telling senior members what they should be doing just strike me as odd. There's at least 3 different people that keep coming back under new accounts and posting way too much in Meta (not including QS). The first two are pretty easy to spot but the third is a bit more clever.

Although I find 50 a too big amount, I do appreciate the humor behind your gesture  :D

May be you are true. Probably most of the high quality posts are generated by them and there's nothing wrong with meriting such post regardless who is the poster is. Nevertheless, merit data is available to everyone. You can check and create list of backscratchers and backstabbers of merit (LoyceV has it for custom trust list). That would differentiate abusers and/or if someone is trying to achieve something which community didn’t see.

  Nah the problem is your interpretation.

 I have been here since 2012 I know a few hundred posters very well.  I don't know you very well at all.

So if I see your name I won't go to click on you. Unless the thread title looks interesting.

I clicked here today because the title caught my eye.

This thread is short right now and I can tell you I know 85% of the posters on it.

They know me and if they like what I say I will get a point/merit. I could not care less about merits anymore I have 1000's of them.  Many earned. Plus 1000 given since I was here a long time. I know I write good posts. So if it was always a merit system from 2012 I would likely have earned 2000 not the 1000 they gave us. legendary members. I liked the title enough to give you a merit. SO I will now read your posts and see if you should get more points.  Its hard to catch my eye if you are a newbie but if you look you will see I gave more than 100 newbies their first  merited

Edit: I just read all 43 of your posts.

You write really well.
So well I would say you are an alt and not  a newbie.
But I did promise you a merit for the title of this thread. So I gave it to you.


And checking the posters here I know 8 of them I know they effort good work and I know that I have given all of them a merit or 2.

I also know they have given me merits.
As for the op your english posts are really good.  and my wife helped me with your spanish posts.  You do a lot of quality posts. Really good ones. I will be looking for your name the next few weeks.

It is insane that there is no lifetime cap on merit you can send to someone. There are users here that have literally traded hundreds of merit with each other. The fact these people are typically the ones trying to destroy the reputations of others with flimsy accusations of bad behavior and you see exactly what sort of system has been created here. Something should definitely be done to address it, but good luck getting people who surround themselves with ‘Yes men’ to take any action that wouldn’t benefit themselves.

Well Jack is helpful on the tech boards, and he knows more about crypto than I do, so I expect he will put the 25 smerit to good use.

@Jetcash completely obliterated the argument with a single blow. At first I thought "what just happened" but then I got the message. @DdmrDdmr comments about how a close community or can affect merit ratio made me rethink my stance on the matter and see reason. Its not as difficult for users to cross paths  and as @philipma1957 pointed out good posters who overtime have become a household name will get twice as much merits. I agree because I also read posts of names I am familiar with.
Thank you all for your thoughts and opinions. I got a few bruises here and there  ;D but it was fun ( some posts cracked me up) and educational at the same time. Other users who might have previously bear the same ideas with me got their answers.
 You misunderstood what I meant. I only referenced the thread because it is a popular thread that explains how merit system works, that's all. Thank you for the compliment, I think. I do my best to strike out, you already read all my posts, you will be seeing more of me

I don't really know what it's all about but it sounds like a case that has affected you personally. I don't know if that is what has made you think of the lifetime cap but I don't see the point. The system is set up so that you give merit to deserving posts according to your rationale. I don't see a problem with LoyceV and fillippone sending a lot of merits to each other (if they have, I haven't checked), for example. Putting a cap would distort the system.

Did you miss the part where he called you a fake newbie? OK well those are more my words than his. I'm calling you a fake newbie.

This is psychological, if you send someone 2 merits, the person will have 1 smerits. If someone do you a favour today, will you not remember the person? Meriting someone's post is like you did the person a favour, infact, it is a favour, but yet having quality posts. I hope you see the reason I first implied that it is psychological. What you should comment more about are people sending merits to low quality posts, if you find anyone like that, you can report the person, not reporting someone reciprocating by sending merit to quality posts. You can give merit back to anyone you like, so far the post is of high quality.

Just to point something; you aren't meriting someone for his future sMerit usage, but for his quality content. I could send you 50 merits which would then end up to Jack which would then end up back to me. That would be an abuse, even if you, Jack and me merited objectively, because we'd all increase our merit count for no particular reason.

Or to put it in another way. We, the merit sources, could come into an agreement that we will send each other 50 merits once a month. We'd continue to merit objectively (or at least try to), but we'd already abused the system.

I agree with most of the posts and think you are looking at it wrongly. Just by looking at the merit history, you might get the feeling these members are collaborating and intentionally meriting each other to benefit. 

If you look past that and research where and how they post, you might see why they have such high amounts of merits. Go and check out who are the members who are the most active in the Development & Technical Discussion and Bitcoin Technical Support sub forums for example. Look for those providing the best answers to questions and helping with problem-solving.

Several names will catch your eye. Let's say there are 15 of them. So you have 15 members with the same interests, knowledge, and experience, spending most of their time in the same sections. That creates a small group of people who constantly come across each other, read each other's posts, and like what they see because they solve problems. It then becomes natural that those people merit each other without there being a malicious system behind it.

Consider also the following. If a person is always nice to you, gives you compliments, and creates a positive atmosphere when you are around that person, you will remember the name and feel like you should return the favor. It's human nature to want to feel appreciated and show appreciation to others. The next time you see that person, you will gladly say or do something nice. It's the same thing with merits. 

No I didn't miss it. I didn't miss your opinions either. You're Legendary and therefore your words hold more waters than mine.
You have been here longer so much so you can detect fake newbies in a blink of an eye. There is no substance to your claim except bitterness. Maybe this post offended you idk and sincerely I will continue to be my original self regardless of how you feel about me. I'm not the type to cower to cyber bullies. This isn't high school

@jackg can be happy that you have such a high opinion of him, and this is clearly seen from the fact that you have sent him more than 200 merits so far. I honestly don't care what you do with your merits, but I'm of the opinion that it's better to reward 50 people or maybe 25 than to act this way, and in the end, you didn't prove anything, except that you have your top merit fan.

https://i.imgur.com/YS3ESNb.jpg

---

Unfortunately, it would be good if @jackg is at least half as generous as you are, but he doesn't think it's necessary to reward good posts.

https://i.imgur.com/tWiqcEM.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/JTFVBfC.jpg

I've Merited many people who Merited me. But that's not necessarily a bad thing, as long as the posts deserve it. It still worries me though, when I notice someone Merited me right before I Merited them. It's a risk when you sent out lots of sMerit, but I still try to avoid it (meaning I won't Merit a deserving post if that user just Merited me).

It happens indeed, but people are also free to spent their sMerit the way they want. If it's abusive, they risk getting tagged. If they're Merit sources, they risk losing their source.

At least it's a whole lot more difficult now. There used to be account farmers with tens or hundreds of high-ranking accounts, and that's completely impossible to do now.

Actually, I made this for Merit:
Merit Backscratchers: who scratched who's back the most? (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5101199.0)
[parody] Merit Backstabbers: who stabbed who in the back the most? (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5103387.0)
It's been a year, so I'll update these topics.

I've received 195 sMerit (https://bpip.org/Profile?p=loycev) from fillippone, and returned 123 or less (https://bpip.org/Profile?p=fillippone) (I'm not in his top 10).
If there's no cap on good posts, there shouldn't be a cap on Merit to send.

Well to be fair my older brother has zero interest in btc.

But he is very smart and an excellent writer.  If he came to this website he could do the same quality posting and in chinese along with  English .

So op could be a.smart person that finally got interested in btc.

There are times I would not mind having a second account to not be looked at like there is phil he posts too much or whatever.

I didn't realise that I had given Jack so many merits, but if you look at the awards I think you will see that most of them are for helping people with tech problems.
I'm a bit of a loose cannon with merit awards. I even give merits to people I don't like if I think their post is worth it. Or if it suits one of my political purposes.

That's where your wrong.

Does this really seem like something an _actual_ newbie would say? Think about it:


You're a newbie. Did you forget that? And quite honestly your posts aren't that good, so who are you to tell other newbies what they should be doing?

With your very first post, you're sucking up to Ratimov for a merit, and it got deleted, probably marked as spam.

And let's revisit this ass-kissing bullshit:


How would you even know they're called "scam busters?" Don't tell me because you spent a lot of time lurking before you wrote this.  ::)

I'm pretty sure this account is also you:


You do the same inconsistent line spacing thing:


- You're both big on ass-kissing using the "@soandso" thing
- KingsDen opened 27 threads in less than 2 months, you've opened 7 in 3 weeks
- You both love talking about how you're a newbie



Also, neither of you are newbies.

I think you're spot-on, nutildah.  And of course, there's the "king" part of each one's username, which is the straw that crippled the camel as far as I'm concerned.

The only way OP could know about all of the stuff he's talked about is if he lurked for a while before registering, but I seriously doubt many people do that these days (like I did in 2014).  When confronted with the accusation, OP didn't mention anything of the sort but instead just denied it.  True, he doesn't owe anyone an explanation, but if it was a simple one like being a lurker and learning about all the personalities and whatnot that way, why wouldn't he just say that?

Ultimately I think OP thinks we've never seen this trick pulled before and that skeptical members are just going to take him at his word.  Not gonna happen, OP.

I admit sometimes I can come across as a bit overzealous.

Its just tiresome seeing the same 'ol threads about merit from ""Newbies"".

And then we're supposed to just chow down on this artfully plated bullshit they've prepared for us.

Newbie OP could post in any section in the forum about anything and he spends half the time posting about merit, waiting to be cyberbullied apparently. Reminds me of a meme I saw the other day.

https://i.imgur.com/lg2iMFG.jpg

For the record, one account I may very well have wrongfully accused of being a Fake Newbie is arbiter5 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=2554568).

He was a little too enthusiastic for my liking so I slapped him with a neutral (basically what happened), but as time went on I found his story that he was a crossover from Reddit more believable, and realized I had potentially made an error (accusing him of being a fake newb), so I removed it.

Edit: I mean if you think about it, none of this matters. None of this means anything. Have a terrific day.

I haven't much to add to this thread, I was summoned by mentions, but had some real-life vaccination mishap that hindered my ability to post.

Merit system had the main purpose of limiting spam and account farming. I joined the forum after this change, so I haven't a clear idea of how messy the situation was before, but judging from the tons of deleted posts I bump into from time to time doing my meta-analysis, I guess it was pretty dramatic.

Of course, I was pretty successful in gathering merits, and I explain my view here:

Ranking up is possible! 2900 Merits earned in less than 12 months! My 11 Hints! (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5098333).

I merited every single post in this thread (a little bit of merit trolling like @Jet Cash did) as I think the contributions were of utter quality. Many accounts were already merited by me in the past, and also merited me back, some of them were new to me, some of them, I couldn't merit as I already hit the 50 merits/mo that currently is the only limit to full discretionality in merit distributing.

As a merit source, I tend to distribute merits in the best possible way: post content, post quality, the ability of the receiver to send merits in his turn, are all factors I try to ponder while spreading merits. I do agree with @theymos when saying you should merit a good post I don't agree to.

The proof is the OP: there is no godfatherism in the merit system, and this critique from a "new" account is even more suspicious. I am wondering which real account is hiding behind this name, and why he's afraid to use his real name...

Yep, that's another way a very knowledgeable newbie could appear to be an alt account--but as I said, if you're accused of faking your newbie status here, why would you not just say you learned all about bitcoin/whatever on another site like Reddit?  It would save the accused a lot of hassle, and it's at least believable. 

What isn't believable in this case is that KingsDen/Magicalking knows a lot of stuff about members of this forum, and that isn't information you could easily gather unless you've been a lurker before registering--and I'd think that you'd have to lurk for a fairly long period of time in order to become familiar with the biggest personalities on bitcointalk. 

I lurked for months in 2014 and I still wasn't familiar with most members when I joined, because I was paying more attention to what was being written than who wrote it.

I think it does matter, but it's not exactly earth-shattering stuff in the grand scheme of things.  That's why I wouldn't even bother to leave a neutral trust on someone suspected of lying about their origin.  There would be enough reasonable doubt in my mind that I wouldn't feel right doing that, and I'd prefer to discuss it with the member in question like we're doing now. 

And to that point, it'd be nice if KingsDen/Magicalking would address the question of how he came to know so much about the forum when his rank would indicate that he shouldn't have so much knowledge.

We have successful digressed from the discussion to me. Okay, I mentioned right there in the post you quoted that I spent time reading scam accusations. They are names that stick when you browse each board. Those users have made contributions that are visible to the blind. You have not been a newbie in ages. In one of my other posts I made a joke about being addicted to the forum. I have been browsing the boards months before I decided to open an account.  I do not have any affiliation with the user kingsden or any of the other newbie accounts you have linked me to. I chose a username that wouldn't require numbers. The line spacing is coincidental. My thoughts are mine and no one else's. Lastly I originally posted in beginners and help but was advised by DdmrDdmr to move the topic to meta which I did. I saw this thread fit for meta that's why it is here. I did not forsee this becoming a problem. Am I wrong to post in meta? I don't suck up to anyone. I follow the rules, I say what's on my mind. If I don't know about what's being discussed I stay clear of the comment box. My posts are personal and come from the heart. I am my best critic I go back to every post I make and think of better ways to make it better

@op, from my own personal experience here, I don't think there's any God fatherism here, if you find people meriting those that merited them in the past, it might be a mere coincidence, and besides, its never a rule here that if you find a merit worthy post from a user who merited you before, you shouldnt merit them just because they've merited you in the past - No - you are free to merit anyone as long as their post is worthy of it, the merit system, as we all know, was put in place to combat spam and shit posts on the forum, this has helped to create a cleaner and a more healthy environment for crypto discussions and also helped those new to bitcoin and cryptocurrencies to get help easily, one rule on merit is that, it is forbidden for anyone to sell it, some forum users have in the past broken this rule and those caught were severely punished.

This is a real misconception, because we all know vividly that their is no Godfatherism in this community, so let newbies have it in their skull, ranking up or awarding merit to someone does mean that the higher rank user is piloting or making the lower rank user to be elevated immediately with a collaboration, we have to understand this concept that, if someone subsequently meriting a particular person, that doesn't mean is the Godfather here, because this community accommodate different set of people from different denominations and secondly, for somebody to be meriting someone frequently that shows that the methods of the user composition of text is suit or suitable to the person...so let us not reason contrary or negatively about awarding a user merit like three consecutive time's.

K bud, whatever you say.

You're free to have all the fun you want doing this little dance; as I mentioned before it's kind of entertaining and who am I to stop free entertainment.

Though the Op is objective.  But I honestly think that in terms of meriting a post, what should be great concern are;
1. Is the post being merited a quality one? Even at that I understood that quality is in the beholder's eyes. What appeared to me as quality, may appear to another as non quality. So, it is purely discretional.
2. I think in the forum, there is no alternative to appreciation. Merit is an appreciation. Will it not be wrong that someone who might not even be a merit source gives me 4merits and I will be unable to return even 1 smerit to him?
3. Merit is psychological. Immediately you always agree with ones opinion, it appears that you guys reason alike, you will naturally see yourself meriting the user severally because you are psychologically attached to him.
So, the cycle of merit should not be a problem in as much as there are merit sources available to always distribute merit randomly.
Thanks!

I don't think there is any favourism of merit circle on this forum as you will probably see that quality posts have been receiving merits from the members but if you are talking about reciprocal merits then ofcourse you can see if one member giving merit to another but if the posts deserve it to be.For all the merit sources that I know are actively engaged in giving smerits to all the good and constructive posts that come under their witness and sometimes theh give say many merits to each other but it's not that they are abusing the system because sometimes they run out of smerits and they can give it to each other so that members are able to receive them when needed.The circle revolves the same way because when a merit source is receiving merits from another source it will distributed among all the posts that deserves to be merited.So there is no such thing in the forum according to me.