Yes, this is another thread complaining about Merit. I am sorry.
I read some threads here in the Meta section,
the difference between the view of the Merit system here and in our French local section is just completely different.
This post is a translation of a post of oscar2000, that is a well known Legendary member in the French section.
Link to original post.
This translation is not extremely litteral but the meaning is exactly the same. Sorry in advance if there are some English mistakes. I did a little research of "age structure" of the forum's ranks. I preceeded by survey, because there are about 1.5 million members.
I searched the ones that have "oscar" in their pseudo. There was on february 28th 360 members, not enough to my opinion to have significant statistics.
So I searched the ones that have "scar" in their pseudo, there was 1 274 on 02/28:
- 33 that registered in 2011, so 3%
- 23 that registered in 2012, so 2%
- 94 that registered in 2013, so 7%
- 111 that registered in 2014, so 9%
- 217 that registered in 2015, so 17%
- 126 that registered in 2016, so 10%
- 418 that registered in 2017, so 33%
- 252 that registered in 2018, so 20%, and it should be noted that 2018 is just beginning, 2 months over 12, and already 20% of the total number of members registered for 10 years. The forum was exploding, so the brakes were put on that.
Among these 1 274 members, there are:
- 12 Members
- 8 Full members
- 2 Senior members
- 3 Hero Members
- 2 Legendary members (including me)
27 members in this 1 274-members sample have a rank that give them Meriths, being only 2%, this result surprized me. In reality, there are an enormous quantity of accounts opened without any message. And also a lot with only 1 or 2 messages.
Among the accounts that own Merits, there is a certain proportion that are not active for years. In particular the accounts of the years 2009 to 2012, the people that managed to get some BTCs at a few dollars
(euros in the original post) or a few dozens of dollars are not there anymore. In theory they have some sMerit to distribute, but in reality they won't do it, they have better things to do. For example, I think about
davout, registered in october 2010, he bought or mined his first bitcoins at 6 cents, he is Legendary, he have 200 sMerit to distribute, but he will not do it. His last posts date back to may 2015 in French and january 2017 in other languages (well, he connected yesterday, but this is just to contradict me).
Closer to us, I think about
sangoku that I followed in 2013-14 and
Meuh6879 that left us a month ago...
Among these members that have sMerits, what is the number of sMerit they can send?
- Members : 12 x 2 = 24
- Full members : 8 x 20 = 160
- Senior members : 2 x 50 = 100
- Hero member : 3 x 100 = 300
- Legendary members : 2 x 200 = 400
Total : 984 Merits in first place.
492 Merits in second place (converting sMerits)
246 Merits in third place
And so on, until the stock in out.
So at best 1 968 Merits.
I say at best, because don't forget the accounts that are not actives anymore, maybe 20% of losses? maybe 30%?
So maybe 1 500 sMerits to distribute in reality.
An extremely well concerted coordinated action would allow the 3 Hero members to rank up to the Legendary status. We know that it is already too late to have this action, we have all begun dispersing our Merits in a generous and useless way. Generous because we wasted it and we now regret it ; useless because acting like this the number of promoted members will be way lower.
We also could have decided not promoting the Heros members to, on the contrary, make the 8 Full members rank up to Senior Members. But why more the Full members than the Hero members or the Senior members? There is a shortage, anyway.
The second merit source, is also insufficient: 12 000 Merits to distribute every month, to promote 2% of the 1 million 500 thousand members, that is to say to promote 30 000 members, this is 0.4 Merit per month in case of equal repartition on the ones that already have some Merits. So 19 years to rank up to Full member, or 31 years to become Senior member, or 52 years to be Hero member or 104 years to become Legendary. Or 200 years to do the full carrier.
The system is widely under-calibrated. A very-well coordinated and consensual action, asking to 70 or 80% of the members that have Merits to sacrified to concentrate the effort on the remaining 15% would allow to make them rank up one time, no more.
If we take a snapshot of the ranks on the French section (or another local section) today, and come back after one year, less than 5% will effectively have ranked up.
You can abandon any hope.
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) c'est winspiral, mais ce serait étonnant que ce soit une source 
