Merit & new rank requirements

[JayJuanGee]

JayJuanGee

I find your avatar ironic, because out of your entire, emotional and petulant rant, you danced around the subject. Not once did you suggest why you think the merit system will work. I see you're the fanboy type and you can write prolifically but you'll never produce anything of value because you yourself haven't defined why you hold your beliefs.

First, you are looking at the wrong indicator, if you believe that my avatar is attempting to send some kind of message to you on this particular topic.

Second, you are whining about this merit system, and sure it is possible that you have convinced a few other whiners to chime in to support you in your complaining cause; however, you have also erroneously attempted to argue that I have some kind of burden to support the status quo system that has been established (this new merit system), when I do not.  

I do not need to provide either evidence or argument regarding why the status quo new merit system is better than some amorphous and unspecified change that you may be proposing (such as going back to pre-change, perhaps?).  

If you are proposing a change to the status quo merit system that has been established, then you have both the evidentiary and the logic burdens of presentation and persuasion to convince others.  For me, your whining has not accomplished much of anything in terms of either evidence or logic, but perhaps others will be more persuaded by your lack of presentation, perhaps Theymos?  Yet I doubt it because I think that Theymos would likely prefer to see more evidence and logic if he is going to make some changes that goes beyond mere whining or attempts to divert discussion through largely irrelevant and unjustified personally attacks.

You use term like whining to address legitimate concerns and have no understanding of the burden of proof. We've addressed our concerns, you offered no rebuttal except juvenile mockery and pseudo-intellectualism. You're really a predictable person, I bet you're even a Libertarian. People who half-understand tend to follow that ideology.

In short, you're a fucking troll and we would all do well just to put you on ignore, you have nothing to offer the world and are incapable of constructive conversation.

I just want to point out to all how much of an idiot fanboy this troll is, click his profile. He says "How much alt coin diversification is necessary? 0%"

With a fanbase like him, BTC is sure to become as irrelevant as these forums will become.

You are really distracted and grasping at straws in your ongoing attempts to bring up all kinds of irrelevant bullshit topics and to attempt to put some kind of burden on me to have to defend various random ad hominem points that you are making.  I am not going to play your little game and pursue your seemingly stream of conscious fantasy discussion.  

Let me repeat my point one more time with some possible hope that your seemingly pea brain might begin to focus on the topic of this thread:   if you believe that the merit system needs to be changed in some kind of way, then you have the burden to provide evidence and logic for the position that you are taking and perhaps clarify what the fuck position that your are taking, in the first place, regarding the merit system.  

[athanz88]

Forum is the pursuit of merits now. Will live strong and persistent. Natural selection.
Merit will not appreciate the quality. Merit should not be the basis of a new rank. Merit is the gratitude of users. Not everyone can get it in the right amount. The number of merits is too large to move to new ranks

How do you know so much about how the merit system of the forum is going to play out?  

You have been a member of the forum for about 1 month.  The merit system was implemented 1 week after you registered your account.

I suppose that if you do not like this new merit system, then you don't have to use it, right?  You have only one month invested into the forum, so far, right?

Says the guy who only had to hang out and post to increase his rank.

What's up your butt?  Look I am using nice language, here?  

Your coming into the conversation to get in your two cents, makes you come off as a bit bitter and envious, no?  

Do you think that I had anything to do with implementing the new merit system?  

Here, I am merely talking about it, and you can proclaim my bias.. blah blah blah.. but that likely reflects more on your bad attitude rather than anything to do with me.

Accordingly, the content of your posts suggest that you are unwilling or unable to understand or accept both concepts of system changes and the concept of employing a grandfathering clause type arrangement in order to attempt to fairly transition members from the existing system into the new system.  

If you were attempting to make another point, then I am all ears, but mostly what I got from you was a weak-ass diversion attempt at an ad hominem attack rather than attempting to deal with actual substantive matters related to the merit system.

I found the tone of your post to him to be snarky and dismissive. You ranked up under a completely different standard, yet you seem to take a knee jerk defense. The system is poorly thought out, take it as bitter if you want. Personally, I think these forums are kind of a negative on the community anyways. Too factional and loyal to outdated tech. Too many scammers and too much greed.Yet if you ask an advanced question, no one here has an answer. I think the merit system is the slow death of these forums, which is probably for the best in the long run. But it's still sad to see what Satoshi founded to become irrelevant.

But I like how you created a whole story in your head about how I'm bitter and evious because your tone is snarky...

How come someone determine someone tone from a text? i am curious about this matters.

Being hard on the community is not the same as being negative to community, rather than negative, merit forces us to level up ourself, and how come is that a negative things for the community. And being positive to a community doesnt mean a forum needs to hear and do what the community says. Merit will only give death to member which can not rank up (mostly because they dont want to level up their self cause they dont want the hard way to earn merits)

I know satoshi made bitcoin and also one of team that made this forum (cmiiw for the forum part), but it doesnt have connection between decentralized spirit of bitcoin with this centralized forum, You really got things mixed up

 I can understand why you can't determine tone from text, you can barely convey a coherent message. Your logic seems to be pretty incomplete. The only ones who will get merit are those who post popular, or more appropriately, patronizing posts. This board needs less BS and more logic, it's kind of a desert here.

 As most people aren't willing to patronize and ass kiss for merit (there isn't a ton available anyways) they will likely move on. Then it will just be the same circle jerk passing around merit. It's essentially created a closed community that is resistant to reality, like the BTC main forum.

If you can't determine tone from this than you need a better English teacher:

I suppose that if you do not like this new merit system, then you don't have to use it, right?  You have only one month invested into the forum, so far, right?

Wow, now i can read tone and i am 100% sure that your tone is coming from a whining and butthurt people who is pessimistic about the system that is implemented recently called merit.

Telling other people's logic incomplete but get mad to a people who doesnt like other cryptocurrency and got tilted by word "How much alt coin diversification is necessary? 0%" and rant randomly about people's avatar. How complete your logic is, very complete.

There are many people who got merits by now (except you i guess) because they accept it and try hard for it. If you are saying that people only gets merit because they are friends or ass-kissing, of course it will get me mad and other people mad, do you know how much effort i made to my post in this thread that i made :
1. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2947171.msg30272338#msg30272338
2. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2822349.msg28909933#msg28909933

Please stop throwing random tantrum without any valid data.

No thanks for the lesson tho.

[orkoso]

As to the topic at hand:

I have severe doubts as the, well, merit, of the merit system. I've seen several systems implemented to restrict spam or low quality posts over the years, and they have all come to naught sooner or later.

The reasons for that are many, but the biggest one, in my opinion, is not a negative. There are a lot of clever people here, and they will figure out how to game the system. Whatever the system is. There are many things that can be said about the denizens of bitcointalk, but for the most part they are not sheep.

Let it play out. Theymos does keep an eye and an active hand on his creations. It will work or it won't.

I am not aware of the earlier methods you are talking about as I joined recently. But I think the merit system is designed after giving it la lot of thought as:

1) This system is designed in a way that it will keep getting better with time on its own. The alt accounts, account farmers will spend the default merit they got soon. They will also fail to get merits from merit sources as they will not be able to post good quality posts. If they start improving the post quality, that is an additional benefit.

2) All the new registrations will now be careful from start with their posting. Less work for moderators which can utilize for other important tasks.

3) The merit system system actually has resulted in automated moderation with the help of existing members.

4) Finally, let me explain regarding members going to game this system as well. It is not happening actually which is evident from the complaints we are getting from so many new members that they are not able to rank up.

Some of the farms out there are pretty obvious and some direct action would be nice apart from just waiting for the merit to sefl-correct IMHO

[shield132]

I have a one great idea too.
For example if user posted somethinf which was more likely a spam and moderator deleted his/her post, what about to give this user -1 merit? I mean if I have 200 merit and one of my post got deleted by mod, let's decrease my merit by -1 and make it 199 automatically. I think it will be a good feature too.
Or if user reported post to moderator and that post got deleted, give that user +1 merit, if not deleted - then -1 to reporter. This will help community to take care of what do others post.

A little bump of my post. No one thinks that it's a good idea? It will reduce spam on it's way. Won't be a bad feature.
Imagine guy has rank and merits but now spams, when someone reports it to moderator and that gets deleted, number of users merits will decrease, so this will somehow make users to not spam in order to keep their merits at default number or up.

[makulo123]

The whole merit system is just one total nonsense... Just look on the first , second, third post and so on in this thread. These guys didn't even have to try to post "quality" content in order to get merit, they got merit just because they were first in this thread...

Next, look here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=merit;stats=toptopics
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=merit;stats=toptopicsat
Do you see any non-merit related thread/posts here (except for shilled shitposts/ANNs)? because I don't...

Why would ordinary users of this forum with low ranks be meriting other posts with motive other than expecting others to merit theirs? Meriting other's posts will only drain someone's sMerits, and if the person who merited doesn't get his merit back, he won't be able to sMerit other posts neither be able to rank up as well... People are already abusing the system (suprisingly) ( https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2823221.msg28920985#msg28920985 )... And this creates an ecosystem really resemblent to inflated fiat economy.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1840789.msg18316056#msg18316056
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=375643.msg4022997#msg4022997
I mean WTF??? (these posts REALLY "deserved" to be merited)

[kelsiivo]

I wonder who the first one to 15 million merits will be 

I like this change a lot . Hopefully we'll see an increase in post quality 

15 million merits is not possible in one lifetime now. Regarding posting quality, I cannot comment about all members but have seen some exceptional posts be new members. Merit system is a good motivation for everyone here.

[Biomech]

I wonder who the first one to 15 million merits will be 

I like this change a lot . Hopefully we'll see an increase in post quality 

15 million merits is not possible in one lifetime now. Regarding posting quality, I cannot comment about all members but have seen some exceptional posts be new members. Merit system is a good motivation for everyone here.

I tend to agree. It's a positive step.

Those whining the most have nothing of merit to say 

[CryptoLex]

I do think merit is  good step forward. Most new accounts did manage to get alot af posts because of bounty programs and them posting results in the threads made them getting higher ranked. Non of these posts are any close to quality.

Im fine staying member because of the merit

[Magister Magus]

Well, it's simple math: if you write ten wonderful posts every day, and ALL of them receive ten merits, you will need only 400 years to achieve 15 millions merits. Well... good luck! :-)

I wonder who the first one to 15 million merits will be  

I like this change a lot . Hopefully we'll see an increase in post quality  

15 million merits is not possible in one lifetime now. Regarding posting quality, I cannot comment about all members but have seen some exceptional posts be new members. Merit system is a good motivation for everyone here.

[Magister Magus]

Well, I'm frustrated as you are, because next week I'd reached the full member rank, and now I have to earn a lot of merits to achieve that result. And of course I've no idea when I'll succeed.

But... firstly, I received already a few, and some of them from "difficult" high ranks members, so... it's possible.
Then, I improved very much the quality of my posts, and this is very positive. I'm ashamed of my first ones. I'll write a specific post about this.
Much more, I understood that I'm not here to earn some cheap money just spamming the forum.

WTF! I'm here because I want to became a f...ing cryptomillionarie, not a shitpost worker.

So, after this enlightenment, suddenly all this discussion about merits and ranks becomes insignificant: if I'll receive a merit, I'll be happy just because I give a contribution and someone appreciated me. That's all.

And don't forget: the merit system has still a lot of space for improvement, but - like it or not - it stopped the tsunami of shitpost.
Of course now the situation is a little stuck, but it was necessary. Now we'll see how can we make it better.






 

First, just to clear the air (if anyone will actually read this) I am biased because I don't feel I can personally rank up anymore. So, take this with a grain of salt.

My thoughts:

I know the merit is new, and I really like the concept because BitcoinTalk.org is a core part of the community and needs to be protected, but based on the evidence, I don't see this working as planned. Rather, it appears to be simply a caste system where the current ranked people have now just hard coded their levels and almost no one else will be ranking up from this point forward.

I don't have access to the actual data so I just have to go with my observations. But I would LOVE to see the ranking growth rates since the Merit system was implemented. Probably went from some rapidly growing rate to near zero. Was that the goal? To turn off leveling up? I bet that's what happened.

Here are my limited observations:

1) Merit does not appear to be moving from the haves to the have nots.

-This means we have a liquidity problem

2) Where Merit has moved, it appears to be too infrequent to work as intended, where better posters would be moving up in rank.

-Easy to confirm, just scan the latest threads you are reading and see how many people are still sitting at a round number of Merit (e.g., 10, 100, 250, etc). It's just about everyone. Again, I would love to see a % of accounts that now have anything other than a round number of Merit.

3) Where Merit has moved, it's very hard for the public to know why, who gave it, and for what posting, which leads me to believe, most of the movement has been from people who control several accounts. As a member of the blockchain community (ignore my 'creation account date' I've been in crypto since 2013) we are supposed to be about transparency and accountability.

-For those without a round number of Merit, they appear to have earned just 1 to 4 added points, and again, a scan of their recent posts do not yield anything more impressive than other people's posts (in my opinion). But the lack of transparency will lead to suspicion in this community, as it has done with me. That's just how we roll!

-I realize there is some public tracking going on, but it's not easy to find and therefore doesn't actually work as transparent (IMHO)

4) While BitcoinTalk is flooded with spammers and multiple accounts (and I completely agree that is a problem) under the new system, ranking up has become virtually impossible and will no longer reward activity. While spam is a problem, I believe a new problem will emerge, a lack of interest in posting on this site which will lead to degradation of utility.

-I've worked  in many settings where leaders considered cutting some requirement (like how under the old rules, simply posting got your rank on this site). They wanted to cut the requirement because it seemed extra, unhelpful. But I argued against cutting it because although it was not helpful directly for the intended purpose, removing it would very likely lead to a situation where performance would decline and then this seemingly unhelpful requirement would actually once again become useful. I know I'm leaving out detail here, but think of it like an ecosystem. Some would say "who cares if species XYZ goes extinct" until years later they realize that caused a chain reaction that killed off an entire jungle.

Problems and complaints, that's not very helpful. So how about a solution?

I prefer small changes, so what if Merit was no longer tied to ranking up, but the activity level requirements doubled or tripled. Or what if some small amount of Merit was required to level up. Like, people had to earn at least 1 Merit point before moving each rank level. AND, I would recommend you grant people more sMerit to solve the liquidity problem.

To summarize: the Merit change, appears to not be meeting the stated indented goals, and I would urge the leadership of this site to consider an alternative before significant damage is caused to a key institution of the crypt world...this site.

[JayJuanGee]

I wonder who the first one to 15 million merits will be 

I like this change a lot . Hopefully we'll see an increase in post quality 

Could you be a bit more realistic... come on, 15million? 

Why don't we start by attempting to find out who gets to 10k first and then 100k.. perhaps, witnessing the  reaching BTC price parity first would be a more realistic merit received target?

So far, Theymos is in the lead by quite a bit, but perhaps some posters will catch up to him and pass him up?  Perhaps?

[JayJuanGee]

Actually, in another thread, a member repeated the concept of a "negative merit," and I had a kind of "ah ha" moment.

Here's my earlier post.

I was initially against the idea of negative merit, but I thought of a way that it might work.  Here it goes:

It seems to me that if there were negative merits, the poster should need to feel so strongly about giving the negative merit that it would subtract from his/her regular merit bank.

Therefor, if the member gave someone a negative merit, then that person would need to have at least 5 merits because it would remove 5 merits from that members regular merits in order for that member to give the one negative merit to the other member.  Under such a system, we would be able to have negative merits, and members would only employ such possible negative merit feature sparingly and after giving some considerable thought to it.

[icohunter1024]

I'm not spammer but i'm newbie and i don't know earn merit point. What a pity when participated in forum late and now is very difficult for newbie.  😂

[Soke]

I wonder who the first one to 15 million merits will be 

I like this change a lot . Hopefully we'll see an increase in post quality 

For sure, it won't be you.  No wonder you don't have any merits.   Your post is a waste of space.  Practice what you preach and make quality posts. 

[digaran]

Actually, in another thread, a member repeated the concept of a "negative merit," and I had a kind of "ah ha" moment.

Here's my earlier post.

I was initially against the idea of negative merit, but I thought of a way that it might work.  Here it goes:

It seems to me that if there were negative merits, the poster should need to feel so strongly about giving the negative merit that it would subtract from his/her regular merit bank.

Therefor, if the member gave someone a negative merit, then that person would need to have at least 5 merits because it would remove 5 merits from that members regular merits in order for that member to give the one negative merit to the other member.  Under such a system, we would be able to have negative merits, and members would only employ such possible negative merit feature sparingly and after giving some considerable thought to it.

Demerit is not possible, I wouldn't give a negative merit to somebody else if I could lose my own merits. reversing them is not easy and would complicate everything, reversing a single merit could result in deranking of other members.

We should have a list of merit sources, instead of theymos to be the one checking their sent merits, everybody should have access to their stats, only their stats matters.
Some people are deleting their posts with received merits, if I had a list of merit sources, I could check and see if any of them has ever merited a deleted post.

I'm not spammer but i'm newbie and i don't know earn merit point. What a pity when participated in forum late and now is very difficult for newbie.  😂

If you have nothing to contribute as a newbie, how could you contribute as a high ranking member?

[Trilogy-AI]

The Merit system doesn't much affect newer posters. But it does put the kibosh on senior folks, especially those that were just about to rank up. Doesn't really seem fair for them: someone being a few posts away from Senior Member now has to go hunting for 150 Merit points. But someone else who just happens to have crossed that threshold is now grandfathered in.

[JayJuanGee]

I'm not spammer but i'm newbie and i don't know earn merit point. What a pity when participated in forum late and now is very difficult for newbie.  😂

I looked at your posts, and they are pretty shitty... there is no real substance to them except you seem to be searching for ways to make money...on bounty or whatever.  So yeah, you been here a very short period of time and did not contribute anything that would really inspire anyone to give you a merit, right?  Can you see how I see that in the posts that you have made, so far?

[JayJuanGee]

[edited out]
 

We should have a list of merit sources, instead of theymos to be the one checking their sent merits, everybody should have access to their stats, only their stats matters.
Some people are deleting their posts with received merits, if I had a list of merit sources, I could check and see if any of them has ever merited a deleted post.

Actually, I had never really considered that particular problem of the deleted posts, and you may be correct that there should be ways to access information about deleted posts that had been merited - I am not sure whether the only means would be to list the merit sources; however, it could be one possible way. 

I am not really opposed to Theymos's initial decision to NOT reveal the merit sources - and it is likely that in the future that he will disclose that information - because, as you may recall, he also stated that he suspected that through time, members were going to be able to figure out who are the merit sources - which may be just a matter of one or two months seeing that some members are giving merits beyond what would have been their maximum possible level of initial distribution plus 1/2 of the merits that they subsequently received... Although there could also be some quirks in that hypothesized information in the likely event that Theymos also does have the power to selectively award sendable merits to members - and so there may be some mystery about whether he would actually employ such a sendable merit distribution to selected non-source members.

[olumyd]

Like I said before. This new system has good in it. People who concern themselves with ranking will 'learn'. They'll study more and gain more knowledge about cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology. This forum must be about increase in intellectual asset and also in crypto.

Most information from this forum happens to be the reliable content others out there depend on. So we need to represent the forum better. Besides, what good does a troll or a spammer do?  Other than lead others astray. I kind of like to stay off projects where there are 'good project' or chatters of 'success'... This is no cheerleading forum.

[PoolMinor]

Like I said before. This new system has good in it. People who concern themselves with ranking will 'learn'. They'll study more and gain more knowledge about cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology. This forum must be about increase in intellectual asset and also in crypto.

Most information from this forum happens to be the reliable content others out there depend on. So we need to represent the forum better. Besides, what good does a troll or a spammer do?  Other than lead others astray. I kind of like to stay off projects where there are 'good project' or chatters of 'success'... This is no cheerleading forum.

Yes as illustrated by the below infographic, merit must be earned by reading and contributing rather than poor displays by members such as myself.






Image size adjusted with help from here:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=help;page=post#bbcref