Merit & new rank requirements

[KingZee]

There are obviously some differences between ranks in terms of received merit distribution, but nothing too extreme that would indicate that the higher ranks have an easy life getting merit. Forget the outlier cases you see around. The norm is another one, when you take into consideration forum wide data.

I love your website, I'm sending you my last sMerit because I spent my other 3 ironically.

One thing about the data you're presenting : It's a local comparison. In other words,

"71,69% newbie TXs out of all newbie TXs are of 1 sMerit each." and so on.. It's only natural that for each specific rank, the number of 1 Merit TXs are the majority out of all the transactions towards that specific rank. What I would like to know is :

Total number of 1 Merit Tx to Newbie merited posts / Total Number of 1 Merit Tx to all merited posts.
Total number of 1 Merit Tx to Member merited posts / Total Number of 1 Merit Tx to all merited posts.
...
and so on varying by Merit and by Ranks.

That way we would be able to see the distribution of all Merit by post, taking into consideration the ranks of the users posting them.



On the other hand, it's funny how people feel so patriotic about spending their merit points.. 50% of Full member outgoing transactions were towards members and full members. Same 40% of all Legendary outgoing transactions were towards Legendary and Hero members.

This would be okay if the flat value of merits being exchanged here was the same, but it's clearly not as the flat value of sMerits of Legendary and Hero members is obviously much higher than that of lower ranks..

[1714929604]

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[cryptovigi]

...


On the other hand, it's funny how people feel so patriotic about spending their merit points.. 50% of Full member outgoing transactions were towards members and full members. Same 40% of all Legendary outgoing transactions were towards Legendary and Hero members.

This would be okay if the flat value of merits being exchanged here was the same, but it's clearly not as the flat value of sMerits of Legendary and Hero members is obviously much higher than that of lower ranks..

I love statistics, because depending on the assumption, you can prove almost everything

You say: "40% of all Legendary outgoing transactions were towards Legendary and Hero members"

I say: Legendary gives almost equal merit amount to Members, Full Members, Senior Members and Hero Members, and they also give almost the same amount of for low ranked users (Newbies, Juniors and Members) - 23,45% as for other Legendary 26,10%

You say: "50% of Full member outgoing transactions were towards members and full members"
I say: Full Members gives the same amount of merits to lower ranked members - Juniors and Members 41,13% as to semi ranked - Full Members and Seniors 41,96%

I can also say that:
Hero Members gives almost equal amount of merits to Legendary, Senior Members, Full Members and Members... What's interesting here: each lower rank gets more merits than higher one...

Junior Members give just the same amount to Newbies - 4,54% as to Legendary - 4,54%....

and so on....

So you showed how only injustice of Merit system I see in the same data that it is not so bad...

Of course as it was said may times it's not perfect... probably it's also not very good... For sure there some abuses, there are guys who give more merits to their friends than to others especially newbies (just like in real life), native English speakers are favored (although this is global forum)...  but for sure it can't be said that merits are held by few guys who don't let anyone into their table...

[KingZee]

~

Are we really going to argue on outliers? I'm not backing any hard truth or absolute claim when I say that 40% of legendary outgoing is towards hero/legendary, etc..

But are you seriously going to deny that the distribution isn't biased? The picture clearly shows that almost for every rank, they're more likely to merit their same rank, rather than a much higher or a much lower rank. That goes for EVERYONE, NOT JUST HEROES AND LEGENDARIES.

But I mentioned in my last post that I still needed to see flat merit value. It makes more sense to see how MANY merit points are being transactionned here. It was there on the table, I just never noticed it:



These are the total number of merits in outgoing transactions from X rank to Y rank. I'm not going to say anything to interpret this table.

[cryptovigi]

..
Are we really going to argue on outliers? I'm not backing any hard truth or absolute claim when I say that 40% of legendary outgoing is towards hero/legendary, etc..
...

I don't argue I was showing that the same data may be interpreated in different ways and both possitive and negative ways can be correct at the same time.....

...
But are you seriously going to deny that the distribution isn't biased? The picture clearly shows that almost for every rank, they're more likely to merit their same rank, rather than a much higher or a much lower rank. That goes for EVERYONE, NOT JUST HEROES AND LEGENDARIES.
....

Looking at this data one very important thing is missed. They are not showing the whole truth (unless @DdmrDdmr correct me). I've checked it on my own example and saw that data about rank aren't stored each time merit is given - they are current.

That means if you see that hero gave 101 merits to Full Member - it's also possible that he gave 1 merit to newbie, 9 merits to Jr. Member and 90 merits to Member and only one merit to Full Member (data doesn't remember about promotions).
For example - I was given 4 merits being Newbie another 6 being Jr. Member but on this table all merit I was given fell into Members group...

If I'm right we see only merits for Newbies who haven't ranked yet (i.e. to less activity) as well as Jr. Members or Members what means that there was much more merits given to the low ranked members than you see on that table...

I don't have all current data but according to my "old set":

you see that more than 104k merits 43% came to users who at january 2018 was Newbie/Jr Member/Member or didn't existed at all... I think it's not so bad...

[DdmrDdmr]

<...>Looking at this data one very important thing is missed. They are not showing the whole truth (unless @DdmrDdmr correct me). I've checked it on my own example and saw that data about rank aren't stored each time merit is given - they are current. <...>

Yes you are right, I stated so on the OP of the Merit Dashboard thread (on a note). Ranks shown are current ranks, not the actual rank at the time of the awarding of every single sMerit (which would be the ideal tracking, but is not feasible from the outside). It is also interesting to play around with the Date Range filter and see how the proportions shift in some segments over time.

<…>One thing about the data you're presenting : It's a local comparison.<…>

Yes,  it is as you say a rank-base view, but it does show a point I wanted to make, and that is that most merit TXs are of either one or two merits, and most posts get merited by either one or two people at most, regardless of the rank. This patterns barely shows differently on the higher ranks than on the lower ranks.

That does have a collateral reading in my opinion: if you look at it from the point of view of what is required for an account to reach the next level, if the majority of posts are merited in a similar quantity regardless of the rank, then the marginal contribution of each merited posts is very low for higher ranks (i.e. 1 sMerit is 10% of that needed for a Jr. Member to get to Member, but 0,2% of what a Hero needs to get to Legendary). Of course, this also depends on the number of posts one gets merited on.

<…> What I would like to know is :
Total number of 1 Merit Tx to Newbie merited posts / Total Number of 1 Merit Tx to all merited posts.
Total number of 1 Merit Tx to Member merited posts / Total Number of 1 Merit Tx to all merited posts.
and so on varying by Merit and by Ranks.

Something like this:

Code:

TXMer. toRank	      nTXs	nUsers	%1MerTXs%Users	AvgTX/User
1	Founder	        98	1	0,12%	0,01%	98
1	Administrator	640	2	0,81%	0,01%	320
1	Global Mod.	192	3	0,24%	0,02%	64
1	Staff	        1079	25	1,36%	0,13%	43,16
1	VIP	         56	4	0,07%	0,02%	14
1	Donator	        351	21	0,44%	0,11%	16,72
1	Legendary	15499	1060	19,59%	5,72%	14,62
1	Hero Member	8304	948	10,50%	5,11%	8,76
1	Sr. Member	11545	1517	14,60%	8,18%	7,61
1	Full Member	13191	2645	16,68%	14,26%	4,99
1	Member	        15523	3873	19,63%	20,88%	4,01
1	Jr. Member	9894	6507	12,51%	35,08%	1,52
1	Newbie	        2588	1862	3,27%	10,04%	1,39
1	Brand new	138	79	0,17%	0,43%	1,75

I’ve only done it here for 1 sMerit TXs, since anything more is too long here and is better suited in any case on a thread of its own. We could go into the details, but I wouldn't like to extend myself further here.

<…> On the other hand, it's funny how people feel so patriotic about spending their merit points <…>

It’s not that easy to interpret. Legendries do give more sMerit to Legendries on the whole, but are ones who enable more lower ranks into the game. Heroes award more evenly amongst ranks down to Members, and even award less to their own rank. Sr. Members are rather even amongst three rank levels, but on aggregate have awarded similar amounts to Legendries, Heroes and Jr. Members. Members seem more self-centred on their rank, and then favour the nearest ranks on equal parts. Jr. Members favor preferently their own rank, and the one above, way above higher ranks.

There are likely many factors involved, amongst which are psychological featured ones, that influence certain ranks being more prone to merit someone from the neighbouring ranks on a similar roadmap, or whatnot.

What I do find is that there is normally a large difference in the posting style of higher ranks versus lower ranks. This is obviously not an absolute truth, and there are plenty of exceptions on either end, but as personal perception, it makes it clear for me to a large extent why higher ranks get more merited than lower ranks.

[MagicSmoker]

...
But are you seriously going to deny that the distribution isn't biased? The picture clearly shows that almost for every rank, they're more likely to merit their same rank, rather than a much higher or a much lower rank. That goes for EVERYONE, NOT JUST HEROES AND LEGENDARIES.
to interpret this table.
...

You've been droning on about how unfair the merit system is for quite awhile now. Why do you care so much, anyway if legendaries mainly give out merit to other legendaries, etc.? In fact, why do you care about a system that has absolutely no relevance in the real world. It's not like the barista at Starbucks is going to give you a discount on your double soy-boy latte for saying you've earned x number of merits on BCT, after all.

[Speculatoross]

It's not like the barista at Starbucks is going to give you a discount on your double soy-boy latte for saying you've earned x number of merits on BCT, after all.

WHAAAT?

Man, i don't do bounties or sig campaign, you think i've been sitting here just trying to help the community?
Why the hell i spent that much time to earn 170+ useless merit?
I want pretend my double soy latte!

Bad bad Theymos, you lied!

[KingZee]

You've been droning on about how unfair the merit system is for quite awhile now. Why do you care so much, anyway if legendaries mainly give out merit to other legendaries, etc.? In fact, why do you care about a system that has absolutely no relevance in the real world.

Merit has relevance in the real world when it's an extra number you have to grind to qualify for making more money from sig campaigns.

But you're right, I'm done, I expressed my frustration for long enough and I think the arguments and data that everyone came up with, while it isn't complete or conclusive, definitely gives us a general idea that this system benefits the higher ranked users because they just have a large supply to begin with. Also the fact that it's laid out here for everyone to see and further analyze is really good enough for me.

But hey, I have no power to change any of it, but I always try to let others know my opinion if I can stand for it.

It's not like the barista at Starbucks is going to give you a discount on your double soy-boy latte for saying you've earned x number of merits on BCT, after all.

WHAAAT?

Man, i don't do bounties or sig campaign, you think i've been sitting here just trying to help the community?
Why the hell i spent that much time to earn 170+ useless merit?
I want pretend my double soy latte!

Bad bad Theymos, you lied!

Funny.

[guybrushthreepwood]

I think the admins should consider making everyone start on an equal playing field with zero merits and then everybody has to earn them from scratch. It's true that many people probably haven't earned their rank and got lucky just by signing up at the right time but then should Newbies be on the same starting point as someone who has been here for years and made a big contribution? Should theymos -- for example -- have to earn his merits the same way a Newbie will and we discount all his past contributions that he's made previously? I think the "free" merit that was given out was some sort of compromise to take past posts into account even if that means some spammers got through the system. I think it's likely a catch 22 situation and a case of you're damned if you do and damned if you don't because if everyone started on zero merits then all the old timers would complain, but if you give certain ranks merits for free then all the Newbies would complaining that it's not fair. Life isn't fair, but we have to play with the hands -- and merit -- we are dealt.

~

Are we really going to argue on outliers? I'm not backing any hard truth or absolute claim when I say that 40% of legendary outgoing is towards hero/legendary, etc..

But are you seriously going to deny that the distribution isn't biased? The picture clearly shows that almost for every rank, they're more likely to merit their same rank, rather than a much higher or a much lower rank. That goes for EVERYONE, NOT JUST HEROES AND LEGENDARIES.

But you can look at this two ways. On a whole higher ranks are more likely to make better posts, so therefor are more likely to get merited. The quality of posts that come from new users are -- generally speaking -- very low and there's plenty of them so it's obvious higher ranks are going to get more merit, but that doesn't mean new users don't get any. There have been some new users who signed up and got a lot of merit very quickly because they made excellent posts that stood out. The problem is that most new users don't and that's why they're not going to get any -- or much -- merit. I can see why users are annoyed or feel hard done by the merit system but there's probably not much anyone can do other than play with the hand they have been dealt.

[d5000]

@KingZee, I share some of your criticism, but the problem is that we haven't found a system better than the current Merit points. The problem is that the forum rank must be determined by an indicator no user can obtain in an automated way. Activity is too easy to obtain by spamming and alt-account-farming.

If you find the Philosopher's Stone - a real alternative that shares the positive "anti-spam" effect of the "scarce" Merit points and avoids the negative ones - crippled forum functionality for newbies and a long way to obtain better ranks - I think the community or the mods would consider discussing it.

I have also posted some ideas to make the system a bit less "discriminating" for "legit" newbies (those really interested in cryptocurrency), mainly the idea of a probation period for Newbies (to give them a signature from the start but removing it if a post from them was reported and legitimately deleted), and also to allow fractions of merits to be awarded (so lower ranked members can also say "thanks" more often). Unfortunatenly, they weren't really well received.

As a side note: I am more convinced every day that we don't really need the "Legendary" category of users. First, because 1000 merits are very difficult to obtain, and the distance between "Hero" and "Legendary" is extreme (500 merit points - most likely 2-3 years of good posting). But also because it's a title given with influence of a random number (activity between 750 and 1250 or so 775 and 1030).

We can keep it as a "honourific" title. But it shouldn't be necessary to be a Legendary to get full forum functionality (full signature, for example) - a Hero should already get everything.

[KingZee]

~

Look, we all have our reason for coming to this forum. If I take myself as an example -as mentioned by a mod a few posts ago- I spent months never browsing this forum, reason being, I would only come here for business. If user stats were enabled I'd probably bet most of my posts were on the Marketplace.

Judging by the amount of posts on it, I bet a lot of users do the same. There might be users that come to this forum for the sake of finding a new ICO/Altcoin investment, some just want to gamble, others try to seek information on the development side of bitcoin, maybe someone wants to know information about mining, or the typical "how get bitcoin" newbie. The people who genuinely come here for Bitcoin/Off-Topic are either very very lonely, or mental.

But -unfortunately apparently-, if our reasons to make genuine posts are different, all of that changes once we get a signature under our names. Now we have a constraint to post more often, and now we have to "fake" interest.

"Fake" is really a loose word here, let's just call it "secondary" interest. See, I would very much like to spend most of my time productively either doing business on btctalk, or spending it doing other things of whatever my life needs. But if I am going to get paid posting,- and I did participate in sig campaigns before-, I start skimming for posts, find one where I feel like I can get invested into, and make a post. This post isn't spammy or a bad kind of "fake", it's just that because I'm paid to post, browsing the forum is now considered "being productive" for me.

Merit does exactly the same thing, except that :
1. I'm not paid in money.
2. I'm not even guaranteed to be paid at all.

So, in order to grind this merit, I have to go out of my way again, try to contribute to the forum for god knows how long, for the miniscule chance of a hero/legendary noticing me and blessing me with his Oh so precious merits. See this, isn't worth it for me. It isn't worth it for anybody, especially not for people who CAN already make interesting posts like me. I'm even better than your average user because I almost never write "+1" confirmation posts, loop arguments that recycle past posts, laa dee daa whatever most sig-registered users do nowadays. So, I no longer feel like I'm "productive" if I'm posting for the sake of unguaranteed merits.

Here's a solution I proposed a few posts ago :

Or maybe the merit system but in reverse, instead of people being able to +1 people, how about them being able to -1. No one might care about meriting a well-written post, but that doesn't matter because it also prohibits people from using merit as a bargain chip. On the other hand, if a user posts some extremely low quality post, make other users punish him.

Really? How is this any different? This is actually a far worse system and I don't think you've actually thought it through. If we would  have implemented this system you'd be here complaining about that right now as would thousands of other angry shitposters who had been neg-bombed into oblivion and have negative chance of being able to earn. How would they even get that back to positive or neutral without some sort of +1?

Why are negatives so important? Because they give weight to neutral points. Just like trust.

If a user has positive merit : This guy knows how to get himself sucked by other users.

If a user has negative merit : This user writes shitposts and spam.

But 0 merit? This user just doesn't post a lot.

In fact, if you removed the positive merit and only kept the negatives, it would be a much more accurate indication of spammers, because as it is right now, I'M ALSO considered a person that spams, just like everyone else with default merit.

There are definitely other solutions to work around this, as long as you think about improving the main issue :

Merit is forcing people to post just like sig campaigns are.

I might not be the typical user the mods are looking for because I'm just a casual poster, but you'd be lying if you didn't believe the majority of the forum is like me. We all have specific interests in bitcoin, and besides the mods whose job is to browse the forum, I'm sure everyone would like to spend their time productively, or posting on topics they are genuine about. Merit just makes a biased system where users try to find the best places to "fake" interest into other users.

[d5000]

Why are negatives so important? Because they give weight to neutral points. Just like trust.

If a user has positive merit : This guy knows how to get himself sucked by other users.

If a user has negative merit : This user writes shitposts and spam.

The problem is that a negative merit can also mean: "This user writes about topics where people were disagreeing with him." Did you read the long discussions about Segwit last year? Tons of negative merits would have been distributed there.

And there is a almost unsolvabe problem with this approach: How do you "earn" the right to give negative merits? If they were distributed by activity or even you could merit negatively as often as you wanted, you could simply farm accounts to distribute negative merits for people you don't like. The only possible way I can imagine to give negative merits some sense would be if people would have to earn "positive" merits to get the right to distribute "negative" ones.

No, negative merits don't solve anything but only create new problems. And there are already two ways to deal with spam posts (without needing admin privileges):
- Report them
- in the case of a recurring offender: Distribute negative trust.

In fact, if you removed the positive merit and only kept the negatives, it would be a much more accurate indication of spammers, because as it is right now, I'M ALSO considered a person that spams, just like everyone else with default merit.

Incorrect. You're not "considered a person that spams". If you had 0 self-earned merits (in your case, you have some self-earned points already) then you simply are considered a person that "didn't contribute a merit-worthy post". There is a wide area between "spam" and a "merit-worthy post".

There are definitely other solutions to work around this, as long as you think about improving the main issue :

Merit is forcing people to post just like sig campaigns are.

Please name some solutions you have in mind. It's really hard to figure out a system that does justice to all.

The "issue" you point out, in my opinion, is not a problem because you don't need Merits if you don't need to post for signature campaigns. You can use the forum normally (even the Marketplace) without a single merit point. And the proposal I first linked to (probation period for newbies) would solve the problem you point out entirely - because in this case, you got the signature at the start, and you only get removed it if you write spam posts.

[KingZee]

I was being polite and I gave you my personal stance on the problem because you mentionned me. I don't want to keep arguing about this mainly because theymos is probably a brick wall when it comes to reverting changes, and because I've talked about this for way too long.

Both you and hilariousetc argue that a negative solution is going to be bad because people will abuse it, why don't they already abuse the existing trust system? Only people painted red are ones that "deserve" to.

But I'm going to just completely scrap off that system for the sake of coming up with something new.

First, merit doesn't solve the spam problem. Newbies and juniors still spam and don't get punished for it. Merit just "highlights" a few users that made supposedly "interesting" posts. But it fails because it's an extremely biased stat. People that post in scenarios where there is a lot of opinions and try to pick sides with sMerit owners, or people that give out money, have forum status, etc... and lots and lots of factors make Merit a much easier currency to grind by a minority as opposed to the rest of the community.

So how about another idea, decentralize it. (ha-ha) Make everyone able to give out merit, just not by large quantities, and only by peer confirmation.

Someone posts a good post? If 5 different users give it a +, the user gets rewarded by a point. But wait, what if people make junior armies to spam +?

Let's see, let's make it weighted. For a user to get a point out of a useful post, he's need + from 3 different user ranks, and 5 total +. Everyone has the ability to give out +s, but they all have an equal amount of currency. Rank doesn't matter, each user can only + 5 posts per month. These are just numbers I'm pulling out of my ass. But I hope you see the point.

It's really not hard to try and come up with a less biased system if you spent a long enough time thinking about it. But like I said, I'm burnt out of this topic and feel like I'm wasting my time contributing. You can reply to let me know your opinion, but I'm afraid this is going to be my last post, cheers.

[d5000]

You won't believe it but I like your idea with the "limited merits per month" a bit (let's call them simply merits instead of "+'s") and the requirement to be merited by users of different ranks.

We probably have to fine-tune it a bit to avoid a couple of problems. For example, if a spammer only spams long enough (and merits himself's alt accounts) then eventually he will be able to merit himself at will. But this may be not a problem if the other users and the forum staff are wary of these abuses.

Another problem could be high-ranked members meriting spammers for payment. However, I can imagine this problem is also solvable, as this behaviour could be simply forbidden by forum rule and the user banned.

A fine idea would be a tool that shows stats about the "merit network" of every user - basically the same thing Google does to avoid SEO link spam abuse. If such a tool is too resource-heavy. then it's probably enough if only staff has access to the full tool, but other users should at least be given a simple stat for every user so they can help to find abusers

And I think 5 per month is too few. It should be at least 100 per month, so you could use it basically like the "Facebook like button". (Edit: To avoid abuse of high merit quantities, the number of merits an user can give to a single post should be limite to 1). The requirement for ranks would be pretty high, obviously.

[JayJuanGee]

I think the admins should consider making everyone start on an equal playing field with zero merits and then everybody has to earn them from scratch. It's true that many people probably haven't earned their rank and got lucky just by signing up at the right time but then should Newbies be on the same starting point as someone who has been here for years and made a big contribution? Should theymos -- for example -- have to earn his merits the same way a Newbie will and we discount all his past contributions that he's made previously? I think the "free" merit that was given out was some sort of compromise to take past posts into account even if that means some spammers got through the system. I think it's likely a catch 22 situation and a case of you're damned if you do and damned if you don't because if everyone started on zero merits then all the old timers would complain, but if you give certain ranks merits for free then all the Newbies would complaining that it's not fair. Life isn't fair, but we have to play with the hands -- and merit -- we are dealt.

This concept that you describe is a common practice of a grandfather clausing - which like you mentioned is a sort of compromise.  Sometimes, a grandfather clause will continue to allow older members to stay under the old system; however, in this case, the grandfather clausing merely was a way of distributing merit in order to approximate rank that was already earned - even though hence forth everyone will earn merits (and/or rank up) based on the new system.   Surely, no compromise is going to be completely perfect, and there remains some discretion about how it is implemented and thereafter tweaked - which tweaking seems to have already taken place a few times since the initial implementation.

~

Are we really going to argue on outliers? I'm not backing any hard truth or absolute claim when I say that 40% of legendary outgoing is towards hero/legendary, etc..

But are you seriously going to deny that the distribution isn't biased? The picture clearly shows that almost for every rank, they're more likely to merit their same rank, rather than a much higher or a much lower rank. That goes for EVERYONE, NOT JUST HEROES AND LEGENDARIES.

But you can look at this two ways. On a whole higher ranks are more likely to make better posts, so therefor are more likely to get merited. The quality of posts that come from new users are -- generally speaking -- very low and there's plenty of them so it's obvious higher ranks are going to get more merit, but that doesn't mean new users don't get any. There have been some new users who signed up and got a lot of merit very quickly because they made excellent posts that stood out. The problem is that most new users don't and that's why they're not going to get any -- or much -- merit. I can see why users are annoyed or feel hard done by the merit system but there's probably not much anyone can do other than play with the hand they have been dealt.

I know that there is a bit of harping on this point regarding built in biasness towards higher ranked individuals, and even though some of these matters can be curious regarding whether there is some kind of egregiousness going on - but in the end, some of the fussing about boils down to pettiness and in that regard, there seems to be an attempt by some merit whiners to assert that the distribution of merits needs to be based on objective criteria - which you are nearly never going to get when you add human subjective components and human discretion.  Part of the movement away from the old ranking up system to this new system was intentionally meant to add more human element (and therefore subjectivism) regarding the ranking up of members - or even some levels of credibility that might be given to individual users (even those that have already ranked up) based on the number of merits that they earn over time.

Of course, there can be some learning that comes from criticisms about an existing system, yet sometimes also, the whining just devolves into a high level of complaining about nothing in order to attempt to make the perfect the enemy of the good.  Overall there remains a lot of benefits in the new merit system, and there remain decent and legitimate ways to earn merits within this new system in the event that any member has desires to rank up - yet even not ranking up does not prejudice them in the ability to participate in the forum in a variety of ways, at least in the information sharing ways - even if less rank might remove some abilities to earn money from forum participation (which I guess could be one of the motivations that a member might later adopt, even if that was not an initial motivation to get involved in this forum).

[JayJuanGee]

@KingZee, I share some of your criticism, but the problem is that we haven't found a system better than the current Merit points. The problem is that the forum rank must be determined by an indicator no user can obtain in an automated way. Activity is too easy to obtain by spamming and alt-account-farming.

If you find the Philosopher's Stone - a real alternative that shares the positive "anti-spam" effect of the "scarce" Merit points and avoids the negative ones - crippled forum functionality for newbies and a long way to obtain better ranks - I think the community or the mods would consider discussing it.

I have also posted some ideas to make the system a bit less "discriminating" for "legit" newbies (those really interested in cryptocurrency), mainly the idea of a probation period for Newbies (to give them a signature from the start but removing it if a post from them was reported and legitimately deleted), and also to allow fractions of merits to be awarded (so lower ranked members can also say "thanks" more often). Unfortunatenly, they weren't really well received.

As a side note: I am more convinced every day that we don't really need the "Legendary" category of users. First, because 1000 merits are very difficult to obtain, and the distance between "Hero" and "Legendary" is extreme (500 merit points - most likely 2-3 years of good posting). But also because it's a title given with influence of a random number (activity between 750 and 1250 or so 775 and 1030).

We can keep it as a "honourific" title. But it shouldn't be necessary to be a Legendary to get full forum functionality (full signature, for example) - a Hero should already get everything.

I agree with everything that you say - except perhaps the last part since really I doubt that a discontinuation of the ability to earn legendary rank would solve any meaningful problems, without creating new ones (for members who would not be able to rank up to legendary). 

On the other hand, I have read some forum discussion about the possibility of adding at least one rank above legendary, and even though that might not be necessary either, such addition of more rank(s) would be a reasonable exercise of discretion for theymos (as owner) to determine .. and I doubt that such additional rank creation would create any meaningful hit to forum morale, and it could even cause some additional motivations to rank up further...maybe it would be based on 2000 merits and activity level or some higher level?

[SamReomo]

I just love the merit system and new ranks because it gives equal opportunity to every member of the forum to show their skills  by posting high quality posts. Before this system there wasn't any real measurement to determine the high quality posters and low quality posters because everyone was almost able to achieve higher ranks from posting, and no matter if the posts were of good quality or not.  But now only those will be able to climb the ladder of higher ranks who give their time to research, so they could create high quality posts that might help many new comers as well as inform the reputed users of the forum.

Only activity to raise higher levels was somewhat fair, but unfortunately it was vulnerable as many corrupt users who had no skills other than account creation were able to create accounts so they could sell them to new users who had money. That is indirectly a huge treat for the active and hard working users of the forum because those newbies were able to have Sr, Hero, and other rank account just by feeding those account sellers some cash. The merit system has solved that vulnerability with its entry.

But, I am still somewhat confused about the ones who are having many alts, they might try to misuse the merit system to gain higher ranks, but that confusion is still not that huge because I am very sure that misusing of this system will be very hard for those people because getting higher s-merits will requite hard work for their alt accounts, so they will have to post quality materials to get those s-merits which is probably impossible for them.

[Direwolve735]

I just love the merit system and new ranks because it gives equal opportunity to every member of the forum to show their skills  by posting high quality posts.

I believe that the merit system not only creates equal conditions for writing highly qualified posts, but also radically changes the established hierarchy on the forum. Now it’s not enough to be a high rank user to enjoy the respect of other participants. Personally, I look at the number of merit first of all. And I think many others also evaluate this indicator. Now the rank itself doesn`t mean anything: if it`s not confirmed by merits, then trust in such a user immediately falls and his account begins to cause suspicion. We see a huge number of hero and legendary members who aren`t able to earn at least 1 merit, but on the other hand we see users of lower ranks who have proven that they really benefit the bitcointalk forum. A new elite is being formed at the forum, the foundation of which is not activity and rank, but merit-recognition from other members of the bitcointalk community.

[hilariousetc]

So explain to me how does the merit system prevent heroes and legendaries from posting equally low effort posts if they start with more points, have more to distribute to each other, and vice versa, how does it encourage lower ranks to merit posts that deserve to be merited, if they don't have many sMerits nor Merits themselves?

It doesn't. It prevents new users from becoming them just by shitposting, I wouldn't be against everyone starting from zero merit either, but then you would still have all the shitposters crying about that. "y u take awai mah merit! Its nut fare!". We really can't win. Without merit the forum is a shitshow, but with it people complain that they can't get paid for shitposting.

Lol? I don't even have a sig campaign under me.

Where did I say you did, but you're actively trying to join the highest paid one repeatedly.

I already know I'm never getting merited because the top people who have the points only merit the people they care about.

You've already been merited. I'd say you'd actually have little problem in rising through the ranks, but this is something you seem to be unwilling to do. You seem to want it all now, and that's not how this works.

So what are you even talking about? I am writing these long-ass posts out of pure disgust of the merit system.

Well this would be fair enough if you don't ever join a signature campaign, but this is exactly what you're trying to do, so you have motivation for writing "long-ass posts". In fact, you have little to no chance of getting on the ChipMixer campaign without a history of great posts. If only every campaign was run like them there wouldn't be an issue with spam.

And YES, I don't want to post 60 posts a week to make 20$/week. That's the whole POINT I'm arguing for. It's MERIT that denied me access to higher paying sigs. This last paragraph you wrote is just pure garbage..

This is a bitcoin forum to discuss bitcoin. If you don't want to talk about bitcoin without payment then you're probably on the wrong board and you could be better spent earning money elsewhere. You are 100% only here to earn and that is exactly why the merit system was introduced to stop people just signing up in droves to bleed the system. If you want to earn then bide your time, get the merits and try join a signature campaign. You've already got enough merits to join most campaigns so I don't really know what you're moaning for.

Regardless if your observation is true or not, merit isn't even a problem for those newbie accounts. It BECOMES a problem for legit newbies who WANT to commit to the forums to make money later, because it's now HARDER for them to breach the line to become relevant.

The fact that they're newbies already fucks them over because no one is going to merit them, and that's it, stuck in a deadlock, not just as newbies, but again and again until they reach Hero level.

What exactly are "legit newbies". This is a bitcoin discussion forum and "legit newbies" can post about bitcoin here as intended. The fact that you can get paid from posting here is secondary, but I don't believe people should be able to come here and get paid for posting straight away. The fact that we require one merit to be able to do so is nothing and should be much, much more, but if you want to earn more money here then you now need to put in the time and earn the merit and ranks. With the merit system ranks actually mean something now and are something people could be proud of once they achieve.

Here's a solution I proposed a few posts ago :

Or maybe the merit system but in reverse, instead of people being able to +1 people, how about them being able to -1. No one might care about meriting a well-written post, but that doesn't matter because it also prohibits people from using merit as a bargain chip. On the other hand, if a user posts some extremely low quality post, make other users punish him.

Really? How is this any different? This is actually a far worse system and I don't think you've actually thought it through. If we would  have implemented this system you'd be here complaining about that right now as would thousands of other angry shitposters who had been neg-bombed into oblivion and have negative chance of being able to earn. How would they even get that back to positive or neutral without some sort of +1?

Why are negatives so important? Because they give weight to neutral points. Just like trust.

If a user has positive merit : This guy knows how to get himself sucked by other users.

If a user has negative merit : This user writes shitposts and spam.

This wouldn't work and isn't a solution to anything and would be far worse than the merit system. I don't get why you are ok with giving people negative points but positive merit is a no-no. How would it even work? Can anyone give negative points? What happens if someone who doesn't like you and gives you negative points for every post you make? You would never be able to join a campaign. How is that better than making decent posts and hoping someone merits you? You're so blindsided by your dislike of the merit system you'll propose something that would be infinitely worse and more abused just because.

So how about another idea, decentralize it. (ha-ha) Make everyone able to give out merit, just not by large quantities, and only by peer confirmation.

Someone posts a good post? If 5 different users give it a +, the user gets rewarded by a point. But wait, what if people make junior armies to spam +?

Let's see, let's make it weighted. For a user to get a point out of a useful post, he's need + from 3 different user ranks, and 5 total +. Everyone has the ability to give out +s, but they all have an equal amount of currency. Rank doesn't matter, each user can only + 5 posts per month. These are just numbers I'm pulling out of my ass. But I hope you see the point.

It's really not hard to try and come up with a less biased system if you spent a long enough time thinking about it. But like I said, I'm burnt out of this topic and feel like I'm wasting my time contributing. You can reply to let me know your opinion, but I'm afraid this is going to be my last post, cheers.

You're just needlessly complicating something that is actually very simple and desperately trying to come up with alternative systems which you haven't really thought through and which would in fact be much more worse. You're complaining that merit is hard to get, but now you're suggesting people can only get merit if five others agree. So now it's five times harder to get merits.

[S_Therapist]

Or maybe the merit system but in reverse, instead of people being able to +1 people, how about them being able to -1.

Well, I want to share a story with you.
I had joined a forum named icoforums.net which was paying 1 ETH for 100 posts. It was really lucrative. Of course, I had joined with the intention to earn. But, I tried to contribute to the forum. I had posted some decent posts. Apart from that, I started to report the abusers and copy/paste so that the forum gets cleaned. I was able to remove the spams through reporting but in return what I got from users who were spamming?
There was an option called upvote/downvote. To be honest, I was one of the best users of that forum but you know what, my reputation was -17, because there were some users who had fake accounts and they were only downvoted all of my posts.
That's what will be happened here too. Trust, merits are not moderated. If there is something like -1, you can easily destroy one's reputation. And that's why there is DT member for trust feedback. Otherwise, I may create 100 of accounts and paint anyone I wish which would be visible to everyone.