The merit system, as laudable as its purpose is, is flawed.

[MagicSmoker]

I may be deluded - entirely possible from all the magic smoke* I've inhaled - but I think I am the proverbial poster child for this: nearly 600 posts - most of which took considerable time and/or effort to create and are informative, rather than interrogative - and just 9 merit received.

It's problematic because posts pre-merit implementation will get less (or no) attention from people who are prospective sMerit users. In that regard, you will only see the most notorious old posts being merited (i.e. thread-starters of large threads, old quotes from notable members, etc.)It's not just you. Think of the merit system as kind of like rewarding active constructive posters. Sort of in the same vein as the activity system but requiring constructive posts.

IIRC theymos has a much lower threshold for quality posts. Something along the lines of, good posts are 1-3 merits, excellent ones are 10/20+. The problem with this idea is the huge limitation of sMerit income, as there may be plenty of these 'good posts'. Personally, I believe that using merit in this way is unsustainable. I'm quite frugal with my use of it but I do sprinkle some around when I find nice replies.

Right - it's totally understandable that posts made before the merit system was implemented are unlikely to receive merit now, but I've read several very good posts today that were technical in nature, rather than just opinions I agreed with, and not a one of them was merited. I think DarkStar_ identified the culprit - a lack of merit sources in that dank basement of a subforum that I tend to frequent: altcoins\mining. 

Perhaps a post from a mod in that subforum explaining about the new merit system and how/why to use it would correct that?

I should note that I am not anti-merit, per se - I think it will actually reduce shitposting and, hopefully, curb signature campaign abuse (I have nothing against those, either, as long as the person hosting the sig can actually explain what it's about) - I just don't want to see this forum turn into another bodybuilding.com...

[freedomno1]

The growth and adoption of blockchain technologies have exceeded the forums moderation capacity at some point like in other fields the most common one being exchanges where to many people were joining and got stuck in a backlog. With too much information it became increasingly hard to filter and moderate quality content especially in areas that have seen exponential growth such as Altcoins.

There are a lot of real viable projects that have the potential to scale and are worth vesting or looking into and good low level members who explain the utility of their systems in ICO threads for example. That said because there are so many opportunities I completely agree it is incredibly difficult to keep up to date on every topic and board and Bitcointalk was originally designed to mainly focus on Bitcoin.

Over time the natural extension and the central focal point of the forum has made it so that the focus steadily but surely has moved to blockchain
and to act as a role of navigators and investigators who collaborate and work together in a moving ecosystem to filter content.

Centralizing a reward system does make it much more difficult for individual users to grow if the network of users who can moderate and nurture quality content creators is too small as the pool is limited to the capacity of any individuals empowered in the organization, and among those that can curate they may be selectively focused as a group to particular sub-sections of the forum and thread topics leaving a large niche of content unseen or viewed by rewarding eyes.

In the long run an agglomeration of posts in meta regarding good content does seem inevitable unless an organic growth mechanism is enforced and created, limiting the utility of Smeta will just further highlight and create issues.

The merit system is new depending on how these issued are addressed it can become an organic system that fuels and fixes itself or a rigid enforced system it all depends on who is left with the keys to moderate it and the favoritism or generalization towards certain individuals in the system.

In regards to old quality posts in essence the merit system did acknowledge that however by sprinkling starting merit based on ranking.
I agree though there are a lot of old users who delete their posts and their ranking did not represent their contribution at the time of implementation although we will be able to measure if the system works over time based on activity merits rewarded and content generated.

From what I have seen so far though not that many merits seem to be given out in a day when you consider how many users there are in activity.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=merit;stats=recent

Sorting by recent posts just today there are roughly 50 posts per minute with 1 merit given out every minute with large gaps of 10 minutes where no one is merited and periods where a lot of merit are rewarded in a minute. Kind of like mining ha-ha.
Whether that is a good reward to posting ratio or if 98% of user responses are considered low value posts well that remains to be seen in aggregate.