Bitcoin Forum

Should those that have sent very few to no merits to people be known?

If we want the merit system to be used as intended the people who are hoarding their merit should be made public.

The algorithm would have to be different from the list of top merit spenders, I'm sure Theymos and team could easily create the most appropriate relationship. However I propose it include some or all of the following:

• Lowest merit sent in relation to merit received (including the original issuance)
• OR lowest merit set in relation to current merit score
• Exclude Newbies, Jr. Members, and Members
• EDIT - Only add accounts for consideration if they've been active since the Merit System started

I know Theymos and crew are considering decaying the merit at some point, but this list would be an appropriate metric to add to merit stats and could help gauge if/when any decaying rule should be applied.

You should deal with lowest merit spenders that have spent above 1 merit. Otherwise, you'll have to deal with a lot of inactive accounts, unless you decide to exclude them from the list.

hmmm, how about the members and full members, i know that they are only given 5-15 initial sMerits, and it can be easily exhausted unless they got 2 merits to share 1sMerit, so I think that this would not work unless full members and below can get some merits so that they would be able to merit others.

Meh.  I think it's people's right not to give out merit points.  Some people don't buy into the merit system, are lazy, inactive, or whatever.   It's not a cause for concern and really isn't anyone's business anyway.   That's my take on it.  The only people who should be censured are the ones who are gaming the system.

I would challenge you to defend that odd statement.

How is revealing who has sMerit going to help the Merit system to be used as intended?   Are people supposed to be encouraged to beg for Merit from those who have it?

This system was established to reward those that make quality contributions to the community.

That objective requires two parts to a single transaction to occur.

(1) Someone must make a quality contribution to the forum
(2) Someone else must reward that quality contribution by sending merit

Those that have merit, and moreso those that have received merit, who aren't sending merit aren't fulfilling their side of the transaction.

I totally agree that people should be able to send merit as they see fit, but if people are sent merit they should be willing to return the favor forward.


Great point, and absolutely not!

If there is going to be no expectation that the holder of smerit has to actually use it then we also can't admonish those who squander their smerit on friends or give 50 merit to one post.

Great points; I thank you - I just have the one issue with this statement.

Sending merit requires work.  You need to evaluate many posts and pick the ones you think are most worthy.  We are not being paid to send merit, so it should not be a transaction we need to fulfill.

An innocent new user makes an oddly relevant comment and receives two merit points.  Suddenly this user has an obligation to reward someone else with a point?  I don't think so....

This kind of bias would be magnified how many times if we published a list of those who had spendable merit?



I think that is a different issue.  Not spending merit and sending all your merit to a friend are two different things.  :/

Sending merit requires no more work than anyone is already spending cruising the forum.

You don't need to hunt for new quality posts, this isn't a job for everyone. But provided you are a good contributor, who is actually reading posts in threads (and not just responding to the OP), you will find original posts or responses that you deem are valuable - you give them a merit. It takes 5 seconds, literally.

The universe of members able to receive your merit are those that participate in the corners of the forum you lurk in.



If you're being given merit you should feel an obligation to spend the resulting merit on posts you believe contribute to the community, it's part of the privilege of getting merit.



They are different things only if we are agreeing to be inconsistent with how we approach people's use.

To have a policy/expectation that "you can spend your merit as you want, but only if it's in line with these other specific rules" will just perpetuate the debate of "I should be able to spend how I want!" and "These people are abusing merit use!"

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Those that hoard merit are as careless with it as those that send merit to friends or give out 10s of merit for a non-constructive post. Let's either shine a light on both sides of this carelessness or stop complaining about how people choose to spend their merit.

Fortunately for my point of view, Theymos will probably start a decaying process which will clean out the stale sMerit sitting idle and useless.

Ok, We have lot of people (Jr.Member and newbies) that do not have any Merit so they cannot merit. Personally for me, I read here a lot of post and come across some good post also.

I can suggest that , like we have link for "Report to Moderator" for abusive posts , same we can do like "Report for Merit" for the people who are reading here and do not have Merit right now to spend.

Somebody can say , I should make collection of these post  as Theymos suggested but actual problem is that I need to bookmark them , wait for the count of 10 to publish. Now this need additional work and wait.

I think a simple button click like "Report for Merit" and continue to read on.

I vote nay, for the reasons Vod gave. Though it's all public information anyway; if anyone really cares about sMerit hoarding that much, they can just scrape the forum to get the information they need.

You don't need to wait until you have 10 merit to start sending merit to others. Each merit received generates .5 (or one half) merit to send. You have 1 merit right now, when you receive 1 more merit you'll also be given one to send to some one else that has made a post that you deem a quality contribution.

In the spirit of the topic I started here and you sharing your opinion, I'll give you that one merit so you can have one to spend. Spend it wisely...but tis better to give than to receive!

Merit really shouldn't be this big of a deal. Why are people acting like this?

The system was intended to reward quality posters, not penalize people and turn this forum into some Orwellian shithole where everyone is snitching on each other and publicly shaming each other. The idea of a public shaming list isn't just overkill. It's downright fucked up.

And it wouldn't even work. I would just quickly dump all sMerit I have to avoid being publicly singled out, on someone like Vod, because who could blame me for that? I don't have time to worry about "Merit police."

And if you want to talk about how the system was intended to be used, then consider that people with limited sMerit may want to reserve it for truly deserving posts. There's nothing wrong with that.


Doesn't seem like a big deal. And that's why Theymos suggested that sMerit might decay in the future.

You have your reasons for going this cause of actions but then calling people out for not giving out merit is a little bit to the extreme because of some factors:

1. Giving merit based on posts is completely a subjective decision with no quantitative reason which means what makes sense to me might not make sense to you.

2.  Forcing people to do that means that we are open to another round of issues. Then you see another calling out of someone giving merit to those who don't merit it based on their own judgement, or being accused of giving to their alts (which might be right though) but because they are forced to.

The merit system has been designed after a thorough understanding of the what the community needs which has not even worked for more than 3 months after that modifications can be made.

See, you are so focused on MERIT, you forgot about TRUST!

If you don't give all your sMerit to Vod, you risk the negative trust banhammer!    :P

I thought the merit system was created to help mods to reduce low value spam posting.

The merit system was dumped on me, and it wasn't part of my original agreement for using BitcoinTalk. I happen to think the merit system has the potential to be good, but only if people use it to award meritorious posts. If someone can't see a post that they see as having value, then they should keep their sMerit until they do. The ones who are "not fulfilling their side of the transaction" are the ones who award merit to members who have abandoned the forum - Satoshi and the HODLer for example, this blocks the creation of new sMerit. The others are the ones who are too lazy to look for posts, and just give their sMerit to the merit soup kitchens and food banks. I won't even start to discuss the 50 merit awards to promote sig spammers.

Please leave the responsible awarders of sMerit alone, and focus on the abusers who are spraying sMerit like confetti.

I can understand for one time to award merit to Satoshi,HODLer and Pizza post because these are some kind of iconic .(Although those merit lost and no sMerits will be credited to anybody).
The actual thing that made me sick that people giving Merit to Bounty thread Managers (Every body knows, actual spam problem and fake account problem arose due to bounty section, I will suggest we should ban merit on bounty section).

What the hell is going on, you give me payment of bounty, I will merit you

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2708684.msg29173384#msg29173384 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2708684.msg29173384#msg29173384)

Ohh, you accepted me in bounty, I will merit you.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2884232.msg29768294#msg29768294 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2884232.msg29768294#msg29768294)

<- Technically I'm not a person, but this cat does send very little merit.

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There is nothing wrong with that. You are assuming that I'm not sending merit to people because I do not want to. The problem is that there is a very little number posts actually worth meriting. I am not going to:
a) Find a good user and go through his/her post history and merit their posts (see the recent abuse report against Xandry).
b) Waste countless hours digging through garbage in order to find something that is worth meriting[1].

Once the problem of garbage-quality posting is alleviated to some degree, then I will likely be sending out more merit points. The intended functionality of the system is as follows: You continue to use the forum as you have until its introduction. If you see something that seems constructive (to you) and you feel like it deserves points, then you give it points. You should not be forced to find posts that are worth meriting.

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Nothing against the OP, but posts like these and especially threads where shitposters/farmers (et. al.) complain about the system are just further enforcing my conservative stance. There is no, and there should be no, obligation to do anything[2].

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[1] I'm aware of the generosity of some users, but not everyone is like that and not everyone has time to open *giveaway* threads and not everyone agrees with those either.
[2] I wonder if it would be *right* to, e.g. pay someone to spend time finding posts that are constructive and should be merited. Either, a user with a lot of merit points paying someone to find posts that should be merited, or paying a user that has a lot of merit points to spend time (working) finding constructive posts and meriting them.
This system has raised a lot of *unique edge cases* and thus also questions.

Oh boy! I gave you a merit for that Lauda.

Runs to hide in the Ivory Tower, :)

that is a good suggestion
I have another suggestion that could use besides this question. admins could reduce the roof of merits and instant of this increase waiting time for posting
for example for full members (that require 100 merits and 120 activity) admins could increase the post timing (from 1 minute to 5 minutes) and also decrease the merit score from 100 to 25 merits. and design a system to user report good post for admins to give them merits

Yeah, I don't think people should be 'shamed' in some way just for not dishing out merit. It's their choice whether they want to or not so there shouldn't be a table of these people, especially when it will just be populated by inactive users. Their merit will decrease anyway, but there's more important things to be thinking of right now like adding more merit sources and giving more merit to those who have shown they can dish it out well.

I agree to this completely.  And if I remember correctly, the admin mentioned that for merit sources, there smerits will decay after a month. So they need not be miser with merits and that is sufficient.

Totally agreed. That guys should get their tongues out of bounty managers' arses and stop freaking others out. When they're giving their merit to bounty managers, bounty managers are totally not goin' to spend that merit anywhere. They're just creating a bounty thread and sometimes answering the letters. That's a dead end for merit been spent there but not to "like" a really ironic or helpful post.

Of course the bounty managers will spend their sMerits. They go to alts, and their favourite spammers so that they can create bigger signatures.

I doubt they are going to put alts in the system, they can be easily caught. but for spammers ... well that has a sense.  :)
then that means the spammers won't use their sMerit

Thanks. Actually, I can get on board with this stance - that there should be no obligation for how one uses their merit - and therefore there should also be no penalty for those that drop 50 merit on one person, one post, regardless of constructive activity.

What I'm really against is the inconsistent application of a policy. And allowing people to hoard but chastising them for how they spend would be incredibly inconsistent.

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The author of the I AM HODLING thread was last active on January 27, 2018. Sooo, GameKyuubi (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=26945) is still active.

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It's great to see a lot of opinion on this thread.

So he is - he made 11 posts in the last year - welcome back to him. :)

You have some great points. I've been able to get a small amount of merit in a short time by writing insightful posts. However, I see most merit being given to newbies from legendary members and merit sources. I don't think this is just because they HAVE merit to give, but because at legendary you are more invested in the quality of the forum itself.

I think most members - full members see Jr. members as competition and so they don't merit them. I think this is unavoidable, but won't make a big impact overall.

I do understand the feeling of wanting to hoard your merit. I saw this great infographic https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2834641.0 and wanted to merit, but didn't have enough, so I left a post instead. I got a merit and for a minute I thought "I'll hold on to this"...but then I realized I was just being crazy and part of the problem. I think other people will have this same epiphany, some sooner, some later.