Bitcoin Forum

I understand that Meta is flooded with Merit postings, but I believe I have found the one simple solution to solve everyones complaints: Merit Source Quotas.

If a merit source ultimately has to reach a quota, similar to police officers issuing tickets, the merit system will be a raging success. More merits will be passed around and post quality will increase just as it would without the quotas in place.

Why? You ask...

In a given set of 10 posts, there will inevitably be the best post. A merit source will then in effect, be forced to choose the best post out of several posts, instead of arbitrarily picking posts that meet their personal requirements. This leads to more merit being passed around, and users ultimately being awarded for posting the best posts - not just the posts that meet highly specific "quality" requirements.

There is no need for demerits and no need to adjust merit amount to level up.

This is a bad idea and the situation you compare it to (Police quotas) are equally as bad of an idea. I appreciate the intention behind it; you would like to see merit freely flowing to the posts you believe to be deserving of merit. However, merit quotas for the sources would change everything for the worse.

Currently there is no obligation for active you are, how much time you spend on the forum, how many posts you read or how you dish out your trust/merit. If we enacted a quota for merit sources, then it would be necessary that a merit source is active X amount of time per day, reading Y amount of posts and meriting Z amount of them. This would inevitably promote spamming beyond belief; if there are quotas and you can only find spam posts, you would inevitably be "forced" to give a spam-post a merit just to keep your merit source status and keep up with criteria.

It would serve to benefit those that don't deserve merit and it would put extra strain on merit sources, which would lead to them doing a worse job at distributing their merit, not a better job.

Out of 10 posts there will be a "best" post, but "best" will be subjective and the "best" out of those 10 could still be horrible and not worth a merit.

I hear this will be implemented on Facebook and Instagram as well. Users will no longer be able to ‘like’ posts they actually fancy. Instead, they will be shown 10 random posts and be forced to ‘like’ one of them. If they don’t comply, they will be placed on probation so that they won’t be able to ‘like’ any posts for a month, or, in the case of repeated violations, they will be stripped of their ‘like’ source powers permanently. This system will be a raging success. </sarcasm>

If you are on this forum and only find spam posts, then there are far deeper issues at play. Quotas would not make sense from a time perspective, just an amount perspective.

I've got aanother idea - introduce posting quotas for new members until they can prove they aren't just merit hunters.

That isn't even close to what I said, but thanks for trying to straw-man my perfectly reasonable refutation of your bad idea. I did not say there is only spam to be found, but you were trying to argue that :


This is flawed, because the best post out of the 10 could still be undeserving of a merit. Merit and trust must both be arbitrary and not a sanctioned system, otherwise there will be even more abuse than there already is. You can not force a user to think your post deserves merit, just like you cannot force them to trust you.

Quotas would not make sense from any perspective. If you must merit 1 post out of every X posts read then you will be forced to merit posts you don't believe deserve it. This ruins the entire merit system and encourages people to spam, in the hopes that they will, more likely, be the "best"-shitty post out of 10.

Think of me as a reputable merit source with 5000 sMerits, now force me to do anything, I don't have to do anything, I just need to be reasonable when I am meriting people, as a merit source, I need to read and merit if I want to help.

Merit sources should have a sticky thread in meta, and they must have a title under their forum names, how could theymos monitor 57 sources? let the community to monitor their actions, nobody would bug a merit source if they want any merit from them, would you bug a DT member to ask for positive trust?

I can see alt accounts with 500 posts, 500 activity and 900 merits, if we know who are all the sources, we could find out if they were meriting their friends and if they were ignoring others.

What do you mean by these? How can post quota prove that someone is a merit hunter? Wouldn't this force newbies to spam post since they don't have enough knowledge?

I agree to you sir.., how  this forum can be much productive, meaningful and helpful to others if some people here are posting nonsense. As i learn Merit is form because forum is going to be a wasting garbage due to all the spammers that are still joining here. And the reason of having merit is to decreasing the volume of useless or worthless post in the forum, therefore spammers will be lessen too. And best result for that is we can gain here a better, helpful and meaningful post.It will be a big help to us specially to all the beginners. And thru this I'm pretty sure that this system will be much wider and the number of people joining here will be more increasing too.

That is the worst idea ever because newbies still cannot contribute to the community well and if you give them a post quota? What the heck will they post about? Posts asking for questions?  Instead of doing it, I think the merit system is fine as is since those who doesn't contribute to the community will not rank up after all and merit sources can merit post that are really quality posts. Users selected to be merit sources should have an indicator or a badge saying that they are merit sources in order for users to monitor if they are really doing their job or not.

Yep, this post sounds as good as the "Useless Ethereum Token (UET)  (https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/useless-ethereum-token/)" .

a) It addresses a need that does not exist, that is ranking up members. Ranking up a certain number of members is not an objective of the forum per-se AFAIK.

b) Addresses it in a counter productive manner: By forcing sources to merit even if there is nothing to merit. That is, if everything is shit, they would have to find the ones that are less of a shit, yet still being shit.

c) Measures "success" wrongly: The objective of the system is NOT to let merit flow, but to increase the quality of the posts. Merit flowing is desirable, not an absolute need.

d) The only end of the post is to address a personal "need" of ranking up, not to improve the community.

e) It is biased mentioning "everyone's" complaints. People who are here to share their concerns and learn would have no reason to complain.

If you want to shitpost or go bounty-only you are free to do so (I do bounty hunt myself),  just don't expect to be rewarded for it and don't try to force sources into it.

Everything that EthanB said is on point. Abuse in many forms has been rampant in this forum, let's not corrupt the merit system by promoting something that would lead to its misuse. There is a reason why merit sources are appointed by the moderators of this forum and it's because they know what quality is. You don't have to force them to give out merits just because they need or obligated to reach a quota. What will the point be if out of the 10 posts you submitted the "best" is not sensible at all? We all have freedom here in this forum, let's not suggest things that would not lead to the betterment of this forum.

sorry before .. I appreciate maybe a little I listen to the discussion with the Merit system I think good, the reason maybe every member, especially the bottom is not only going to be active but will improve the quality of post in order to get merit value .. because it is very meaningful not only for I am even for everyone under this forum.