nice investigative work... if it turns out to be highly relevant (which i suspect it may) is irrelevant-- trying to research and providing evidence you have spent time and then alerting others to look into it and investigate  before sending funds is worthy of merit above and beyond what most merit receivers do.

I don't agree with the selling of accounts at all.

However saying that he has made an observation of something that I think is quite clear makes him jealous is not essentially true.
There is for sure a concentration of merit given on certain boards to the same group of people giving them out. That is not essentially them doing anything wrong but it certainly does destroy the credibility of what many claim merit means or what it's purpose is.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1SAi_b3umCcFJO2dMoLYjWCjNz1JhOLWrsRHhYQK-nb8/edit?usp=sharing

the above stats provided by r1s2g3

very interesting to see certain things there.

I would also like to see merits removed from those given by the top 300, 400, 500,1000 and merits that were given in the meta section removed just to see what the lists would look like.

It is already clear posting on the alt discussion board (main board for those arriving and discussing) is basically a waste of time if you want to receive merit.

That list does have a slight output error but just 1 position out on the left hand side list.

Great idea I think it would help a lot to alert people to the unofficial rules.

Of course it will not help with the largest and most dangerous problem of intentional scammers who will always be crafty and stealthy or just too big to tackle and bring down fully. The board will not be easy to moderate until sigs are removed. Or a decentralised version of noob jail brought back.

The unofficial rules  should come with a guide to the possible action that will be taken against you for each infraction. Merit reduction and variable time bans. They can't be too rigid (which is why i think they are not already) because there always be need for a human element to take all factors into consideration. Any bad decisions can also be discussed in meta anyway.

The problem is most people are worried about the smaller less damaging infractions more than tackling the huge scams.

Intentional bad guys that have demonstrated they are not to be trusted should be perm banned.

The real dangerous ones are not going to be easily caught though.

dinofelis, smooth, anonymint, bcx

Great posters in many ways.

I can not say before 2013 but these and some others were very nice to observe. All were capable of excellent thought experiments on nearly anything. I liked watching any weak point in a debate getting tested to the max. I liked to  watch them interact and reach a consensus on things where you could see how they had all contributed to the agreed optimal answer/solution/concept.

dinofelis was very tactful and extremely humble considering his very fine mind. His arguments were rock solid.
smooth was also mostly diplomatic but also a destroyer of weak arguments with little mercy -
anonymint -  he was my fav poster for various reasons  he brought the most action from other great posters and I thought his writing style was like getting free english lessons ( you can tell I need them). His arguments on non technical matters (since his other stuff was over my head) were excellent, well thought out and very robust. He also correctly predicted a lot of movements and outcomes for free on board which you could benefit from. He openly analysed new designs and gave those out for free.
bcx - he was mostly before my time but an exciting person to read and could provide some great entertainment. He reminded me of anonymint in some ways. I never found any great interaction between them both which could have been really fun.

when there was interaction between these and other great posters it was so much fun to read and learn as much as you could

Some of the best posters you may not even really like ( there are some other great posters i dont really like)but that does not stop them being a fantastic read and a real education on how to structure and plan your argument or form a very robust opinion on things.

I suspect a lot of excellent minds are more absorbed by technical matters and don't tend to spend time posting much.

Depends what you like to read. I also like just the friendly chitchat in communities by helpful posters and such.

I don't see any of them returning soon. But I hope I am wrong.


@HODL2090

You need to be careful with this. Freedom of expression (not hate) is not something we should suffocate.

Needless mindless abuse with no logical justification and that is continuous when they bring nothing else to the board then yes they should get a warning then if no change a temp/perm ban.

However personally I don't mind 2 people blowing off steam in a well structured argument with a sprinkling of bad language if they feel it is justified. Swearing of course makes you look less professional and less in control but in certain cases nothing sums up a scamming shit bag than exactly that.

You are asking humans not to act in a naturally human way. This will take huge moderation and open up all kinds of thresholds and different penalties. I do not like restrictions on reasonable amounts of swearing depending on provacation.

For instance someone scams you out of 2 btc and vanishes its okay to call them a scamming piece of shit.  Or an escrow that goes bad or ico team that ditches their project after eating up all the dev funds only to start a new one.

Also you will create a board of nitpicking slathering ass lickers appealing to authority for some small recognition of pointing out some scam victim who just called the scammers a swear word. These will be counter productive and a waste of resources.

If you are an innocent party getting swearing and abuse it just makes the other person look like the bad guy. It's all about context and thresholds that are pretty complicated. Hate crimes and cyber stalking are different matters.

The rules I believe are at this time unofficial and undefined intentionally to leave a lot of scope from the mods to decide. They have been doing a good job mostly I think all these years. Those new members pushing hard lines to these rules have obviously missed the entire reason such rules are placed there in such broad terms.

As to new members attacking established ones. I believe when attacks are public it should be a simple matter of seeing if the provided evidence for such attack meets a reasonable threshold. If there was no reason at all or didnt come near to the threshold the attacker is the one that should be then a pariah until such time he has learned his lesson.  This holds for all but the most technical matters where most of the members are unable to discern the evidence nor threshold. That could then be an issue that would be difficult to prevent. I have seen this complaint before and was unable to know for sure who was in the right. Mostly people of such a level of intelligence don't actually swear and abuse that much since they recognise it is not a great strategy to win over support.



 

 Do you know even memes are starting to be considered as copyright theft which is something that is actually more serious in most cases than plagiarism. Although I believe there is an over lap in this very complex area. Soon if we are not careful we will wipe out a lot of good members.

I do see the the net gain of such an idea in terms of ridding the board of people who are intentionally doing wrong.

However, to be totally honest if people are intentionally plagiarising here for financial gain (not just trying to post something relevant to help others like some argued the guy from the collectibles forum was doing ) they should be banned. Getting them to snitch on 2 others will probably not change the type of person they are and not prevent future schemes they may be planning. If they are bad eggs they should be deleted. For me it is all about establishing intent to find the real bad guys who are here to scam others. I have seen several times people will ask a question and someone else will cut and paste the answer from the net. This is before icos and sigs they were just doing it to be helpful. These should get a temp ban or warning. These are not essentially bad eggs.

For me personally it is clear TP ( who i believe is a usually constructive member who has probably been of great benefit to the board over-all although i had not seen him post on the alt board for a long time so almost forgot who he was but when he was there he seemed a good member I remember him joining and asking questions back then)  clearly based his initial decision upon incorrect assumptions. This was a mistake. This is understandable and there is no problem with that. However now we dispelled the initial 2 reasons upon which he justified the red tag - - let's just remove it.

Your idea is clever but I do not like the idea of someone who is clearly a bad egg getting a pass whatever they do next. Some bad eggs just will never change. Get rid of them. As much as I dislike plagiarism if it is deliberate , repeated and for only financial gain it is still secondary to those running huge scams to defraud peoples btc away from them directly. Although this overlap once again. Intent is so important.  This guy on the evidence available is not a bad egg.

Nothing stopping OP reporting bad eggs in future and has done in the past so I don't think he even needs motivation.

Of course that is up to him but motivating someone become a snitch ( i snitch on real scammers for sure by facing them down in their threads and have done it perhaps more with big scams than 99.99% of this board )  if they have not done something intentionally wrong can cause them problems. Trust me that if you make trouble for the wrong people on here you need to know what you are getting yourself into and make your own decision to out them. Forcing people into such action could be dangerous ground.

I like your idea and you seem like a smart person but just extra things to consider before going forward with that.

TP may stick to his word and remove negative trust now that he sees some other people other than myself feel it could be overly harsh in this case. I think he will.







 

@DdmrDdmr

I think you forgot to turn the figure into percentage (100 /150 000) *100 -> 0,067% … Arguably the best posters will at some point merit some of the other best posters, since that is what merit is about: meriting decent content, and that content is likely generated by … surprise .. the best posters.

Ah yes thanks for correcting that.
The 0.067 would at some point merit the 0.067 but  already we know that 33% of their merits are received within that group and sent could be even larger (although as you say could be smaller)
Not sure about the best posters since that is a very hard thing to determine.

For sure what is the best post to one person is not to another. You could quite possibly have a conversation with some far lower merit holders and find it was much easier to achieve a non biased logical consensus based upon observable events. One could even reason a poster that has prevented many scams is the best poster in a different way.  I have recently seen some members falling back on quoting their merit score to claim their argument held more weight. This is certainly not something I depend too heavily on. I have seen some claim it proves more worth. Again it can not be used that way imho.

A person with very low merit and indeed rank could spot clues that a project was a scam and highlight this saving investors millions upon millions of dollars and even if their post was lacking in every aspect except to provide this insight it could be reasoned it was more valuable to this community and to crypto in general than all the highest merit posters combined (excluding satoshi and a couple of others of course). Perhaps it can be used though to state you would be statistically highly probable to provide what many others consider to be a post they can agree with and consider good/worthy of merit. Perhaps I being too negative but still merit is not a complete guide to locating the best posters. For sure though if we are being sensible it would be a short cut to locating posters generally worth hearing from.

The overall merit per post on the Bitcoin Discussion I calculated back in July 2018 (a bit has rained since then though) was 0,033/post. For Altcoin Discussion it was 0,009/post. So the ratio is 3,67 times better in the Bitcoin Discussion section compared to the Altcoin Discussion. Nevertheless, the chance factor is not a random lottery equal opportunity based, since each post’s chances depend on many factors, being content one of the core ones. I think there is much more spam in the Altcoin section than the Bitcoin section, which drags the ratio down for the Altcoin section.


Yes I agree with with everything else you said in your post as it seems to make logical sense.

I agree content should certainly be one of the cores ones. To me it should be the only one really.

However, having only been to meta a few times in many years here (perhaps 4x) before this recent period in the last few days. I would estimate 99% of my total posts or greater I have made on the alt boards... since visiting meta it is much easier to give out merits to people that are very helpful and such and without intending to your given merits are soon going to a small group people.  It reminds me of the alt board a few years back but sadly here you tend to find a far far higher proportion of nitpicking ass kissing overly pc people since it is the main place to come and report perceived wrong doing in the hope of some recognition (and of course reporting of real dangerous scammers too ). Of course reporting serious wrong doing, scamming in its various guises is very much needed but the overly pc and ass kissing to perceived authority figures is spoiling it and sucks away from genuine flow of sensible conversation.  It's a shame everyone seems to have retreated here from the alt boards and not to the serious discussion board so logical reasonable threads need not get contaminated by overly pc unreasonable ass kissers.

Thanks that would be really great


Thanks for updating your post.

when you say this  So (29958/65641)*100 =45.63% of merit top 200 is given to top 200


this means 45.63% is received by the top 200 from other members of the top 200 right?

but what I really wanted to find out was...

Top 200 send x % out of the top 200 ... is it possible?

So for instance let's say your stat is 50% not 45


So top 200 get total 10,000 merit total.

5000 from outside the top 200

5000 from inside the top 200

What is the top 200 only actually sending 5000 so they are sending 0% outside of the top 200.

Of course this is a crazy proposition I can see many top 200 are sending noobs quite a bit of merit.

But I want to know what exact %  the top 200 sending outside of the top 200% of the total they are sending.  Do you see what I mean and is it possible to even find out?

Top   10 ->  9,57% received merit from Top 10.
Top   20 -> 17,80% received merit from Top 20.
Top   50 -> 26,38% received merit from Top 50.
Top 100 -> 32,69% received merit from Top 100.
Top   200 ->  43,29% received merit from Top 200.
Top   500 ->  50,61% received merit from Top 500.
Top   1000 ->  56,62% received merit from Top 1000.
Top   5000 ->  69,44% received merit from Top 5000.

thanks  for these... so a bit better than I expected at 43.29% not 50% or greater but regardless still a monster proportion.

So allowing for the fact 150k members posted recently the 0.00066% of the board are getting 32.69% of merit their from the same 0.00066% of the board. I know this is irrelevant and would mean nothing but I wonder what the probability of that taking place if merit was randomly attributed between just 150k accounts ...ah if only I was a math master or even just okay at math. Well since it is irrelevant I shouldn't give it much thought.

The stat we can't (or perhaps we can but I am missing it) see is what % of merit given by out each tier is kept inside each tier this would probably be even more interesting to know. I am I correct in saying the top 10 posters could give 100% of their merit to each other and their received % from inside the top 10 could still be tiny if the tiers below gave them a far greater proportion of their merit?

So for the sake of examining circle jerking and back slapping you would really need to know the given stat more than received would you not? as I say stats are not my thing but you seem far more math minded than myself. Is it not more important to know what % they send out of their tiers compared to the % they send within their tiers that what they receive in from other tier and their own tiers?  Am i missing something with this part due to poor math ability? or is that stat already something I should be able to calculate from the provided stats?

Comparing meta board to the alt board of course is a bit of a stretch I admit. The alt board discussion is the board hit the hardest by the ico promotional wave of scammers so to try and compare the post quality is of course not really possible so to compare the merit stats is not really going to prove anything other than you will not get merit on the alt discussion board even for a great post generally because of many factors but primarily because you are going to be much harder to find by those with most merit to give.

 This is sad because most noobs will be primarily interested in alts and will be motivated to join discussions there hence already reducing greatly their chance of any merit to practically nothing. I have noticed some alt sources mention they never visit alt discussion or for some reason

Anyway I agree there are lots of reasons why you should have 0.007% of a merit per post on alt compared to 0.28% chance of merit on meta. That though is a massive difference.

Let's though compare bitcoin discussion which is more moderated and has not been crushed like the alt discussion since it is not meant to have discussion of annoying new and mostly scammy icos. So should be more comparable so pretty much what I had thought 13x more chance of merit per post. Am I interpreting that correctly?

Merit is a good addition though and I think the alt discussion board is slowing up ...so account farmers are dying back a bit.

Interesting to view the received stats you posted though for sure. Thank you for posting those.


@actmyname

I agree with what you have said to a certain degree.

Although  it is nice to take a deeper look at how things are actually taking place so far with merit.

I think the bottom is almost in now. However, depending on a few factors I will pull out of trades where I am in the red if I can inject the leftover btc straight into something that I consider has an even better chance of rebounding harder.

Depends how confident you are in mid term it will sink further. I mean if you are confident it will sink further before the rebound then you must get out then back  in later. I have not had amazing luck in these exact scenarios following that action though. Usually unless there is amazing opportunity I need money for at the time I will not pull out if it is already red unless new news comes to light that makes it look very negative compared to when I got in.

LOL reading that back I have not explained that well so I hope you can get what I mean.

the part about wrong neighbourhood.... is totally correct. However given time I think the alt board will once again become a place you can use.

not sure about not being an active seeker of knowledge but there are several factors that prevent good posts getting extra merit they deserve if compared to posts made in the right place at the right time by the right person.

Thanks for the reply and I think you have a point for sure.

However a lot people whom I notice from the old alt days are probably not held back by these things I'm not sure why they have mostly moved to meta. Although for sure meta seems an easier place to interact with people that are not primarily interested in promoting icos.

This is very interesting

Can you show me what this top 50 list looks like if you subtract  merits from those that are currently on that list and then currently top 200 merit holders.

Even better can you find out

What % of merit given out by the top 100 goes to others that are not in the top 100

what % of merit given out by the top 200 goes to others that are not in the top 200

DarkStar_   has demonstrated great character here and fair play toward you by restoring your trust to 0 from -1. Fair play and humanity would I hope be the KEY ingredient to being a DT member. I honestly think this is one of the most fairest and considerate actions I have seen on this board in a long time.

I hope that you (the OP) yourself will make great effort from this point forward to demonstrate your acknowledgement of  his effort here and really become a long term valuable member of this board. As a trader trust score is very important so be careful as possible to demonstrate you are honest and genuine..(which so far i think you have)

To those that stuck to the perma ban suggestion even after taking into consideration the observable facts.... I really hope that you are judged by those that show more humanity and fair play than  you have shown here if you are to one day make an honest mistake.



 

Although of course the statement

"Only high ranked users are rewarded with merits"  was always going to be domonstrated as incorrect due to the fact it was kind of an extreme statement.

It is quite a complex thing to really get to grips with but in broad strokes I would feel quite confident about saying if a new poster is posting on the alt board (alts are generally the thing most noobs gravitate to ) you are going to be a huge disadvantage compared to posting in the meta section and being an established member of a group that are familiar with each other and have previously supported their posts/ideas. Again that is quite normal and not really something I think is really a big issue.

However to try say that these things are not factors of varying weight could be misleading. I think noobs that make claims similar to merit goes to those legends and top merit holders already are not to be mislead into believing they are barking up the wrong tree and in the wrong forest.  I think that if I were a smart new user here though I could devise a way to accumulate merits rather quickly but then you may not be able to post freely and in a natural way that boards should really encourage.

If you do want merit certainly do not question or push against ideas or those that have it in abundance that is for sure.

I also strongly suspect that a significant and perhaps far too large  proportion of merits GIVEN out by the top 100/top 200 merit holders are retained within the top 100/200 top merit holders.

So although it is not true that only high ranked users are rewarded with merit, there are other statements one could create that could seem that things are not as far from that situation as would be ideal.

You have busted a myth based on a statement that I would say nobody would honest think was realistic and have provided some good data but on the other hand if i was a new poster here posting in the section that of most interest to most new users I would have to assume a lot of merits that could be coming my way will be going to a group of people in meta who don't really need them.

I have recently been wondering if this is a bad thing or not. It is certainly not a reason to end merits as they are fighting successfully one of the most board destorying trends.  I think that merit could be given a far greater power to make the board better but nobody seems to favour my previous proposals regarding them. Maybe because they are not great ideas or hard to implement but I didn't see any real argument that demonstrated that.

Merits were introduced with good intentions and I think they even in current form are of great use and benefit. Lets not though consider them as a perfect system and not tell people nothing to say here when they notice some issues.

Merit seems to be working in a positive way. It is stopping account farmers leveling up and selling accounts. It does not stop the worst bunch of scum which are ico pumping spammers who are getting more inventive with their schemes and fake conversations. This is the main issue on the alt board. However the fact that it is doing some good is reason enough to keep it for sure.

If you are a new poster posting in the alt section you will have a very low probability of getting merit regardless of your post quality compared to if you post in meta.

Meta is now it seems the place a lot of posters have retreated to from the old alt discussion board.  I have no idea why they have not retreated to the serious discussion which seems dead.

Meta though does sadly attract a lot of the sort of people you wanted to kick up the ass at school. Those nitpicking sniveling wretches who want to appeal to authority in the hope of some crumbs of respect over reporting pathetic and counter productive crap from those that make honest mistakes or don't act within their overly PC ideology that does not stand up to logical and reasonable analysis.

Here sadly they can congregate to reinforce on each other that (although in the real world they are mostly pariahs due to normal persons feeling ill after spending much time in their company) they are vital to impose their illogical and unreasonable views upon others. Worse still those types will try to support and enforce obviously unfair and incorrect decisions by those that they perceive to be in power and crave just single merit from them. Again that does not apply to all persons in meta.

I agree that the board should be a place of general pleasantness where at all possible. However sneaky scammers deserve no such consideration it is totally okay to speak to those as you please. Hate of scams and scammers is actually essential. Since meta is a place where most ass lickers congregate looking to shove their noses deep in rectums then you sadly go from an environment of scammers alt discussion board to an environment with a high proportion of ass licking overly PC gimps (not all persons in meta but already i located several).

The best  solution  would be to create junior boards for the bitcoin and alt discussion boards leaving the current btc and alt boards as more senior boards that required  x merits to post on.

Junior boards would be like the old noob jails with a decentralised voting elevation from other members who can then spend their time positively rewarding merit to new good posters and not negatively reporting scammers.  Sadly most would likely remain in meta rewarding each other but still some would probably go there and do a few hours now and then helping genuine and honest good posters gain access to the senior boards. Also no sigs for junior boards. Also instead of bans there could be relegation to junior boards ( certain merit deletions ) for old members who can be shown to be guilty of minor to mid level wrong doing (obviously scamming should be a ban anyway if proven).  

At first glance looking at this I would say that it is not quite as bad as I had initially suspected however it still is along the lines of what I thought it would be and this data could  actually not be clearly demonstrating the circle jerk/ back slapping within the top 100 or 200 users that is going on.

If we look at this

Top   10 ->  9,57% received merit from Top 10.
Top   20 -> 17,80% received merit from Top 20.
Top   50 -> 26,38% received merit from Top 50.
Top 100 -> 32,69% received merit from Top 100.

This is received  and i think looks a little better than what i had expected due to those being merited by those hoping to get some merits in return.


I expect by the time we expand this to the top 200 we would notice that 50% or even greater are received by other members of the top 200. This data to me does not rule out that much higher % for example 70 - 95 % of merit given out by the top 200 does not just remain within the top 200 .


Also worth noting is that meta absorbs such a high proportion of merit compared to the number of people actually posting here. I suspect  the alt board (where most new people post) and even the btc board that have 10x the number of posts actually has far more than 10x more people posting there. You can likely say 100x of times more people posting there. Then seeing the number of merits that meta absorbs is a lot.

Now there will be some who will say you can always interpret data how you prefer to. Since I don't know the % of merit given out by the top 100/top200 (which is still let us say realistically 0.01% of real posters taking out bots and scammers) which ONLY goes to other top merit 100 / 200 holders we can not really rule out a definite circle jerking back slapping pattern here.

Having said all of that it is not a big deal. Merit works well for stopping new bot accounts powering up and account farming and provides some way to show appreciation for views they share and other useful things. Therefore is working well but we have to be careful regarding what other conclusions we automatically draw merit scores.

I do not agree. Anyone could be hacked. Are you saying that if you get hacked it is always your own fault?


Also a legend account that old and also I thought I saw mentioned a person that has donated not only a lot of time but also financially.

If you can prove the hacked account was yours before it got hacked then of course you should get it back eventually.

I am sure actually that this person will get his account back in the end it will just take some time.

There is probably just a huge back log.  However in my personal opinion legends and especially legends that have donated should be at the front of that queue.  I'm a personal believer of the more you put in the more you should be rewarded kinda guy.

I expect a 2 step verification via email could stop a lot of these problems.

Deleting his thread must be a mistake, I can't think anyone would not empathise with getting his legend account back

I challenge anyone here to read through the OP's entire post history and then tell me he is a shit poster  that the forum does not want and provide evidence

1. He is a legitimate trader.
2. He always advocates using safe trading practice with bitcointalk own escrows.
3. He does not make any needless shitposts AT ALL or at least a tiny % less than most people here
4. He has highlighted and reported several scammers and phishing site link posters
5. He is often warning people on threads where noob accounts are asking for unreasonable trust and are high risk. Replying on such threads things such as " no way will I be sending to a new account first" - or " 1000btc no escrow sounds legit" are warnings that to me are totally justified on noob bait threads.
6. I have learned 1 very important thing that I did not know reading through these posts.
7. He has very low motivation to shit post - he is not even wearing a sig so needs no inflated post count.


I strongly refute that this person can be classed as a useless member of this forum nor a shit poster.


Saying this person should be perma banned on the basis of

1. breaking the forum rules of crediting yourself with other peoples work

2. being a shit poster of no worth

Is observably incorrect on both accounts.

You are again mistaken that short and concise posts regarding price , escrow availability , shipping ect  are essentially shit posting. This is not the case for trading. There is no requirement to make long posts for legitimate trades.

He is a legitimate trader who seems fair and helpful to others too. This is there for anyone to examine. Go ahead go through his entire post history. I do not doing trading here really but bitcoin/crypto's can use all the honest traders they can get right now.

I understand you do a lot of good work and must be frustrated at all this scammers and bots and other various schemes. This person is obviously not someone that deserves to be grouped in with them. You have made a mistake I believe in good faith based on a report and flagged it red.  

However I had expected that you had just missed a lot of information since you had been busy fighting other scammers and jumped to the wrong conclusion in this case. Fair enough, anyone can make a mistake. But this is a lot more concerning for those that have a sense of fair play I think. You are still advocating a perma ban when to me even the red trust there (of major damage to a trader like him) this is very harsh.

I think removing it would provide you with more credibility than keeping it there long term.

Thanks very much for clearing that up.