Merit Stat from theymos data

[zentdex]

I create these charts based on the post of theymos seeking for further analysis of data.

Here you go: https://bitcointalk.org/merit.txt.xz

Similar to trust.txt.xz, it'll be updated weekly. It will show only the last 120 days of data; someone else should archive the old ones if you want them.

I am especially interested in analyses of this data which could point to sub-communities where the initial sMerit is exhausted, and new sources are necessary, and people who might be good merit sources.

Edit: Note that for a little while I had user_to and user_from as names, but I decided to change it to IDs.

I do hope that these charts will give further information about the Merit System. Unlike before, I try to provide my analysis based on the following chart; It will great if intelligent forum members out there could further explain these charts and give review if ever I missed something.
Before anything else, the rank is based on February 27 rankings.

The first chart is all about sMerit send by a group of users from January 24 to March 1; it clearly shows that more people are excited to use their sMerit two days after its implementation. Legendary top at sending Merits this is due to the fact that they have more sMerit than the lower ranks. But there are days (8 days) which Hero Members gave most Merits than Legendary, this is synonymous with Full Member and Sr. Member; which there are 16 days Full Member sent most of sMerit than Sr. Member.

But as time goes by, these sMerits have been exhausted, or people gradually slow down in giving sMerits. Let’s take for example the Legendary members who give a total of 3,131 sMerits on Jan 25 down to a total of 233 on March 1 which is 97% decrease. Below is the table of sMerit sent decrease per rank:

It is notable that Hero Member decreases their rate of giving sMerit at almost 98%, while on the other hand Jr. Members only decline by nearly 94%. Maybe because of Jr. Members are not given sMerit to share with others. The results seem disturbing that is why I created this second graph which shows the Moving Average of sMerit since its inception.

The graph shows that the Average sMerit gradually decreases day by day. The highest moving average (6,796) peaked at Jan 25 while the lowest (2,394) is marked on March 1. From Jan 30 to Feb 13 the average decline between five to three percent (5-3%) per day. Moreover, on Feb 14 to March 1, the average decline per day shift between two or one percent (2-1%). These indicate that sending sMerit is pretty much stable enough or there are lacking sMerit to send. If the latter is right and the decrease remains at 2%, the theoretical moving average 1 sMerit per day will be reach on March 2, 2019.



After seeing the continuous decline, I go back to the data and check what could be the cause and possible solution to negate the phenomenon. Thus, I chart all the senders, and these is what I see.

The chart shows that most of the sMerit sent came from the Legendary, and the least came from the Administrator. If you are thinking that the Administrator is not sending enough, you should probably ask the question, how many Administrator are there? Thus, I counted the unique account for each rank or position and ended up this table below:

The table shows that the Administrators are working hard to send sMerit to the forum members. They are the most generous sMerit givers followed by the Staffs. However, I have found that people in a Member rank send sMerit less than for those who are in Jr. and Newbie rank. This could indicate that they are saving their sMerits. And I just though that, I am one of them. Lol. And by the way, just round up those average to represent actual sMerit.

 
The next question that runs in my mind is the time most of the sMerit were given.

The chart shows that most of the sMerits are given during 8 AM up to 12 PM forum time. It is 16 hours long of sMerit giving, which peaked during 3 PM and plunge during 4 AM. Do this mean forum member from Western give most of the credits compare to Southern? I think more demographic info of users could draw a conclusion in this matter.

I also tried to figure out which day of a week got the most number of sMerit

The chart shows that most of the sMerit are sent during Thursday and Friday; This increase is probably the effect of the two days sMerit sending frenzy (Jan 25 & Jan 26).

I hope this post helps, comments and suggestion are very more welcome.

[1713991817]

1713991817

[1713991817]

1713991817

[1713991817]

1713991817

[1713991817]

1713991817

[1713991817]

1713991817

[coin5haker]

Can say it about right, as I sent 2 merits being Member  But seriously, it is a great job, hopefully, it won't be left unnoticed by the community. I don't have merits left, unfortunately. But I don't like the trend, does it mean people getting short of sMerits? Or trying to give less?
I would like to see the spread of merits among the users. As in the real life, must be a few users get most the merits, like 80/20 rule. Or you could think GTFO and collect your own data 

[CodyAlfaridzi]

Great review!

The chart shows that most of the sMerit sent came from the Legendary, and the least came from the Administrator. If you are thinking that the Administrator is not sending enough, you should probably ask the question, how many Administrator are there? Thus, I counted the unique account for each rank or position and ended up this table below:

The table shows that the Administrators are working hard to send sMerit to the forum members. They are the most generous sMerit givers followed by the Staffs. However, I have found that people in a Member rank send sMerit less than for those who are in Jr. and Newbie rank. This could indicate that they are saving their sMerits. And I just though that, I am one of them. Lol. And by the way, just round up those average to represent actual sMerit.

How could there be 64 unique staff accounts, 15 global mods, and 3 admin? I think the numbers are a bit off. There are only about 30 staffs, 4 global mods, and 2 admins (well it's 3 if you count theymos_away).

[Saint-loup]

We don't know in which sections are given the most smerits?

[addeqt]

I hope this post helps, comments and suggestion are very more welcome.

Great info. so this means newbie and jr. send more merits than members.
I am just wondering if those are send merits who among received those merits.

[Coffee_Lover]

But as time goes by, these sMerits have been exhausted, or people gradually slow down in giving sMerits. Let’s take for example the Legendary members who give a total of 3,131 sMerits on Jan 25 down to a total of 233 on March 1 which is 97% decrease. Below is the table of sMerit sent decrease per rank:

It is notable that Hero Member decreases their rate of giving sMerit at almost 98%, while on the other hand Jr. Members only decline by nearly 94%. Maybe because of Jr. Members are not given sMerit to share with others. The results seem disturbing that is why I created this second graph which shows the Moving Average of sMerit since its inception.

Thanks for this analysis. Good thing I went here in Meta and I found this thread. It has been a question for me if the merit system is effective, given justice or members who give merits just give it to those they like.

If there is a gradual decrease in the rate if giving sMerits, I hope the Admins, Staffs, Legendary and Hero Member create a thread to give their justifications with such actions. I know they have their own reasons why they stopped giving sMerits. Were they fed up in giving merits? Were they exhausted? Can't they find quality posts now? Or what? So members like me will be informed about their reasons and expectations for me to have merit/s.

[romanovst]

We really need to increase the number of merits in circulation. We should not create a situation where members do not have enough merits to send to a deserving person. I have seen merit giveaway threads where the member starting the thread had to lock it as his Smerits got spend on initial applicants. In order to increase the merits in circulation- two things can be done. First is increasing the number of merit sources. Admin added some but they are not sufficient. Another option is to increase the number of merits given to each merit source per month.

[tbct_mt2]

--Snip--

Honestly, thanks for your very informative thread.
However, I would like to give you some suggestions to improve your thread next time. I really want to do statistical analysis but unfortunately I am not familiar with types of datasets from the forum.
Average figures don't tell us the truth in some cases, especially if the distributions of target variables are not normal. Even for cases which have normal distribution, we have to present both mean and +/- standard deviations.
In contrast, for those cases which have non-normal distributions, we have to use median and interquartile range.
I will highly appreciate anyone help to transfer data from the forum to excell, which I can use Stata software for analysis.

Thanks.

[zentdex]

does it mean people getting short of sMerits? Or trying to give less?
I would like to see the spread of merits among the users.

Were they fed up in giving merits? Were they exhausted? Can't they find quality posts now? Or what? So members like me will be informed about their reasons and expectations for me to have merit/s.

Thank you for your appreciation.
This is based on my opinion but as what I see both of your question is could be answered by YES; People are getting short of sMerits and trying to give less. However, I have no proof how much remaining sMerits are left in each account to tell they are giving less.

How could there be 64 unique staff accounts, 15 global mods, and 3 admin? I think the numbers are a bit off. There are only about 30 staffs, 4 global mods, and 2 admins (well it's 3 if you count theymos_away).

Thank you for your appreciation.
The count includes theymos; I’ll better manually check those numbers next time.

We don't know in which sections are given the most smerits?

Thank you for that suggestion, I’m working on that. I’ll update you once finished.

I am just wondering if those are send merits who among received those merits.

Thank you for your appreciation.
Yeah, you’re right, I’ll do it next time. For the moment, I have another post which shows the number of member getting merits and their ratio. You can see it in this link: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3071785

We really need to increase the number of merits in circulation. We should not create a situation where members do not have enough merits to send to a deserving person. I have seen merit giveaway threads where the member starting the thread had to lock it as his Smerits got spend on initial applicants. In order to increase the merits in circulation- two things can be done. First is increasing the number of merit sources. Admin added some but they are not sufficient. Another option is to increase the number of merits given to each merit source per month.

They are already into that. They are continuously looking for members who could be a possible merit sources.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2852479.msg31327729#msg31327729
There are even list of applicants which you can found here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2823944.0
There is another list but I can’t find it at the moment.

Average figures don't tell us the truth in some cases, especially if the distributions of target variables are not normal. Even for cases which have normal distribution, we have to present both mean and +/- standard deviations.
In contrast, for those cases which have non-normal distributions, we have to use median and interquartile range.
I will highly appreciate anyone help to transfer data from the forum to excell, which I can use Stata software for analysis.

Thank you for your appreciation, comments and suggestion.
I’ll better include those figures next time. By the way I sent a PM to you for the Excel version of the file. Happy Analyzing!

[mobilazy]

Zentdex Are you data scientist? Are you related to Sentdex youtube account https://www.youtube.com/user/sentdex somehow? I watch it a lot   I'm learning hard to get this career path, thinking about to get MSc after Coursera and Udemy courses. Great job, I wish I could to wrangle the data like that someday!

[digaran]

I'm getting more source merits to send, I've already ranked up 2 Jr members into members or 2 members into full members. currently I don't have any idea on how to post a task with merits as the reward. if I ask for something complicated, nobody would know how to complete the task, if it is too easy, they might get undeserved merits.

I have already made up my mind about giving merits to members, I would give them a task to complete and they would earn some merits. I had 3 sMerits last time I checked, now I have 7. if the thing that you have done here was useful to me, I could have rewarded you with some merits. my first attempt of distributing merits got somebody a negative trust.

I wanted to ask people to post on my thread and have me viewing their posts. due to the limited source merits given to me, I couldn't offer something interesting for people. if you are up for it, I could reward you with 7 merits if you could PM me the numbers of empty blocks from block #20,000 to block 500,000. if you think that you are up for the task, post here and reserve the spot, I don't want several members doing the same thing and expect to have the reward.

[ericunc95]

I'm getting more source merits to send, I've already ranked up 2 Jr members into members or 2 members into full members. currently I don't have any idea on how to post a task with merits as the reward. if I ask for something complicated, nobody would know how to complete the task, if it is too easy, they might get undeserved merits.

I have already made up my mind about giving merits to members, I would give them a task to complete and they would earn some merits. I had 3 sMerits last time I checked, now I have 7. if the thing that you have done here was useful to me, I could have rewarded you with some merits. my first attempt of distributing merits got somebody a negative trust.

I wanted to ask people to post on my thread and have me viewing their posts. due to the limited source merits given to me, I couldn't offer something interesting for people. if you are up for it, I could reward you with 7 merits if you could PM me the numbers of empty blocks from block #20,000 to block 500,000. if you think that you are up for the task, post here and reserve the spot, I don't want several members doing the same thing and expect to have the reward.

Just wanted to say thank you for offering up merit rewards for tasks completed.  It is also nice to see that you have ranked up several members and jr members.  Also, to the statistician up above, great post.  If I had some sMerit to give you, I would as this was a really good post.

[boy130]

Excellent post, highly informative. I think the reason Hero members receive the most merits is likely because they are more well known in the community, they have formed friendships and create acquaintances here on the forum which leads to them being looked favorably upon in the posts. Also, hero members are bound to give out the most merit as nearly all of the merit sources are at least hero or above. 

[Alexis.Nick]

Thank you for sharing this data this really helps me to understand more about merits. As I read this post I was enlightened that merit is very essential to each users now. My hopes are so high that merits will be given to deserving people by users who has golden harts.     

[krishnaverma]

I'm getting more source merits to send, I've already ranked up 2 Jr members into members or 2 members into full members. currently I don't have any idea on how to post a task with merits as the reward. if I ask for something complicated, nobody would know how to complete the task, if it is too easy, they might get undeserved merits.

I have already made up my mind about giving merits to members, I would give them a task to complete and they would earn some merits. I had 3 sMerits last time I checked, now I have 7. if the thing that you have done here was useful to me, I could have rewarded you with some merits. my first attempt of distributing merits got somebody a negative trust.

I wanted to ask people to post on my thread and have me viewing their posts. due to the limited source merits given to me, I couldn't offer something interesting for people. if you are up for it, I could reward you with 7 merits if you could PM me the numbers of empty blocks from block #20,000 to block 500,000. if you think that you are up for the task, post here and reserve the spot, I don't want several members doing the same thing and expect to have the reward.

First, can you tell the usernames of those users you are talking about, I would love to see their posts, especially who became full members. Based on you recent merits sent I see one such member, https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=1048815 , but he has lot of negative trust so doubtful.

I do not think I will be applying for the offer you made but I hope someone in need makes a good use of it.

[romanovst]

they have formed friendships and create acquaintances here on the forum which leads to them being looked favorably upon in the posts. Also, hero members are bound to give out the most merit as nearly all of the merit sources are at least hero or above. 

This is something the admin never wanted with the merit post. He has mentioned that one should not give merits to a post just because he agrees to it. Also, giving merits to friends is wrong in my opinion. If you are giving them a benefit for being a friend and awarding merit to their posts over that of a new member, it is  partiality for the new member. The new members will then feel discouraged to see this and even those capable of contributing valuable posts here will leave. I am sure the admin never wanted to achieve this with the merit system.

[Mpamaegbu]

...if the thing that you have done here was useful to me, I could have rewarded you with some merits.

I am amazed that you think the OP does not deserve your highly treasured merit. Not even a recommendation from you? Wow! Such a well thought out topic and research like this should get well-meaning merits - at all time. Of the 29 merits the OP received, yours isn't even there.

This is one of the major problems of the Merit system. Most people giving this merit have their favorite posters and buddies. Whether they post constructively or not, the Merit givers find a way to merit the post. Now, think of how many merits the OP would've got were the poster a username like Theymos, etc. I am not saying the mentioned users aren't great posters but they seem to be famous here. That's my observation and I stand to be corrected.

2) People think that giving merit will decrease their merit count.

This is very ludicrous. But then there are certainly people who have this mindset, no doubt.

[CarlosCorreia]

Awesome work! Congrats!

I hope forum admins use this data for upgrading and improving this merit system!

In my opinion there are much work to be done!

1) There are still people that don't know how this works.
2) People think that giving merit will decrease their merit count. (don't know difference between merit and sMerit)
3) Many users do not care to give sMerit

I won't be discussing merit system here! This is not the point of the topic!
Just a little message for forum admins.

Great work @zentdex

[zentdex]

Great job, I wish I could to wrangle the data like that someday!

Thank you for your appreciation. Just stay tune, watch and Practice, soon you will create more than I could do. Keep Learning.

We don't know in which sections are given the most smerits?

You can now see it here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3093768.0

Excellent post, highly informative. I think the reason Hero members receive the most merits is likely because they are more well known in the community, they have formed friendships and create acquaintances here on the forum which leads to them being looked favorably upon in the posts. Also, hero members are bound to give out the most merit as nearly all of the merit sources are at least hero or above.  

Thank you for your appreciation.
I agree with you; I so many great and informative thread created by those rank, most of the time they nail lower rank questions. But there are exceptions...  That is what you get thru experience and wide reading.

Thank you for sharing this data this really helps me to understand more about merits. As I read this post I was enlightened that merit is very essential to each users now. My hopes are so high that merits will be given to deserving people by users who has golden harts.      

Thank you for your appreciation.
I hope it clarifies some of untold information about merits. I'll be that one with the golden heart.  

First, can you tell the usernames of those users you are talking about, I would love to see their posts, especially who became full members. Based on you recent merits sent I see one such member,

That is a good idea, but it will need more time and more digging. I think displaying their usernames is not necessary for now.

...if the thing that you have done here was useful to me, I could have rewarded you with some merits.

I am amazed that you think the OP does not deserve your highly treasured merit. Not even a recommendation from you? Wow! Such a well thought out topic and research like this should get well-meaning merits - at all time. Of the 29 merits the OP received, yours isn't even there.

Thank you. There could only be two reasons for that; It's either he don't like the post (but I am wondering why he even bother to comment?) or he don't like information about merits.

Also, to the statistician up above, great post.  If I had some sMerit to give you, I would as this was a really good post.

A simple thank you will do. Anyway, thank you for your appreciation

Awesome work! Congrats!

I hope forum admins use this data for upgrading and improving this merit system!

In my opinion there are much work to be done!

1) There are still people that don't know how this works.
2) People think that giving merit will decrease their merit count. (don't know difference between merit and sMerit)
3) Many users do not care to give sMerit

I won't be discussing merit system here! This is not the point of the topic!
Just a little message for forum admins.

Great work @zentdex

Thank you for your appreciation. Yes, there are so much work to be done, but with millions of members start helping together to explain merit, the work could be easy.

[DaftAjax]

zentdex give me the further information about merit. Thnak you zentdex.

I'm not zentdex but I'll help you anyway. I'll provide you links that'll make you more familiar about the Merit System.
Here are the links glad it'll help:

Merit & new rank requirements
3 Merit Stat After a Month of Merit
Where the Merit Pours?

So maybe the next time we meet you will be better. If you would really study the System and just read those significant information flouring in these section, by then you will not be confused anymore.

Also I wanted to point out that, you need to work on your communication skills mate, for you to make constructive posts and eventually rank up. I'll provide you a link(s) that'll make you more familiar about the forum itself: Beginners & Help
Especially this thread: Newbies - Read before posting