The merit system was created due to the high demand in signature campaigns. But the people applying were all spammers with low quality content.
Crypto is an emerging field garnering billions of dollars in investments and revenue. Companies are jumping onto the blockchain tech train for moon purposes. They're using signature campaigns and paying out insane levels of upwards of $100 per week.
Where there's money, there's sheep. And believe me, all these low quality sheep are trying to make millions of alt accounts just to get into these signature campaigns to rake in dough that's unheard of in forum posting.
Bitcointalk basically got handed an influx of people that weren't there originally and a lot of rule abusers. And the staff at bitcointalk work for zilch, and there aren't that many mods or admins.
What happened? Theymos went “hmm I need to find a way to automate this moderationz.” And he came up with the ranking and merit system, which is still less than 2 months old.
The merit system is an automated system, it's genius, tbh. It's not an emotionless bot that bans and nukes your account for no reason. Because that would garner reviews and give more work for the mods/admins.
Instead, it's a time-based gatekeeper that's moderated by the users themselves. Very ingenious. So you have newbies who can't join any signature campaigns unless they make it through the 6 weeks necessitated boot camp. That means 6 weeks of posting without getting caught by spam bots and community reports.
Then once they're Jr. Member, they can only join some campaigns, while other campaigns are still locked for members only.
Now, to get to member, you need 10 merits. And again, here's the genius of it all – it's the higher-ranked members who get to decide who gets these 10 merits. Someone who is known to be a scammer, spammer, or low quality content poster won't get 10 merits, so they can't join the bounties that make sense.
So Theymos, in effect, is creating a system where everyone is an admin or forced to be an admin without even knowing it.
The only problem herein, are the people who got merits who were spammers, scammers, etc. from the old system. But after awhile these people will be drained of sMerits and banned. And it's only a matter of timeAll Theymos and the other staff have to do is closely monitor who they assign as Merit Sources. If they control the influx of merits, and have Commanders of Good Merit Giving, then everything policies itself!
You'll be left with a forum where only trusted people (not just good posters, but non-scammers) get merits. And these people will only send merits to other trusted people.
It will become a little nazi, at one point, but I believe you'll end up with a very clean forum where only the true posters who deserve to rank up will get merits.
Theymos and crew just have to make sure they're assigning Merit Sources to unbiased trustworthy people who aren't in the inner circle that people know exist.
It's not bad to have an inner circle. When humans group, they instinctively create inner circles. BTT has an inner circle and if these people are the only ones with merit, then you'll see biased merit-giving. The good news is, Theymos will prevent this by assigning Merit Sources to third parties too.
I expect really good things from the Merit System.
