Possible improvement for the merit system: make it more like PageRank?

[gnipnuhz]

I think the current debates ultimately boils down to one thing: managing a growing and vibrant community like BTT is hard. There are now more economic incentives to level up for signature campaigns and the system allowed it to be gamed by posting shit-posts. To close this loophole the merit system was introduced, which may or may not work; the forum is waiting to see what happens next.

From my point of view, the challenge is to effectively promoting quality content / members without discouraging the "spirit of freedom". We have a good lesson to learn from the early internet which underwent the exactly phase. There were a lot of garbage content online and it was hard to find useful things. The problem was later well solved by Google's PageRank algorithm -- pretty much a decentralized "merit-system". The more merit a webpage has, the more merit it adds to those webpages it links to.

What's different between PageRank and the current merit system is that PageRank is decentralized while the current merit system is centralized. PageRank is decentralized in that there are no webpage that is considered "source of merit". Every webpage can contribute merits to its downstream links no matter how little merit it can contribute. I think this is what people are complains about. Right now if 10000 newbie members likes a post, the poster won't get merit. The poster only get merit if a senior member likes it. This might be an exaggerated example but it reveals where the system might be improved.

A natural thought is to implement something like a like or +1 system where a like from A to B's post is considered a link from A to B; a PageRank algorithm can then be ran to figure out everyone's merit. However, even if this is the case, it'd take a long time for the forum to accumulate likes to obtain meaningful results. But still I think this is the right direction and I'd love to have a like button to click when I like a post. Over time, the forum might got enough likes data to evaluate this option.

With that said, there is difference between webpage score and BTT merit/levels -- webpage score fluctuates while BTT merit/levels monotonically increase. So when we ran the PageRank algorithm, we can lower cap everyone's merit with their existing merits. I think this is still an improvement, because I only needs to focus on likes while the system figures out the merit outcome for me. I also think it is good to give all newbies a non-zero merit to start with.

Last but not least, even with PageRank there are SEO algorithms that can game the system. But that still would be much harder comparing to having no merit control at all.

Thoughts?

[Kingigolo]

Your suggestion is one that is noteworthy, the process of receiving merit should be as decentralised as possible, the introduction of merits is a welcome development though, it'll definitely stop many from posting irrelevant things just to increase their rank.

[Emilyearl]

Your suggestions are good but it still boils down to someone having to like a post to prove it's relevance. I will say the moderators should consider censoring posts, delete the meaningless posts and only allow meaningful posts. And if an account is known for continuous shitposting, such account should be flagged and if the owner continues, the account should be banned. I think by this, the forum might be better.