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1  Other / Meta / Yet Another Merit Thread (YAMT) But Hear Me Out on: March 15, 2018, 11:24:46 PM
I am tired of so many complaints about Merit/sMerit. It is most certainly a step in the right direction towards improving the quality of discourse on this forum. That being said, a very small minority of complaints about Merit/sMerit may be of value.

One of the things people complain a lot about is that there are not enough Merits to go around, especially in some local/niche threads. The number of Merit sources have been increased, and this should partially help the situation. However, there needs to be a way to shut the complainers up once and for all. Therefore, I propose the following - Recommend for Merit.

What is Recommend for Merit?
Recommend for Merit would be a button available on each post. You can recommend your own post or any other high quality post that you think hasn't received any Merit but deserves it.

What Does it Do?
There would be a way for all the Merit Sources to see, in a single view, all the posts that have been 'Recommended for Merit'. If they think a post deserves Merit, they can give merit to that thread and that removes the post from the list of awaiting posts. Perhaps they also have the ability to remove low quality posts from this list (or only Mods).

What About Abuse?
This would be the biggest problem. So perhaps you can limit the number of posts that can be recommended for Merit based on the user rank or some other criterion.

What About Rewards?
Similar to reporting spam, if a user repeatedly identifies undervalued posts for Merit and the posts are subsequently Merited, they can optionally be rewarded by the Mods/Merit Sources.

What About Punishments?
There may be a staked game where users stake their own Merit to recommend their posts. But perhaps the most effective way would be that if some users abuse this system, they get awarded negative merit.

Idea in Progress. Feedback Welcome
2  Other / Meta / Merit and Discoverability on: January 26, 2018, 06:50:18 PM
Introduction

The new Merit system was introduced in the forums to try and improve the quality of discussion. Users need both Activity and Merit to reach the next levels on the forum. Merit is earned based on quality of posts, while Activity is earned based on quantity of posts.

Discoverability

The Merit system can function as a really good discoverability mechanism if done right. This is a data point for the forum. Forum posts, unlike say Reddit posts, don't have an upvote/downvote feature. However, now they do have the +Merit feature. This means each post has a 'score' associated with it, which can simply be the sum total of all the Merit received by a post.

This can really help surface good content. This is because the default content today is sorted chronologically. Some of the older posts that may have been really good are lost. There are great threads with 100+ or even 1000+ pages of content. If you're new, it is very hard to wade through all of them. Merit is a great way for you to find good content.

Say there is a price discussion thread. It has tens of thousands of pages. However, a few of the posts with some evergreen content, for example a valuation model or mental models to think through what gives Bitcoin value, are valuable to the community, and likely Merited if they deserve it. New forum members can see these posts more easily.

Suggested Implementation

I would suggest the following -
  • For every thread, have a button that says 'Show only Merited Posts', which would only show the posts that have received Merit

From a discoverability standpoint, I see this working as something similar to Reddit Gold. Sometimes, there are hidden gems that get downvoted due to groupthink (think about Greg Maxwell posting on r/btc, for instance). Someone gives a Gold to a really good post and it stands out. But more importantly, I can see all the gilded posts of a subreddit.

We can implement a similar type of discoverability on the forum. For example, in the entire thread discussing Merit right now, it's 50+ pages. It's hard to go through the whole thing. I'd like to see the Merited posts, because it is a filtering mechanism. This should help the forum moderators filter through suggestions as well.

Benefits
  • Discoverability
  • Easy to Catch Merit Abusers - if everyone can see bad posts getting a 50 Merit, you know something may be off (selling Merit, multiple accounts, etc.)
3  Other / Beginners & Help / Some Bitcoin reading for the weekend on: April 09, 2016, 12:53:52 PM
I've collected a bunch of informational and educational resources, from books to courses to guides, to help get started with Bitcoin. This list isn't your how to earn 0.0001BTC, more like how you can learn about Bitcoin. It has very technical resources if you want to get into coding for Bitcoin, it has economics resources that you can read to understand the background behind Bitcoin's philosophy and it has some 'fun and light' reading material from some really good authors. Enjoy!

Link: http://btcgeek.com/learn/
4  Bitcoin / Meetups / Bitcoin Debate Coverage: Jeffrey Tucker vs. Andrew Schiff on: February 21, 2014, 04:14:23 AM
This took place a couple of days ago at the Bitcoin Center in New York, located very close to the New York Stock Exchange. I was able to cover the event. Here's the writeup:
http://btcgeek.com/bitcoin-center-nyc-debate/
What do you guys think?
5  Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Dawn of Autonomous Corporations, Powered by Bitcoin on: October 22, 2013, 02:05:17 AM
"The real value of Bitcoin lies in economies that don’t yet exist"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6589067
Top post on Hacker News at the moment. What do you think?
6  Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Bitcoin Arrives on Bloomberg: Beginning of Mainstream Adoption? on: August 09, 2013, 11:30:00 PM
Bloomberg terminals have been the cornerstone of all financial data throughout the world, and Wall Street cannot run without these terminals. Now, Bitcoin has arrived on these Bloomberg terminals (for employees only at this stage). Is this the beginning of mainstream adoption of Bitcoin, starting from the financial institutions/Wall Street?
Link: http://btcgeek.com/bitcoin-ticker-arrives-on-bloomberg/
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