Bitcoin Forum

1. Introduction

I wanted to look at the newly promoted forum members from Newbie rank, since the newly instated rule change that took place last Monday (17/09/2018), with data from right up to last Friday (21/09/2018).
As to a general context, the number of Jr. Members was around 72.206 (*) (see Statistics of 2,312 million bitcointalk users (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5025283.msg45460080#msg45460080) by @mazdafunsun), out of which around 4.940 were Jr. Members with at least 1 Merit at the time, and therefore conserved their rank. So a total of approximately 67K were demoted (*).

(*) Numbers are approximate, since data used to conform the referenced post by @mazdafunsun takes weeks, and profiles change over that period of time.


2. New Era Newbies that have ranked up

@Coin-1 identified the list of top senders to newbies since the change of rules this week (see  [TOP-200] Members who support newbies - Thanks!  (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5034141.msg45969154#msg45969154)), indicating that 1.637 newbies have been merited this week (not all are demoted previous Jr. Members). @Jet Cash was interested in some sort of classification of the newbies, to distinguish "true newbies from spambies".

What I’ve done here is to perform a classification based on the number of posts, to get an approximation to the degree of posting behind the scenes. I cannot distinguish between the number of posts before and after the change of rules, so all are accounted for. I could also have played around with the account creation date, but I didn’t want to over complicate it.

This is how things are looking:

The above a breakdown of the 1.637 newbies that were later awarded merit this week, showing their current rank, and their initial Rank (Newbie) with an indication as to how many posts they have in their baggage

Buy "New Era Newbie" I am considering any newbie that had no merits at the time of the change of rules. The newbie could have been a demoted one from Jr. Member rank, or an already existing newbie. The number of posts serves as a rough indicator to separate these groups.

So it turns out that out of the total of 1.637 newbies that were later awarded merit this week, 29 made it straight to Member rank, 1.463 to Jr. Member rank, and 145 remained newbies due to lack of activity (as of last Friday).
In general, 41,47% of the now Jr. Members have <= 100 total posts in their baggage (all-time; we cannot tell how many of those were created since last Monday when the new rules stated). The number goes down to 19,24% for cases with <= 50 posts.


3. Complete list of Ranked-up Newbies

I’ve created a google spreadsheet with the complete list of ranked-up new Era Newbies (those 1.637), and shared it here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1KmBvi21XZn6Oxh8c6Vsuax6wxSAhsQWsAzDYfsYOU2E/edit?usp=sharing.

For each entry I’ve indicated information about the ranked-up newbie (id, name, profile URL, rank, activity, merit, initial rank, number of received sMerit TXs, etc.) as well as the first meriter of the account (Meriter Id, Name, profile URL, and Rank).

So... 1.637 "New Era Newbies" have been promoted from the initial 67.000 demoted ones?

Sounds like a pretty good number to me, mostly when this new system is barely a week old!! besides, many of them have actually deleted all their post, so they have better chances to get the merit they need -they don't have a shitty post-history anymore, so...
Probably some people are right, and 1 merit to junior is not enough. Being demoted is an indication of being a probable shitposter. To have a number beyond 30 in your post count with not a single merit in your history is more than enough ingredient for having some doubts about the user-quality. So, having "back" 1.637 zombie posters in less than a week doesn't look really nice to my eyes.
Or maybe, after spending some time in Meta, I'm just depressed.

It was indeed a huge number but still not that great.
But I think this is a good start again for the forum to have nice and better community again just like the old times.

+1 to the statistics.

Still hope that in a later time the number of the new era newbies that makes a good posts will suddenly increase larger than twice of it.

Not all those 1.637 are previously demoted (I cannot detect the demoted ones in order to tag them in the database and see their evolution), but we can get a pretty good idea looking at the number of posts … Nearly 80% of them have more than 50 posts, so that’s a rough indicator as to who they may be (not a flawless criteria on a one by one basis, though, but good enough to get a rough picture).
I figure a more relaxed criteria may have been applied during the first few days when meriting Newbies. Let’s hope that the re-ranked Newbies post accordingly to what is required. Worst case scenario: 1.637*20 posts per week on average = 32.740 spam posts per week … Let´s be positive though for now.
This simple exercise does nevertheless go to show though how a small number of people could potentially create a very large amount of spam in a flash, so awarding a simple merit bears in many cases more responsibility than it seems. 

We do have the complete list of New Era ranked-up Newbies in case anyone wants to look around for clear cases of abuse in the awarding process (see section 3 with the link to the complete list, that can be filtered and sorted by diverse criteria). I’ve seen cases brought up already of merit awarders vividly reviving their Alt’s ranks …