I am quite surprised yesterday when I looked at my Bitcointalk account. It is a newbie.
I went up my rank from Newbie to Junior member last month but now my account has been downgraded.

I dont know what happen but I think it is so funny & there is something cruel here

this is just my opinion, since theymos announce new rules about merit for jr.member,when i look at meta board don't you feel that meta is full of newbies, or it's just my feeling, and we all know what they want, well at least they try to make quality posts.
but how long will it last? in my opinion after they get merit things will return to the way they were before or maybe even worse. Some will stop and some will take easy rarities.
because there are some people who want merit instantly so they buy merit on someone, and of course they will work harder (more crazy spam) because they have already spent money on it.
so I think it's only a matter of time, what do you think?

it was expected to happen. But I am now waiting for this to happen.

I was curious:
Theymos announced the "Enhanced newbie restrictions & requirements" in post 45810047. This was on Sep 17 06:27 (Dutch time).
Post 45752895 was made 24 hours earlier, and post 45853867 was made 24 hours later.
Post 45705944 was made 48 hours earlier, post 45894771 was made 48 hours later.
Post 45469471 was made 1 week (plus 7 minutes) earlier, post =I'll update this next week was made 1 week (plus 7 minutes) later.
That means:

• In 24 hours before the announcement, 57152 posts were made.
• In 24 hours after the announcement, 43820 posts were made.
• In 48 hours before the announcement, 104103 posts were made.
• In 48 hours after the announcement, 84724 posts were made.
• In 1 week (+7 minutes) before the announcement, 340576 posts were made.
• In 1 week (+7 minutes) after the announcement, ZZZ posts were made.

In 24 hours, that's 23.3% less posts.
In 48 hours, that's 18.6% less posts.
In 1 week, that's zzz% less () posts.

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When I click Show unread posts since last visit., I can now see some actual real threads again! There is still ANN and BOUNTY pollution, but in between are real topics (I have no boards on ignore on this account).

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Update: theymos posted data on the number of posts per day in the past 30 days.

It all comes down to these three things:

1)  Shitposters write poorly-written posts.  This is usually, but not always, because the shitposter is trying to write in English when they have a very poor grasp of grammar, what words should be capitalized, where the punctuation should go, and shitposters tend to very often have an extremely limited vocabulary.  The person might be intelligent in his or her native language, but posts often sound like they were written by a simpleton.

2)  Shitposters produce vapid content.  Shitposters usually don't have much to say.  When they write something, it has usually been written many times before by many different shitposters.  This leads to either very short, boring posts or very bloated posts that should be much more succinct than they are.

3)  Shitposters are incentivized to post.  This is obvious if you're here for longer than a week, and this is also why people don't read anything here--shitposters are not paid to read.  It's why most posts you make don't get replied to in the spam mega sections like Bitcoin/Altcoin Discussion, Economics, and Speculation.  This also explains why there are so many members here and why there's so many posts in general.

If you see a post that you think is complete crap, it's almost a guarantee the member will meet all 3 of these criteria.  And OP, you're going on ignore.

It's not about giving your own opinion.
Shitposters are those who try to fulfill the signature campaign requirements without effort, and most of the time they have nothing to say on the subject but post anyway.
All those trying to make a living out of the bounties turned this place into a shithole. Sorry to say that but it's true, where money and freedom are involved you will always find abusers, and here is almost no control and they become greedy and abuse the freedom more and more.

I don't know if you are an alt, or a genuine new member, but you do seem to have a focus on the merit system. I think you should put this behind you - it is so passé. Shitposts are made by spambies to scratch a few alt coins ( that they may not receive), and it seems to create a myopic approach to Bitcoin Talk. It is far better to use the forum to improve your knowledge and skills.

I have come across many merit spamming due to the new ranking update. Still, it was also taking place before this update happened but it has increased much these days as everyone has noticed.

I personally think at one point that this system is working in some parts of the forum but some people are just misguided about what posts should be merited as there is no single definition of what a merit deserving post is. Still, I read a statement from thyemos explaining what type of posts deserves merits.


But I think many people are using merits to merit the posts that they agree with and not meriting the posts which are of high quality. ( I think this is also done by some merit sources )
And This is the reason why many of the quality posts are ignored.

This is a very big Flaw I think which should get some solution instead the main purpose of merits will just be lost and only the merited posts will be related to views and not for the quality an of the content.

I want some views about:

1. What flaws do you think this merit system has?

2. How do you think merit system is abused? ( I don't want buy/sell as an answer )