I don't think it is appropriate to regulate how merits are given, especially if people are volunteering their time to give out merits. It wouldn't be fair that someone has to learn (and be accountable to) a bunch of rules just to give out something that doesn't have any benefit to them. You cannot 'unsend' merit, so someone who breaks a hypothetical rule would have a hard time remediating their mistake.

That is very much similar to what the merit system is. Although not all merit is given because the sender agrees (or "likes") the post, as a decent amount of merit sent is sent for posts of which a decent amount of effort was put into it.

Maybe for the next April fools day joke, theymos can implement a system in which people can award a "LOL" to posts they find funny, and an "angry merit" for posts that upset someone. People would need both merit and "LOL" in order to rank up, and if the "angry merit" to "LOL" ratio gets too high, their avatar will automatically change to a warning that the person is mean.

It is strange to see someone like you to advocate to wait for the facts to come out. I could have sworn that you used to be strongly against that.

You could argue this is a bug. Like I said before, I don't think theymos would allow a large number of attempts before he would take action on the code/link being used.

Perhaps a solution would be to invalidate the code after xxx number of consecutive attempts to login to an account not associated with the code.

Only a fairly small number of people leave trust for reasons that do not match that statement, although they send a very large amount of negative ratings.

If you want that description to be updated, you should advocate for it to be updated in Meta.

I have plenty of those types of ratings myself.

I don't agree with those ratings on your trust profile either, and I will tend to not trust the ratings of those who give those kinds of ratings.

Unless there is some amount of evidence that (specific to you) you stole money from someone, I am not going to believe those ratings.

The purpose of the triple question mark is to give an early warning of someone potentially starting to scam people via a long con.

If someone has positive trust, and receives a single negative rating, each positive rating will be worth a maximum of 1 point, and if the negative rating is insufficient to take the trust rating below zero, their trust score will be a triple questionmark. Assuming n is greater than 0, the sum of the score from all the negative ratings is 2ⁿ

You are using the wrong standard. I believe it is best to award merit to posts that a lot of effort was likely put into making. It is possible a one liner is deserving to have merit, and it is possible a 10 paragraph post should not receive merit if it is incoherent. The basis for giving merit is if a lot of effort was put into creating a post.

The ultimate goal of merit is to eradicate people who post as many posts they can quickly in order to "earn" as much money they can via signature advertising, which market forces have caused to pay by the post. If people who put a lot of effort into their posts are rewarded by being allowed to rank up, those who create a lot of low effort posts will leave when they can't rank up.

In general, if a post is funny or witty, chances are, not a lot of effort was put into making said post. Most of the time when I say something funny, it is because I reacted to something I read or heard, and thought of something funny off the top of my head. I wont necessarily spend a lot of time trying to find a way to make something funny.

My concern is that many of the posts cited in the OP were low effort posts, and as such, I don't think deserved merit. I think it is pretty clear those posts (and many more throughout the forum) received merit because the merit sender agreed with the content of the post.  The problem with this kind of behavior is that it will encourage the forum to become an echo chamber, and will encourage others to agree with those who clearly have merit to spend.

The underlying root problem with the merit system is that merit is valuable based on the fact that merit ultimately allows someone to earn more money via signature campaigns by way of having more signature features, however merit cannot be easily purchased with money. There are however implicit barter transactions for merit when people back someone with sMerit in a dispute. It would be more appropriate to allow people to buy merit so they can have more signature features, and so they would have incentives to not go around posting a bunch of nonsense and garbage because if they did they would lose what they paid when they get banned. 

It looks like you will get an error message if you try to login using a link that is not associated with the account you are trying to login to. You could presumably brute force which account is associated with a code by trying to login to every account until you no longer get an error message. I suspect theymos would detect this and invalidate the code before someone could try many accounts.

Does he even believe in giving people the benefit of the doubt?

His ex-wife has someone of a conflict of interest as if he cannot earn a living, she wont receive (as much) alimony. It also appears he is (has) going through a pretty nasty divorce, and if some of what has been said about what he did is true, I don't think it would be entirely unreasonable for a situation to escalate into DV.

I believe it is actually Los Angelos.

According to a report that was first reported by tmz, Michael Avenatti aka the Creepy Porn Lawyer has been arrested on Domestic Violence charges.

According to TMZ's sources, Avenatti was involved in possibly two Domestic Violence incidents, one yesterday, and one today.

Avenatti represents porn star Stormy Daniels and is planning on running for President in 2020 as a democrat. If Avenatti really was involved in multiple DV incidents, he should fit right in at the DNC, based on some of the people Democrats have stood behind this recent election cycle.

Avenatti also was pushing a narrative, that IMO, was false on its face, that now Justice Kavanaugh was involved in multiple gang rape parties in high school in the 1980s. I wonder if he will advocate to receive the same standard of due process himself that he was pushing for Justice Kavanaugh to receive.

I am curious to know if this will derail or enhance his chances of getting the Presidential nomination from the Democratic party, and if this will impact his ability to practice law in CA (and elsewhere).

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update March 25, 2019 - he was charged with attempted extortion in him allegedly trying to extort &25mm from Nike. I wonder if lauda gave him any tips as to how to successfully extort someone.
https://www.foxnews.com/us/michael-avenatti-to-be-charged-with-trying-to-extort-nike-for-up-to-25m-sdny-says

This guy was running for President as a Democrat

I think you forgot about 2010 when republicans picked up 65+ house and senate seats.

The number of house seats picked up by Democrats was about average as the party who doesn’t control the White House picks up in the first midterm election. This is with Democrats vastly outstanding republicans (with much of the money coming from out of state, that Democrats hate so much that they gladly solicit and spend).

Also many of the picked up seats were by moderate Democrats.

It is interesting to know this is the basis you like to leave trust. I will need to remember this

I don’t think Oprah could get elected. She is widey popular, however she has made mistakes in the past in terms of what she pushed in her show. There is more than enough dirt on her that can be found on the archives of her show and it would be easy to get many people to see these clips.

She probably also wouldn’t be able to run as a candidate who can energize her base enough to have a real shot of winning.

Also, identity politics is diminishing with the advent of Trump as his approval from blacks and other minorities is much higher than any other Republican in recent history.

From what I can tell, merit is very frequently given for posts that the merit sender agrees with. This is the circle jerking the OP is referring to. This will lead to new users mirroring the opinions of those in power. This diminishes the free flow of ideas and makes it more difficult to dissent from popular opinions. Even in this very thread, multiple posts have merit that fairly little effort was put into said post, but that the merit sender likely agreed with what the post said.

I also suspect that people send merit to those who are believed to have a lot of merit to send in the hopes of receiving merit in return. This results in merit sources having abnormal amounts of merit.

Merit sources are people who have the capacity to send more merit than than they can spend with the sMerit they get from the merits they receive. They demonstrate this by pointing out posts that should have more merit than they have.

Also, merit sources should be sending 1/2 of the merit spent. This ignores the merit that can be spent from the airdrop. Everyone doesn’t spend all the sMerit they have so the percentage will be somewhat below 50%.

If you want to auction something, you can optionally use the auctions sub. You can otherwise use the sub you would normally list items for sale to auction these items.

In your case, you can list your domains in the Digital Goods sub. This is also filled with a lot of junk, however without commenting on your domains specifically, most domain listings are going to be junk.

Fox News has just projects that Democrats will retake the US House of Representatives.

Will this result in Trump getting impeached? How many times? I suspect he will get impeached for dubious reasons at least 3 times, but will likely overwhelmingly get acquitted in the Senate each time.

I also suspect that this will result in government shutdowns, possibly one or two extended shutdowns.

I don't think we will see much get done legislatively over the next two years once the new congress is sworn in. However we may see some legislation pass the House before the end of the current term.

I suspect this will make it easier for Trump to get reelected, and that Republicans will see major congressional gains in 2020.

What do you think?

I don’t have an issue with a mod moderating a thread they happen to be the OP of. I think they can frequently do this without any conflicts.

I do have an issue with a mod moderating a thread and/or post that is about them as this is clearly a conflict of interest and unless the post contains a link to malware, the mod should let someone else handle it.

The fact that a modatiom activity is correct doesn’t matter. The fact that another moderator “gave permission” to do said action doesn’t matter.

IMO, lauda belongs in jail upon being brought up on criminal charges.

I don’t support the leaving of negative trust for these reasons. If the OP is evading a ban, he should get banned if the administration deems appropriate. Evading a ban doesn’t make someone a scammer, which is the purpose of negative ratings.

I haven’t looked into the OPs case at all, but I presume there is decent evidence that he is an alt of someone who is banned for plagiarism. Presumably there is also decent IP/fingerprint evidence to support this as well. Unless the OP has somehow contributed to some portion of the community, he should be banned.

The leaving of these kinds of negative ratings is essentially a soft ban and will likely result in the OPs account getting abandoned. These ratings also essentially cover up inaction by the administration on the issue. If there is evidence the OP is an alt of someone banned for plagiarism, then the fact the OP is not banned should be called out publicly and when enough of these instances are called out, the administration will be forced to make changes.

AIM no longer exists. I however agree with ibminer.

I also prefer to look for alts after someone has been up to mischief, not before. If someone knows that their main account is linked to an alt, they are less likely to try to scam with said alt because they are risking the reputation of both accounts. However they might be more likely to try to scam with what they believe to be a secret alt as they would only be risking the reputation of the alt. However if alts are generally not called out until mischief, they might be hesitant to try to scam with an alt out of fear their main will be uncovered. If alts are called out immediately, regardless of mischief, if they are not already called out, they can be fairly confident the relevant accounts cannot be linked.

This is easier said than done. Spammers would just post ‘bitcointalk dot org’ instead of a actual link and search engines would still pick up the text of the link. The underlying reason why these spammers post these links isn’t to get forum users to click on them, it is to get search engines to recognize that bitcointalk has the link displayed on one (many) of its pages which helps the search engine rankings for the link.

A better solution would be to configure the robots.txt to somehow get search engines to not pick up posts by newbies that are not at least xx hours old. This would give mods time to remove the posts before search engines can pick up the links, and reduce the effectiveness of this spamming strategy to near zero.