Title: Is it true that we only send sMerit to our “buddies” ? Post by: DdmrDdmr on May 30, 2018, 12:25:14 PM 1. Introduction.
Lately, I’ve seen multiple posts that hint or openly state that sMerit is only been sent to our buddies/friends/¿alts?/same rank/”want merit back from” type of accounts. Is this true? When you open/read your (online) press during the day, just how many news sources do you actually consult? There are thousands of sources available, but we tend to read those that we enjoy most or are aligned to our views on matters. Once we work out what we like, we tend to make it a habit to read information from a fixed set of sources, and every now and then we may open-up to others and enlarge our circle. We could take this down a level and state that, within our favoured sources, only a certain amount of sections catch our interest, and within these, articles and columnists. I think that the above analogy applies to the Forum, were we move around certain sections that become of interest to us, there we favour reading certain topics, and we certainly get hooked to reading posts by specific users and favour their lecture, since we enjoy them, agree/disagree/agree to disagree with them, and ultimately find some interest to what they generally write. The above conforms our general habit factor, and also relates to our network size factor. It doesn’t mean that we don’t open up to more sources within the forum, but as time goes by the speed of assimilating new members to our network is bound to decrease. In many cases, our network expansion graph will probably look like a logarithmic function curve: Our network size grows quicker at the beginning, but tends to slow down (not stop) over time. Merit sources may be an exception. 2. First Approach: Merit sent by rank to rank. The first approach to resolve our initial question, about merit sent to buddies, would be to see how merit is being distributed from one rank to the other ranks. We saw this exercise done in the post Which Ranks send sMerit to which Ranks - and who ranked up (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3218442.msg33469339#msg33469339). It’s true that the post is now two months old, but it proved that ranks were not solely concentrating on meriting their own rank or above, but were in fact very active meriting posts belonging to users with a lower rank. So users are not concentrated on meriting buddies on their own rank (or above), but are really of a broader nature. 3. Second Approach: Reciprocal Merit This is the core of this exercise. If the opening statement were to be true, we should find that the vast majority of the users we send merit to also send us some back at some point (reciprocal), although in different quantities. If it is indeed true that we do send sMerit just to our buddies … 3.1 Global Reciprocal Information https://i.imgur.com/YE9vSAL.jpg The data is to be interpreted as follows: Rank: Rank nUsers: Number of users in the Rank that have sent sMerit to another user. nUsersSent: Total number of users that the nUsers have sent sMerit to. nUsersSentReciprocal: Number of users out of nUsersSent that have also awarded the nUsers with sMerit over time. nUsersSentNonReciprocal: Number of users out of nUsersSent that have not been awarded back sMerit over time to the nUsers. nMeritSent: Total amount of sMerit that the nUsers have sent to the nUsersSent. nMeritSentReciprocal: Total sMerit sent to users that have awarded the nUsers with sMerit over time. nMeritSentNonReciprocal: Total sMerit sent to users that have not awarded the nUsers with sMerit over time. Network Size Reciprocal: % of our network that is merited and from whom we receive merit back at some point. Network Size Non-Reciprocal: % of our network that is merited and from whom we don't receive merit back at some point. Merit Sent Reciprocal: % of our sent sMerit that goes to reciprocal users. Merit Sent Non-Reciprocal: % of our sent sMerit that goes to non-reciprocal users. Notes: 1. By “meriting back” I am not implying that the merit is obtained by a prior merit event. The order of events is not analysed here, just the fact that, at some point in time, they have reciprocally merited each other. 2. What I’m counting here are transactions of the nature “User A sent to User B “ x sMerits, where User A is one of the nUsers and User B is one of the nUsersSent. 3. We could also do this exercise from the “Receivers” point of view, but I think it will complicate this even further so I have refrained from posting it. What the above table shows us is that: a) On Average (but who is an average John Doe right?), we send sMerit to 17,14% of users of our network, who have at some point also awarded us with sMerit (reciprocal). Therefore, on average, 82,86% of the people we send sMerit to have not sent us any at any time. b) In terms of Total sMerit, we sent 24,13% on average to out reciprocal network, and therefore 75,87% of our awarded sMerit goes to people in our network who have not awarded us with sMerit. The above varies from rank to rank, but it goes to show that we tend to award way more to people that have not merited us at any time (non-reciprocal) yet that those who have (reciprocal). 3.2 Global Reciprocal Information – By Reciprocal Segment https://i.imgur.com/EMxb1Cn.jpg Being on the global scale, each rank is averaged, therefore withing this average there will be users that have all their sMerit in a network that is 100% reciprocal, all the way down to those that have a 0% reciprocal Network. I’ve broken it down in the above graph by 20% clusters. This means, for example, that there are 84 Sr. Members that have sent sMerit to people that at some point have all merited them back (100% reciprocal segment), 4 Sr. Members are in the situation of awarding merit to reciprocal users in the range of 80%..100% and so on. What we are not seeing simultaneously is how much sMerit we’re talking about in each case since I would need to break down each segment further an complicate matters further more. We can see that the vast majority of us are in the low quintal (0%..20%), and a fair share on the 100% value. These cases are the “fishy zone”, but are on the whole they are not very significant in terms of number of cases vs overall cases. 3.3 Global Reciprocal Information – By Reciprocal Segment and awarded sMerit Segment https://i.imgur.com/Q5kXL9D.jpg https://i.imgur.com/MIa0oHD.jpg The above is a break-down swapping Rank for sMerit Sent group. The average for the groups don’t differ too much from the global averages, although the [40..49] sMerits Sent group does stand out a bit more. We can also see the extremes differ too for obvious reasons: The [1] sMerit Sent group is the lowest reciprocal group of all, followed by the [500+] sMerits Sent group. 3.4 Top sMerit Senders I’ve done the exercise of grabbing the 50 sMerit Senders of all times, and these are their ratios: Code: user_id name rank NuserSentReciprocalOverSent NMeritSentReciprocalOverSent I’ve added a full list of uses with their ratios here: Bitcointalk Reciprocal aggregates by user 20180531 (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/14uqxhrWXor0vltDsWlBMUUP4-Kij5YHRdg2bWGAkTaM/edit?usp=sharing). I came to the site in early January 2018, and had never had any prior knowledge about it nor it’s members. My ratios are therefore natural organic, with no influence to pre-merit kick-off relationships since I had none. My ratios are: user_id name rank NuserSentReciprocalOverSent NMeritSentReciprocalOverSent 1582324 DdmrDdmr Full Member 37% 58% What this means is that roughly 37% of the people I send sMerit to at some point have also sent it to me. That leaves a 63% that have not. In terms of sent Merit, 58% of what I send does go to those members that at some point merited me, but 42% doesn't. I'm also far away from the averages but I believe that my network size is decreasing in terms of groth speed, and thus I tend to merit more my current network. This seems natural to me and falls into the factors I stated in the introduction. In conclusion: in general people do not just sMerit their buddies as shown by the averages; far from it. It is true that one tend's to move in certain parts of the forum and reads certain topics that tend to be what one finds interesting. Those topics may have a larger presence of people that one merits and vice-versa over time, since the topics are of a common interest. I would consider normal 50% ratios without much of an issue. Title: Re: Is it true that we only send sMerit to our “buddies” ? Post by: mdayonliner on May 30, 2018, 12:32:58 PM The above varies from rank to rank, but it goes to show that we tend to award way more to people that have not merited us at any time (non-reciprocal) yet that those who have (reciprocal). This actually means that merits are not exchanging much in buddies then. It's a good sign. I am not saying that two people can not merit each others. Sure they can as long as the contents are worth receiving merits. I used to think that people are misusing merits especially exchanging with each others in massive scale. Seems like in reality it is the opposite. 75,87% is actually 3/4th of the total sMerit circulated. Mind it, now-a-days these small number of merit abusers are cleaver enough to trick the community. They goes like: A to B to C to D to A to C to B etc.PS: The topic turned out something else when I finished reading it. Initially I thought the complete opposite. Good job again mate. Title: Re: Is it true that we only send sMerit to our “buddies” ? Post by: suchmoon on May 30, 2018, 07:45:03 PM It appears that on average we are sending more sMerits to "reciprocal" users: 17% of users receive 24% of sMerits.
Title: Re: Is it true that we only send sMerit to our “buddies” ? Post by: The Sceptical Chymist on May 30, 2018, 07:55:50 PM Nice analysis here. I figured I'd sent merit to a lot of members who'd merited me in the past, but it's nice to see a number. The fact is that there are a handful of members whose posts I tend to like, but that's the reason I send merit to them--not because they're my buddies. I don't know anyone here personally and rarely chat with anyone by PM or any other means, and I don't even consider a user's rank when I'm sending merit.
People complain about this because they're posting in shitty spam megathreads; they're posting garbage; they're impatient; and they're immature and tend to blame everyone else for their failings. It's so much easier to criticize the system when it's not working in your favor, but on bitcointalk most of what people are posting not only is garbage, but in most cases probably doesn't even get read. Check out Bitcoin/Altcoin Discussion and you'll see what I mean. How anyone thinks the average member (not to mention merit sources) is going to give them merit for posts that are only made to satisfy sig campaign quotas is beyond me. So many people here are fully delusional. Title: Re: Is it true that we only send sMerit to our “buddies” ? Post by: LoyceV on May 30, 2018, 08:23:11 PM In conclusion: in general people do not just sMerit their buddies as shown by the averages; far from it. How likely is your conclusion to be valid for people who sent much less sMerit? I don't expect the top merit senders to do "vice-versa trading". The top 50 is filled with Legendary members, who don't need more Merit for anything.It is true that one tend's to move in certain parts of the forum and reads certain topics that tend to be what one finds interesting. Those topics may have a larger presence of people that one merits and vice-versa over time, since the topics are of a common interest. I'm curious to see what your conclusion would be if you do the same analysis for users who for example sent 50 sMerit: Code: 629. 50 Merit sent by zupdawg (#815389) to 1 unique users in 1 transactions People with 65 to 70 sMerit sent could work: Code: 405. 70 Merit sent by hanspeter77 (#110642) to 7 unique users in 7 transactions Title: Re: Is it true that we only send sMerit to our “buddies” ? Post by: coinlocket$ on May 30, 2018, 08:25:20 PM Nice work as always only one consideration.
The data on legendary and hero ranks are maybe infuinced by merit sources since the majority of them has those ranks. Can you remove knowed sources from the graph? Also is really hard to see one top sender sMerit with huge reciprocal merit with another user. Title: Re: Is it true that we only send sMerit to our “buddies” ? Post by: HabBear on May 30, 2018, 08:59:18 PM Wow! I love the UserSentReciprocal and MeritSentReciprocal, it really shows who's giving merit to the same people they receive merit from.
I would consider normal 50% ratios without much of an issue. What about someone with over 90%, should that be an issue? For example, user Loblawblaw has 91% MeritSentReciprocal, implying that 91% of his/her merit is sent to people who have sent him/her merit. Sounds awfully suspicious! If you look at Loblawblaw's merit history you'll find several names that show up on his/her sent and received list. Even more suspicious is that this person's merit is gained and given ONLY on the Wall Observer thread. Sounds like some quid quo pro action, no? Lablawblaw Merit History (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=merit;u=569455) Why is this person a merit source if they're clearly abusing the system? OP, can you run this report for more than just the merit sources? Title: Re: Is it true that we only send sMerit to our “buddies” ? Post by: TryNinja on May 30, 2018, 09:06:58 PM ~snip~ The huge majority of his sent/received merits are in the Wall Observer BTC/USD thread. And AFAIK people have made a community around this thread.I don't think he is trading merits. He is simple not distributing it around the forum (more like just using it as a 'like' system to cool and funny posts). Title: Re: Is it true that we only send sMerit to our “buddies” ? Post by: suchmoon on May 30, 2018, 09:28:15 PM this person's merit is gained and given ONLY on the Wall Observer thread That right there is the reason for this merit inbreading example. WO is like its own separate forum and many users there don't participate anywhere else on Bitcointalk. Disclaimer: I've sent merits to and received merits from Bob. Title: Re: Is it true that we only send sMerit to our “buddies” ? Post by: nev1d on May 30, 2018, 10:02:49 PM One may ask: "Why do people think this?"
In my opinion, everything is due to the fact that people are not happy with that their "useful" posts are not awarded, while "similar" posts from other persons receive 20 merit at a time. I certainly agree that some useful posts go unnoticed, but do not create a scandal from this. I saw that even the creator of the topic was accused of exchanging Merit with the same creators of the topics like mdayonliner etc. (Although we all know that this is not true.) Therefore, the whole problem, in my opinion, is due to the resentment of people and only. And need to somehow correct it Title: Re: Is it true that we only send sMerit to our “buddies” ? Post by: mdayonliner on May 30, 2018, 11:00:27 PM I saw that even the creator of the topic was accused of exchanging Merit with the same creators of the topics like mdayonliner etc. (Although we all know that this is not true.) You need to see the accusers depth of knowledge too. The person1 did not have much idea about how the merit system was/is working. He woke up after receiving a warning from me. He did not like the warning so he made a choice to humiliate me with whatever he can. Still he is trying his best with two topics. One is in the Scam Accusations (Bitcoin Forum > Economy > Trading Discussion > Scam Accusations (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=83.0)) section and another one is in the Investigations (Bitcoin Forum > Economy > Trading Discussion > Scam Accusations > Investigations (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=227.0)) section. In that process he blamed the OP and others as because he found the reciprocal behavior in-between us. But the truth is, like I said - two member can merit each others as long as the post/topic is merit worthy. All reciprocal behavior is not considered as abuse.A madness can not be an example. 1 Lately I have noticed that the person is giving some efforts to the community. So far he created two good topics about the forum and I am glad that he is learning from his mistakes. Title: Re: Is it true that we only send sMerit to our “buddies” ? Post by: HabBear on May 31, 2018, 05:17:43 AM ~snip~ The huge majority of his sent/received merits are in the Wall Observer BTC/USD thread. And AFAIK people have made a community around this thread.I don't think he is trading merits. He is simple not distributing it around the forum (more like just using it as a 'like' system to cool and funny posts). Well, all of the merit that can be seen in his 30 day history is to and from that single Wall Observer thread. It's true that the Wall Observer thread is essentially a section to this forum unto its own, it has over 20,000 pages! But, a lot of the comments are frivolous, there are multiple pages produced each day and there's definitely not that much content being discussed. No one is required to spread their merit around to multiple threads, and it's the content that was merited that is the true determination of whether the merit was worthy or suspect. Title: Re: Is it true that we only send sMerit to our “buddies” ? Post by: DdmrDdmr on May 31, 2018, 11:54:18 AM This actually means that merits are not exchanging much in buddies then. On the overall picture, that is what data shows, sure that there are cases that do, but that is unavoidable. This could serve to help track down merit abusers, but it is not my primal option, since the objective was a different one and thus the focus. For example, injective merit abuse (unidirectional from A->B) would have a 0% Reciprocal ratios and so the user would seem like an Ok user in this analysis. To help track merit abusers there are other kinds of analysis that can be performed (I did one way back with a link to the file that could be used (see Additional sMerit Analysis (smerit.txt) (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3167331.msg32747860#msg32747860)). Its two months old now and was rather complicated to follow, so I didn’t insist on the line of work. It appears that on average we are sending more sMerits to "reciprocal" users: 17% of users receive 24% of sMerits. Yes, well pointed out. There’s a 7 point average difference between reciprocal network size and awarded merit to the reciprocal network. That gap is even greater when we look at the Rank breakdown of the data, and in my particular case it adds up to a 20 point difference!That mean, as you say, that we do send more sMerit to reciprocal users than to non-reciprocal users. Nothing wrong with that really, since we favour the lecture of their topics and encounter them often on the posts we read. <…> That kind of sums-up nicely the non-numerical view, and gives us most of the practical reasons behind our choice of merit awardable posts.<…> I’ve modified the OP to break-down the aggregate data by groups of sMerit Awarding Totals, which allows us to see the view you mention. The average for those groups don’t differ too much from the global averages, although the [40..49] sMerits Sent group does stand out a bit more. We can also see the extremes differ too for obvious reasons: The [1] sMerit Sent group is the lowest reciprocal group of all, followed by the [500+] sMerits Sent group. Many of the examples you provide on the list have no reciprocal sMerit involved, and are thus with 0% ratios. This is rather much like what I stated above when answering to mdayonliner (Injective only sMerit (abusers) show up on this analysis with 0% Reciprocal Ratios). <…> I think the additional data break-down I added to the OP lets us see the information for groups of sMerit Senders that do not have Merit Sources. Comments replied to LoyceV’s post apply, so I think we can see the distribution pretty well without deteting the Merit Sources from the analysis (All 80 could be deleted, but I only know a bunch of them really from their explicit comments on the board).The data on legendary and hero ranks are maybe infuinced by merit sources since the majority of them has those ranks. Can you remove knowed sources from the graph? Also is really hard to see one top sender sMerit with huge reciprocal merit with another user. I’ve added a full list of uses with their ratios here: Bitcointalk Reciprocal aggregates by user 20180531 (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/14uqxhrWXor0vltDsWlBMUUP4-Kij5YHRdg2bWGAkTaM/edit?usp=sharing). I don't normally use Google Sheets, since for large data it's a bit slow, but I cloned my Excel sheet there. I did the exercise both from the Sender’s point of view an the Receivers, so the list has all the data to both sides of the equation (but the OP concentrates on the Senders). <…> What about someone with over 90%, should that be an issue? <…> OP, can you run this report for more than just the merit sources? Any percentage on the ratios can be good or bad depending how it is eventually played-out. For example, we can have 0% ratios but the users behind being injective (unidirectional) merit abusers. We could also have 100% Ratios but with only 1 sMerit involved. The other factor that helps is to contrast with the amount of sMerit sent involved (which I have added to the OP). I figure that 90% sMerit sent to Reciprocal sMerit with 2 basic receiving users may indicate something weird (above a certain Total sMerit threshold), while the same happening with a stronghold of 30 users is not the least bit suspicious. I’ve added a full list of users with their ratios here: Bitcointalk Reciprocal aggregates by user 20180531 (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/14uqxhrWXor0vltDsWlBMUUP4-Kij5YHRdg2bWGAkTaM/edit?usp=sharing) <…> Yes, quite a silly claim based on 3 sMerits given vs 1 sMerit “return”. I contested the post ( Re: [New format] Merit Abuser Gang [Now 18 Cases and 14th yet to be completed] (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3168616.msg38271069#msg38271069)).I saw that even the creator of the topic was accused of exchanging Merit with the same creators of the topics like mdayonliner etc. (Although we all know that this is not true.) <…> I even think the user is creating some decent post now, but I don’t like being dragged into vendettas based on thin-air and have thus refrained from enhancing the size of my sMerit Network in this case. The accusing post was actually posted in various sections, but I only answered in one. Anyway … Title: Re: Is it true that we only send sMerit to our “buddies” ? Post by: aartibtc on May 31, 2018, 12:33:10 PM Members doing this is not a surprise to me. But the forum staff doing nothing about it is really hard to understand.
Title: Re: Is it true that we only send sMerit to our “buddies” ? Post by: coinlocket$ on May 31, 2018, 12:44:21 PM I think the additional data break-down I added to the OP lets us see the information for groups of sMerit Senders that do not have Merit Sources. Comments replied to LoyceV’s post apply, so I think we can see the distribution pretty well without deteting the Merit Sources from the analysis (All 80 could be deleted, but I only know a bunch of them really from their explicit comments on the board). I’ve added a full list of uses with their ratios here: Bitcointalk Reciprocal aggregates by user 20180531 (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/14uqxhrWXor0vltDsWlBMUUP4-Kij5YHRdg2bWGAkTaM/edit?usp=sharing). I don't normally use Google Sheets, since for large data it's a bit slow, but I cloned my Excel sheet there. I did the exercise both from the Sender’s point of view an the Receivers, so the list has all the data to both sides of the equation (but the OP concentrates on the Senders). This is a personal estimate:
We can Assume around 8-9k to 10-11k sMerits montly for legendary rank are from legendary sources. From here if Legendary ranks has 47k sMerit sent overall we can assume 90% of this are from sources. This influence a lot the data for this rank. Title: Re: Is it true that we only send sMerit to our “buddies” ? Post by: DdmrDdmr on May 31, 2018, 01:01:55 PM <...> Perhaps, if the assumptions are right, the Legendary Rank Data would be different from what we see on the top OP. Nevertheless, I do not know (nor wish to know really) who the 80 Merit Sources are and thus cannot substract them. I published the individual data in the link provided today, so if anyone feels that the know the sources and want to give it a go they can...We can Assume around 10000 sMerits montly for legendary rank are from legendary sources. From here if Legendary ranks has 47k sMerit sent overall we can assume 90% of this are from sources. This influence a lot the data for this rank. Title: Re: Is it true that we only send sMerit to our “buddies” ? Post by: DdmrDdmr on May 31, 2018, 02:01:43 PM Members doing this is not a surprise to me. But the forum staff doing nothing about it is really hard to understand. I don’t think you got the meaning of the post… People obviously favour some posters more than others because they like to some extent what they write about, and this could happen in the other direction. Social relationships are like that in their roots, and thus, it happens to a certain degree here. What we see here in the OP is that, on general terms, this is not avoiding meriting people outside our usual network even to a greater degree in aggregate than to our closest circle. <...> Because i already read so many posts with really have quality contents of that post,but when i saw the merits of the person who created is remained zero,a jr.member with 67 activity. Being awarded with sMerit depends on many factors which have been highlighted many times, but are not deterministic. There are some threads started off by users in the spirit of awarding sMerit to people who felt that they were not being merited despite making, in their opinion, good posts. I stumbled upon a post by a user with a recent list here: Re: How to get merits on Bitcointalk? (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3549765.msg36354555#msg36354555) Also Jet Cash has various initiatives going on to that effect such as this one: Another initiative for newbie and junior members (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4186147.msg38317354#msg38317354). Taking a look at TMAN'S guide to getting merit (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3182178.0) would be wise. If you feel that a specific person should be merited, you could suggest that he takes a look at the above. |