Right, the majority of these are not something you specifically did.

I believe the large number of exclusions means two things:
*Using a fairly small custom trust list will result in many people being in your trust network, many of whom you would not normally trust their ratings, or otherwise.
*There is a very large premium to having those on your trust list with good trust lists.

IIRC, there were only a handful of exclusions on DT under the old system, and on your level one, there are more exclusions than inclusions. I would draw the conclusion that many on your level2 depth do not have good trust lists, to the extent that those on your level1 are needing to "fix" these "mistakes" by excluding many people they don't want in their trust network.

This is not a new thing as a result to recent DT changes. I had used a custom trust list for years, and had to exclude many people. I would sometimes investigate why all these people I don't want in my trust network were appearing, but ultimately it was hard to correct the root causes of having untrustworthy people in my trust network. 

You could create an account called "LoyceBot" that theymos would presumably be willing to whitelist for you that could scrape trust ratings on a periodic basis. He might even be willing to allow it to see the investigations board if you have a good reason to be scraping posts from there.

I would not use the word "complicit". I think they were more playing an active role in trying to take down Trump.

The Trump reelection campaign recently sent a memo to many MSM outlets asking they do not invite some who were falsely claiming to have seen or otherwise be aware of evidence of collusion between the Trump Campaign and the Russian government, or to call these people out on these what are now known to be lies. I don't believe they have followed this request, and are allowing some to continue pushing what are outrageous conspiracy theories that borderline on "flat earth" logic.

There are some illicit drugs that will cause a person to become addicted almost 100% of the time after a single dose, that do not have any medical benefits.

Drug dealers will also sometimes give away illegal drugs to their frequent customers when they are upfront about being unable to pay, which ultimately results in it being more difficult to stop taking drugs once addicted, and to break the habit of taking harmful drugs.

In each of these cases, it is the drug dealer that causes the addiction, even if disclosure is made.

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I believe a lot of people blindly support Ulbrict because of his contribution to the bitcoin ecosystem, and not necessarily on the merits of the case and the underlying facts.

This is probably a fairly good argument to say that merit requirements are too high for higher ranking accounts.

I think merit requirements to become a junior member and member is probably too low.

Right now you need 10x the merit to go from junior member to member but you only need a nominal amount of merit to become a junior. To go from member to full member, you need to 10x your merit again. Going from full to senior you need to 2.5x your merit, then only need to double your merit each time additional ranks can be achieved.

LoyceV indicated above that 0.1 merit per post is above average and for someone to become legendary at that rate they would need 10k posts but only a small handful of people have made that many posts.

Please see my thread giving away merits and make a submission.

You can also post several posts of yours here that you put a lot of effort into over the years and perhaps some merit sources will be willing to give lots of merit for those posts. Each person can give up to 50 merit to you per month.

Theymos has previously said that if someone can show they deserve to rank up that merit sources should give up to the maximum merit to them allowing them to rank up.

Yea, the MSMs reporting on “Russia” over the past two years has damaged their credibility. However it at least appeared the reporting, however flawed was their own doing.

The pivot to healthcare was done within a day of the leader of the Democratic Party saying she wants the media “paying attention” to the subject.

It looks like you are advocating for sent feedback to be automatically removed when a user is Nuked.
Perhaps a good solution would be to allow global moderators review Nuked accounts for sent trust and can remove any clearly frivolous sent trust, similar to what is referenced in the OP. I speculate the majority of users Nuked have not sent any trust.
  
The Nuking may or may not be deserved be deserved, I am not sure how much effort mods put into reviewing newbie accounts before Nuking them currently. The Nuking being deserved does not change the fact they were scammed.
I agree, but if a newbie gets Nuked, any thread they create will get removed, including any scam accusation they make.

If the untrusted ratings are just from a bunch of Newbie accounts, I would generally consider this to be frivolous, perhaps from someone with a grudge. I agree that DT feedback will be more effective, but for someone to get DT red trust, someone on DT needs to be aware of the incident, and if you are Nuked, any complaint about the person will be removed, and it will stay that way unless the person Nuked creates a new account.

I would not automatically call this person a scammer, but I would at least ask questions in most cases. If they are going to say the feedback is from a grudge, I would want to understand what caused the grudge, and depending on the circumstances, I might accept that. Or depending on their reputation, I might understand some people might have a grudge and questioning them might not be necessary.

I think it is time to lock this thread so it won’t be quite as obvious when theymos does his April fools prank and so it will be more fun.

I think the standard to remove sent trust from 'Nuked' users should be much lower than for most other users. I don't think this should be automatic though.

My concern is there may be a situation in which a newbie is scammed, and the scammer is able to trick a mod into nuking the newbie. If sent trust is automatically removed, then the scammer will have been able to remove all public evidence of the scam, and will probably not be held accountable unless the victim creates a new account complaining. If someone has a bunch of untrusted feedback from people alleging a scam from people who were nuked shortly after sending the trust, this should be a red flag.   

All the evidence IMO points to corruption. The FBI is apparently investigating the circumstances surrounding the charges being dropped, although Kim Fox, the State Attorney in Chicago would likely be the one in hot water legally if the dropping of the charges was not above board.

The Chicago Police released the investigative report on their investigation, which gives more insight on how much evidence there is against Smollett.

When Smollett was initially charged, the police laid out the case against Smollett in a press conference, which was unusual, IMO. I am thinking the police may have thought that Kim Foxx might have tried to do something like this when they did this.

On Monday, Democratic speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, who is the leader of the Democratic party, said:
You can see a video of her saying this here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YB86nP-jPDU&feature=youtu.be&t=105

On Tuesday, CNN discussed healthcare every hour during their primetime shows, from 7 PM until midnight. On Wednesday (tonight), CNN discussed healthcare every hour (on each of their shows), starting their morning lineup. 

In light of the above, one would have to ask why CNN would suddenly focus on healthcare so soon after the leader of the Democratic party says she wants the media to focus on healthcare if they were not acting on behalf of the Democratic party.

In fairness, there is a court case in which several states are suing, alleging Obama Care is unconstitutional because the penalty is not being enforced, meaning the individual mandate compelling people to purchase something, however this case is currently in the Appellate court, who is far from issuing a decision, and a Supreme Court ruling Obama Care potentially unconstitutional is many months, if not a year+ away.

Is there any way to reconcile the above that does not involve CNN being propaganda and/or what is essentially state run media similar to what is broadcast in North Korea or China?

From the forum administration's perspective, I don't believe it will be viewed these people are breaking any rules, as I am willing to bet they do not appear to be the same person when looking at their IP information and/or browser fingerprints (even though they are clearly doing harm).

IIRC, some people claimed to be in telegram groups in which someone would tell people which threads to post in and would receive payment for doing so, when there was an *actual* sting operation of someone pretending on purchasing the services of these people.

With both gambling and porn, there is an argument that both are harmful and unethical in various ways. I don't subscribe to the logic in making these arguments, however I do not find these arguments to be outright frivolous.

In addition to the suggestions of many above to make sure the signatures are not explicit, and to consider not linking directly to explicit material, I would suggest doing due diligence on the site itself. I would want to have confidence the site is not going to be spreading malware when visitors visit the site, nor when visitors try to download content, and does not have an excess amount of advertisements.

I do find it somewhat strange that a porn site would want to advertise here. I would not find bitcointalk the most effective venue to advertise on for this kind of business.

I am assuming Yatsan is the person you suspect is abusing merit.

I am not sure if he received merit from his alt account, or if he purchased the merit, perhaps from this guy. I looked through his merit history, and I am not quite sure what to make of it. He has received merit from a number of people that I don't think are selling merit, although this is based on their reputation from my perspective, and I did not look at their merit history. Most of the merit he received is from his various WTS threads.

I noticed he also received merit from Distinctin for a post that I do not believes deserves merit on a reasonable basis. Going down the rabbit hole, I looked at Distinctin's merit history, looked at the last 8 posts he sent merit to, and believe at most one of these posts reasonably deserves merit, and most are the only post on the page/thread with merit.

Back to Yatsan, on Feb 19, he received 2 merit from Distinctin (for a questionable post -- see above), and the next day he applies for a campaign (run by Hhampuz) with merit requirements, although only 10 merit were required, which he already met (the recent merit could have helped his application as it would have implied he made good post(s) recently).

I think there is at least a 60% chance Distinctin is either selling merit or giving merit to his alts (I think the former is more likely), and at least a 51% chance Yatsan recently purchased merit. Assuming Distinctin is selling merit, everyone he sent merit to did not necessarily purchase merit because there may be some false flags. Obviously both 60% and 51% is far from certain, and I would not say any of the above proves anything.

That was to reverse the effects of a merit source sending merit for reasons theymos disagreed with.

It was allegedly done to bypass an arbitrary rule, and I do not like arbitrary rules. There are many posts that are not objectively "high quality" (the intended purpose of the merit system) that receive merit. Campaign managers should stop being lazy and should review post quality of their applicants themselves.

While one might conclude this was 'abuse' based on the information in the OP, I don't think this is proven.

I am really not looking for translations of other threads, and prefer original content.

Bitcointalk URL: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=358020
Curent post count (Including this post): 13213
Amount of EARNED merit in the last 120 days: 120+ (not sure exact number)
BTC Address: 3PjXm2XYDKLV5mN3oiKzNTyVvSkqP3ujeq
*legitimate* negative trust received: none

Who are you referring to?

At the end of the day, there isn't really anything you can do. Officially, "merit abuse" is not against the rules. You can decide to ban the person from any of your campaigns if you wish, although I would first ensure their post quality is reflective of what you do not want in your campaigns.

You cannot blindly use merit as a basis for judging who to accept in your campaigns. There are a lot of people who have little merit who are very good posters, and there are people who receive a lot of merit from low effort posts. I would suggest having lower merit requirements than what you might otherwise want, and as a supplement to merit requirements, you can review their post history to ensure they have sufficiently good post quality, or you can ask applicants to present examples of posts that demonstrate their understanding of one of several topics posted at least several weeks ago.

The solution is to change how ANN threads are bumped to the top of the board.

Perhaps posts by those who are not the OP can be ignored when determining thread ordering. To go a step further, the OP could designate one post per day that will “bump” the thread to the top of the board.

This should entirely remove the incentive to use fake/paid bumps.

It looks like 2double0 is going to be late repaying the loan, after allegedly obtaining an extension from the lender.