Bitcoin Forum

It has been found out that many high rank user has been ban in the forum. Sad to say that they commit violations like plagiarism. Now, it seems that admin had find a better way that instead of permban, users that has prove its worth in the forum can have the chance in ban appeals liftimg the permban to signature wearing ban for 2 years.

If this signature ban will defeat its purpose to hold more high rank users in this forum then it is also time to create new found good users and promote them to higher ranks.

So in this case promoting good users to higher rank might be done easily when sMerits will be decayed if not given or awarded to users with a quality posting habit. I think this is how theymos had been thinking since he had said it a while that he had some plans on decaying sMerits.

What do you think could be a possible result if it will going to happen?

Decaying sMerits will force merit hoarders to pass it to others but it does not necessarily translate to promoting lower rank members. Those higher ranks can just send them to their fellow high ranked members. If you spend time reading discussions about smerits, you'll noticed that majority of the higher ranks have been active in searching for merit worthy posts but, according to them, there's only a few.

Theymos might or might not implement that option anything soon, I don't think it'll have any impact because those who still don't want to participant in the meriting process still won't care if their smerit decay or not. Beside theymos has other options if he notice a sudden decline in circulation of smerits which is appointing new sources (which he just did few weeks back) or increasing the allocation of current sources.

The fact that an smerit is decaying doesn't mean it should be given out irrationally. Any member that needs to rank up should not glutton on other users decaying smerit.
If you ask me the merit sources has been up and doing and even non merit sources has also be involved in the circulation of merit.
You would not be give a merit just because you need it to rank up but you would be giving if you come up with something good

IMO the purpose of a forum is to have a meaningful discussion. Many high-ranked members banned, does not mean the community should replace those members ASAP. Thus, decaying sMerit and ban fiesta is not relevant.

Related to sMerit, I don't think decaying is going to be beneficial for the forum because it really takes a lot of time to find useful posts while participating in discussions. Well maybe if it takes one year or more to decay, then I think it's okay.

Just to be clear, are we talking about decaying sMerits that would decay over time to encourage people to continue posting quality content to retain their high sMerit scores or are we talking about decaying sMerit when people are banned for some reason.

The sMerit system can be exploited if someone post exceptional posts for a few months and accumulate a lot of sMerits and then after achieving that goal, he or she starts to post non-constructive posts again. If the sMerit decays over time, people will have to continue posting quality content to retain their high sMerit scores.  :P

Spending smerits is really good thing to the forum but it needs to be spend on worthy post,don't have to spend just on random posts which will kill the intention of merit system.And merit sources also try to exhaust their quota will make the more high ranks rather than the normal user's spend on merits.

Yes, to encourage people to pass on their sMerits for if not it will be decayed over a period of time. This is what theymos has said in one of his replies. But, it was just a plan and never it was being implemented seeing that it is not necessary for now. This is why I have discussed about ban high rank users to which their number has drastically decline and put to stop those high rank users good poster too. As we all know that some high rank users could lift the moral of the forum with their intellectual posting skills. Sad to say that some of them were being ban just because of committing a single violations that has been reported as plagiarism.

As I have mention if the signature ban will be defeated its purpose to retain good users without them removing in the forum might trigger theymos to start implementing decaying the sMerits. There are many users in the forum now that are only holding sMerits and does not put it to good use awarding quality posts.

How would that work? If I understood correctly you are suggesting that someone should find quality posters and send them a bunch of merits, is that it?
How is that different from what is happening now? If you are a quality poster your posts will get merited X amount of times.

Or are you suggesting that a completely new group of quality posters should be found somewhere? You make it sound like there is a group of quality posters that don't receive merits for some reason and this is now there chance to rise and shine.

theymos can replenish the supply for merit sources whenever he wants to compensate for those merits that will be wasted due to the ban wave but they are not going to be awarded to users like an airdrop.

Decaying sMerits wouldn't achieve anything. There is no personal reward for spending sMerits. If users currently aren't sending their sMerits, then the threat of losing them is unlikely to spur them in to action. All it would mean is that they don't have any sMerit to send on the few occasions that they might want to.

Decaying sMerits would decrease the number of merits being circulated, not increase it. If there were genuinely too few merits going around, then a much simpler and more effective solution would be to increase the number of sources or individual source allocations.

I don't agree with decay of merits so members will not be force of sending merits, it should be in their own will.

Some with merits are just not interested in giving merits, nor they are interested of receiving merits, I guess the giving of merits for low rank members to rank up should be the responsibility of the merit source, they should be given a minimum smerit spent over a certain period, and if they are not actively giving merits then they should be removed so the forum can find another source that will fulfill his responsibility.

yeah, I call it as a responsibility as otherwise, why would they apply to become a merit source? what should be their purpose if they will not spend it?

sMerit (sendable merit) is not the same merit which determines your rank. Decaying merit would be a huge change which would also impact the flow of sMerit. Why would decaying sMerit encourage a sMerit hoarder to post more quality content if that sMerit disappeared after certain period of time? They don't spend it anyway.

Finding a high quality poster is really difficult when you know that there are more than a million people here trying to get ranked up through different tactics (plagiarism is one of them). Sending merits to those who copy-paste their content 'even if it is of high quality' may get you into trouble because it is some other guy's material and you should always check what you are meriting.

Another part I checked here is if you think that people fear of getting their sMerits decayed and would send lower rank members those merits just for the sake of saving them, you are wrong. Merits are rewards and I would personally prefer getting them decayed if I don't find a single post deserving my sMerit/s (impossible I know, this is just an example). Although there are different means of quality in the mind of every unique person here, but I look more for the perspective and if someone justifies it (the topic) with their content, then they will surely get merits from me or anyone able to understand the depth or efforts that were put by the poster in that post.

It is a different situation for merit sources than for everyone else. I agree that if merit sources are consistently not using their full allocation, then those sMerits should be reassigned to other or to new merit sources. This is already happening, though, as theymos keeps an eye on how much merit sources are using and rebalances as and when required.

Agreed. If, instead of always being merit-broke, I was ever struggling to get through my source allocation, I would simply double up how many merits I was sending to each post rather than start awarding merit to sub-par posts.

I am thankful to all those whom I was watching doing such mistakes by sending either too many merits to deserving posts or meriting just to save themselves from getting their merits decayed. Though, I think we need enough time to find and distribute 'in my way, reward' our specially given authority which is merits to those who are really doing something from their side without expecting.

Merit was created to be used as a rewarding system which is why I am giving them slowly to the most deserving users of the forum (mostly low rank users). That doesn't mean I don't have a criteria for high ranks, but I am currently focusing on those who deserve it to rank up and produce the same or even better quality in their posts.

Smerits (sendable merits) on an account can be obtained as we know by:

- The one time (January 2018) initial sMerit airdrop that was given to accounts during Merit System kick-off (variable from profile to profile, based on rank at the time and activity during the prior year).

- sMerit obtained as a result of being merited (every 2 merits generate 1 sMerit).

Now the decaying idea has been around for some time, being the generalized idea that it could incentivize accounts to award it instead of “hoarding” it. The theory being, that one would rather award it than see it disappear by means of decay.

While the above may be true is some cases, you’d have to place very concise information in order for it to have a chance of being effective (i.e. 2 sMerits will decay tomorrow and 10 sMerits will decay in the coming 7 days). Would that sort of message move people to award more promptly in general terms? Perhaps to some degree, but you’d need to see the information easily before the process took place (i.e. without having to actually press the Merit link).
 
The other utility would be to eliminate all that initial airdropped sMerit which has not been used after 16 months. The initial sMerit airdrop was around 600K it seems, so a large part of it has not been awarded yet. One would say that 16 months is a pretty long time to do so, and that dormant accounts with airdropped sMerits may at some point be used to trade it through backchannels. Just how much of a risk that is, or how likely that it will be awarded righteously at some point is unknown. I personally would be done with it, but others favor keeping it.

It is unfair if smerits decayed, because people have rights to do anything they want with their smerits. They can hold them till the day they find something deserves to send their smerits to such posts.
Even their accounts, it does not mean that we should do anything to recover such smerits they hold and send them around to help other users. They obviously have rights (and should have) to burry all of their sendable merits if they don't want to send them around. If inactive, left users have rights to keep their sMerits, active users should have rights to hold their sMerits if they want.
Real users will send their smerits someday, if they will be actively in the forum.
Abusers will send their smerits out immediately when they feel risks with their bought/ sold accounts as way to get addition money.

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Moreover, merits are everywhere in the forum, that has not been lack of merits/ smerits.

Decaying smerits seems pointless to me. No one loses or gains from it. It keeps things pretty much as they are.

What should be done is the erasure of all airdropped merit. It's been over a year now. I see no reason why anyone should remain legendary having earned zero merit. Even though it's clear who's earned what, there are still useless high rank accounts benefiting despite their uselessness.

Decaying sMerits is not good and forum will not achieve anything from decaying sMerits.
Following things might get done to use those sMerits
1. Share those sMerits to DT1 members, reason they know where and whom should merit send.

2. Create a feature which send those sMerits to all users equally with some restrictions, like those users who received more than 5-10-15-20 or more merits in last month or weeks.

Being on DT does not necessarily correlate to one’s capability to award sMerits, although there are a large number of Merit Sources on DT1.

It’s not a really a question of finding ways to redistribute “stale” sMerits in peoples accounts (specially, and per my criteria specifically, airdropped sMerits). They can either be left, erased, or decayed, but there is no urge to redistribute them. If there is an overall lack, the proper way to go should be thorough the Merit Sources, be it by replenishing a higher quantity or by adding more if necessary.

Edit:
Note-> Coincidently, on Meta there is now a thread which is on the topic of decaying or eliminating airdropped Merit (complementary to decaying sMerit discussed here). See  Obliterate all Aridropped Merit Please @theymos  (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5148986.msg51278648#msg51278648)). Not a novel topic really, but with way more potential impact, since it would mean de-ranking the vast majority of accounts. Just on this principal alone, it doesn’t really seem (politically) feasible.

Not in the scenario that I explained. The sMerit allocated to members can also decay over time, to encourage them to continue posting quality content and not just the sMerit that they have in reserve to allocate to other people. So in this scenario ALL merit points decay over time and people will have to keep on posting good quality post to retain their sMerit count.

It would be a bit unfair if they did that, because previous good posts will always be good posts, nothing has changed since those post were awarded those sMerit. I now understand that the goal of these decaying sMerit is the ones that are unused by people hoarding sMerits.  :P  

It's true merit is decaying due to ban issue but there is merit source to fill that smerit. I don't think there is huge amount merit decaying because most of all are only newbies. So this isn't major forum issue. However I think we need more merit source, so decayed merit will ne recover earlier.

I've asked LoyceV two weeks ago if he can scrape the number of destroyed Merits during the ban wave but I think it's very much data to analyse. But there was a topic comparing destroyed Merit and new Merit. The result was: [MERIT][NSFN] We're destroying more merits than we're sending. Like, way more. (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5042503.0)

I've just asked suchmoon (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5042503.msg51288052#msg51288052) if she has time to scrape new data since the ban wave has solwed down for a few days now.

Despite of all things raised above on why sMerits should not be destroyed / decayed, I want to point out another one thing:
- Inactive users might come back someday, inactive status does not mean that they leave the forum forever. So, part of them might become mad when their unused sMerits destroyed if theymos suddenly makes decision without pre-announcements. What we have seen here is theymos has never made pre-announcements on exact days when he implement new things. He only asks for opinion on which things he want to improve.
- What if theymos actually announces that all unused sMerits from airdropped merits in January of 2018 will be destroy one month later? Let me guess. I believe that we will see another wave of merit abusements, and most of them will be caught. Later then, Meta board will become crowded with lots of shitty topics and some kinds of boring debates/ wars.

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I don't think we need such situation, so let users do anything they want with their airdropped sMerits.

More? I don't think so, 8 new sources were just added few weeks back. We're still waiting to see the impact of those new sources. I'll recommend advocating for an increase in the amount of smerits allocated to them (if there be a need for more smerits in circulation) instead of advocating for new sources.

It's either bad or good when there are new merit sources rather than increasing the smerit that the merit sources. New merit sources means there are new criteria. Each person have their own criteria on how they reward their smerit so new merit sources will reward smerit base on their own criteria and those who are constructive poster or those who want to contribute have a chance to be rewarded with smerit. Not all person can pass the strict criteria of a merit sources.

Merit source 1 = Strict Criteria : me ( not pass )
New Merit source = new criteria : me ( I have a chance to pass )

I’m with your line of though on this one. I’ve always vouched for the more eyes on the playing field the better, favouring a more diverse criteria when awarding sMerits that a closer circled one. Ideally though, Merit Sources would have less weight in the overall aggregate of sMerit awarding.

Both criteria are not incompatible (number of Merit Sources and their specific sMerit allowance), and can be tweaked at will if required without needing hypothetical sMerit decay to be transferred to them.