100 Days of Merit

[zentdex]

100 Days of Merit

Hello, there fellow members! It’s been a long time since I look into merit stats.
In this post, I will cover the 100 days of merit. Just like before the data are based on theymos data which can be view
here https://bitcointalk.org/merit.txt.xz and other forum stats which can be view here https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=stats .


I. Before and After
Some are still wondering, do the merit system prevent people from creating dummy accounts?
100 days before the merit started the number of new users increases from a minimum of 1,662 to a maximum of 14,274 new users a day.
Fourteen thousand new user registered in a day is almost the same amount of new user for a span of 40 days a year later.
The figure below shows the 100 days before and after merit implementation.



The average new user a day before the merit is 5,152 this go down to 3,315 a day or 36% decrease after merit implementation.
Even though it decreases, we are still unsure if those new accounts are dummy or not.

- - -


II. Giver and Receiver
Merit is created to ensure a quality post contribution to the forum. Some member finds an excellent post and gives merit, while some give merit as a reward.
Some become merit sources and distribute to others, while some prefer to receive merit and hoard it.
There are 128,079 merits given from January 27 to May 7, with a total of 59,297 transactions. The figure below shows the unique number of accounts that give and receive merits.
Ranks and position are based on May 7 rankings. Some have ranked up within the 100 days but based on my estimate there could be less than 4,000 accounts that have ranked up.



The total shows that there are more people who receive merit than those who give. It could notice that most of the beneficiaries of merit are form the lower rank.


Color denotes the receiver of merit. The figure above shows Hero and Legendary don’t hesitate to give a vast amount of merit to Jr members.
Mostly, the higher the Rank, the more chances of receiving higher merits.


The figure above shows the frequency of giving merit to another. Most of the Legendary members give merit to another legendary, while most Hero gives merit to legendary as well.
Members give more frequent merit to another member, while full members, Sr. members, Jr. members, and even staff prioritize to give merit to Members.

- - -


III. Merit Decreases
After the merit was announced, most of the forum members give merit to overcome curiosity. But as time goes by, they realize that accumulating merit is not an easy task.
 One will need to receive two merits in order to give one merit to others. The figure below shows total merit sent per day from individual members.



From more than 4,500 merits given in a day, it dips below 1,000 after 41 days. And from 1,000 merits on March 9, it almost reaches 500 after another 40 days.
The fewest merit sent in a day is 523 happened last April 22 which is sent by 190 members.  Merit giver also decreases, from a maximum of 1,000 down to 190 per day.


Looking at the Merit Sent Moving Average, it almost decreases 1% every day. It would take an estimate of 252 Days before the average merit sent per day go below 100.


The figure above shows the amount of merit given in a single transaction. It could notice that as time goes by, the bulk of giving high merit also decreases.

- - -


IV. Additional Merit Stats
Merit Amount description


There is 41,265 merit transaction that gives one merit, 8,610 that give 2 merits, while 9,421 gives 3 or more merit.
If you question would be, why divide merit into three. That is because the average merit is 2.16.
That is why it could be a good indicator that once you have received one merit, it could be considered as low, 2 for average and 3 or more for high.   

Merit Average
Based on the table below it clearly shows that Newbie and Jr. Member have an average of 3 merits received in the span of 100 days.
It could be assumed that they could easily rank up to a member rank.


Merit Day & Time
Are you looking when the perfect day to post so that your will got a higher chance of getting merit is?
The figure below shows that most of the members give merit during Monday.



This figure shows the time most of the merit is given.


- - -


V. Hindrance of Ranking
There are a lot of members who complain that merit hinders them to reach a higher rank.
Thus, I tried to figure out who among can’t rank up due to merit, due to activity or both.
Table below shows ranks and their hindrance in ranking up.




The figure above shows that 45% of the members need to attain the required merit to rank up.
But it is only 4% higher to a much more more significant problem which is the combination of Activity and Merit.
While some, see merit as a problem, there are members who gain enough merit and just needed to gain additional activity to rank up.

_______________________________________________________________________________ __
Thank you for reading this long post.
I hope you have learned something about it. Once again, this is not an official forum stat.
 Some information may not jive as you want, but I am always welcome to comments and suggestions.

[Vannie12]

Way too many graphs but take it as a good thing. People may see it in their on way and may be understand from a graph that really suits them the most. I do like the first one which is the before and after.
Good stats really.
I think the decrease of 36% from before is not a problem and I think that it is instead an improvement. The fact that your stats say that given merits are less means that merit abusers were lessen. We have noticed before that some users send 50 merits to a nonsense post and I think some of them are now very careful in sending their sMerits which is a good thing. They are somehow forced to find a bit of quality in a post.
Your efforts are appreciated. Keep up the good work.

[The Sceptical Chymist]

5152 new users daily before the merit system was introduced?  Holy shit!  Seems obvious to me that this doesn't represent distinct entities but rather just new accounts--multiple accounts of people.  I wonder how many separate people this actually reflects.  My guess is maybe 200 or so, if that.  Still, it's good to see that number dropped considerably post-merit introduction and hopefully it'll keep dropping.  I'm not saying new users is inherently a bad thing, but I think a lot of noobs are just here to participate in bounties, have zero interest in crypto or bitcointalk, and are going to be lazy shitposters.

Nice data presentation, OP.

[iillaa]

@ the pharmacist   they can  actually  use both things  .. enjoy bounties and grow their knowledge  about crypto  so that they can benefit their selfs from the $$ they got from bounties  as well as benefit other members  from their experience  and not just dump it in the first exchange  then  join another bounty and so on  ..  i think it's a shame to be in such a forum and never learn even small thing from it .

For the main  topic  it was intresting to know that  the more people give merit  the more they get back .

[dark1234]

100 days the merit system seems to have gone well with the graphic view, the number of members deductions is evidence of the decrease in spam accounts that just stay and go without the desire to become an active member and not just looking for $$$ but also trying to understand and recognize bitcoin, crypto and blockhcain

[eddie13]

What activity number are you using for heros to rank up?
775 or 1030 or somewhere in between?

You can't be using 1030 because you couldn't have gotten from 775 to 1030 since the merit system was implimented..

IIRC if you had 775 You got the 1k merits to be a legendary even if you didn't hit the legend lotto yet right?
I think I missed that by as close as possible..


I find it hard to believe that I am one of only 2 heros that just need merit to rank up.. That is quite an accomplishment..

I think their may be something in the legendary lottery thing that is messing with your charts? Or messing with my understanding of them..

[coinlocket$]

Op nice work even if I think we must consider a Δ on the value, based on my calculation the untrusted merit(abuse and exchanged by 50 from legendary to legendary for no reason, and believe me they are a lot) was around 40% last month.
The part that saddens me is that now we are in a situation where the abusers have ranked and for the big part they are unjustly unpunished (I've reported around 100 Merit abusers with, in some case over 200 sMerit and the eth address link, abuse and they are still unpunished).
Also now the monthly merit is very similar to the merit generated by the sources which shows that some of them are afk/don't care/(don't find post to reward, this is in my opinion an excuse demonstrated by the fact that some good sources like TMAN finds a lot of posts where to use the sMerit).
In my opinion now the montly merit without abuser is around 15000 while sources generates 17750.

[Quickseller]

I would be interested to see more information about those who can’t rank up because of merit. I would be interested to see how long their posts are compared to others (specifically those who are one rank higher), where these accounts tend to post (what sections), if these people are participating in any kind of advertising campaigns, how much trust these people have sent/received.

The above information may give somewhat of an indication of how effective the merit system is working.

[tbct_mt2]

It makes sense!
Campaigns which managed by famous managers like yahoo62278, Woshib, etc. seems to have better participants than others.

I would be interested to see how long their posts are compared to others (specifically those who are one rank higher), where these accounts tend to post (what sections), if these people are participating in any kind of advertising campaigns, how much trust these people have sent/received.

For the OP's creator,
As as mentioned in my previous threads (somewhere in the forum), due to unavailable detailed data given by the forum. Those sort of data analyses have significant drawbacks, at least in terms of its reliability.
In my opinion, only IP technicians/ experts can get such datasets from the forum. Theymos only given raw datasets.
Of course, I have no reason to defend the OP's creator, who made extremely good, helpful, nice-graphics analysis.
In addition, I think it might be better to give other users public datasets, on which the OP's creator used for the analysis.
Consequently, other members can verify the reliability of the analysis, and do further forensic analysis (if necessary).
I don't see any reason to keep those datasets in secret, because the main purpose of the topic is to contribute to the forum, right?
So, why not publicly publish datasets? Not only zentdex, but also others who published their analysis on merit system.

[darklus123]

I actually didn't see the give and take of merit that decreases each day that passes by as a problem. It is because this only shows how the current issues affects the system(well actually there are a lot of factors that affects the demand and supply of the merit)

Good numbers tho, because even if this is not the official data I think that the sources is reliable which means that the probability is actually high and reasonable.

[Wheelige]

I would be interested in the forums view on the decrease of merit over time and if that the current merit per day is around that envisioned at implementation. I understand the drop off immediately after the introductions as everyone was given a bunch and were throwing them around, with a large number of farmers merits going to their cattle accounts, but is it not at quite a low level. The fact that it is still in decline even though it has been around for a while is what interests me. In my opinion it shows either a lack of interest in handing out merits or a constant raising of standards, or possibly even a hoarding mentality due to the scarcity (which really has no benefit).
Are there enough merit sources? do they have enough love to spread around? Are they spreading it around? At what point in the plumbing is the trickle down effect being blocked?

[HabBear]

5152 new users daily before the merit system was introduced?  Holy shit!  Seems obvious to me that this doesn't represent distinct entities but rather just new accounts--multiple accounts of people.  

YES! Clearly the introduction of merit has reduced the number of alt or spam accounts being created. That's a huge win!

To zentedex, I have a request for additional analysis.

Is it possible to look at the average amount of merit given, per transaction? I'd like to see if there's a correlation between rank and the people who are gifting merit to friends or alt accounts.

Parameters likely need to include:

• Average of merit given per transaction, by rank level
• Being able to look at that average over shorter time frames would be useful (a week or 14 days maybe), the longer the duration the more likely the 1 merit transactions will dull the results, we're looking for spikes
• Can we isolate transactions by forum board? Some boards are more likely to have these questionable transactions (e.g., alternative currencies, local, etc.)
• We should isolate the received side of the transaction, an alt account is more likely to receive transactions that are arbitrary gifts than due to genuine quality of their posts - obviously just an unsupported hunch on my part
• Exclude people who've never given any merit

Great analysis, thank you!

[cabalism13]

Based on the DATA mentioned above, it really seems that the quality posters are also on the verge of decreasing, and with this numbers the Merits being distributed are also not that high... We might say that the system is effectively working with the standards of posting but the thing is some are now quite fond of not having Merits anymore.
It's absolutely amusing that the DATA stated above, that on the 1st month of this system was also an evidence that the Merits are being abused on that time, and now the difference is quite big more than ever. We already witnessed that this abusers are now having their punishments, getting tagged and  being permanently banned from this forum.
I completely appreciate this STATS from the OP. I hope that some important statistics from this forum will show up lately.

[Quickseller]

5152 new users daily before the merit system was introduced?  Holy shit!  Seems obvious to me that this doesn't represent distinct entities but rather just new accounts--multiple accounts of people. 

YES! Clearly the introduction of merit has reduced the number of alt or spam accounts being created. That's a huge win!

Cloudflare was implemented about two months prior to the merit system being implemented. Cloudflare should have stopped the last of the bot accounts and made it more difficult to create spam accounts manually. A lot of the spam accounts won’t care about merit because their goal was to create back links to their website, not rank up.

[tranthidung]

• Average of merit given per transaction, by rank level

Average statistics are not enough, not exact to describe non-normal distributed variables.
Hence, if zentdex can share dataset which he used for the OP analysis, someone in the forum can use and help to make supplemental analysis.

[athanz88]

I believe that merit will not be (at least very minimum) distributed at some point/time after i see the chart of merit declining. It is like a natural selection from there. The forum will see which member who still contributing even if they dont get merit as much as he/she deserved, and who stays on doing it.

[caytienbct]

I believe that merit will not be (at least very minimum) distributed at some point/time after i see the chart of merit declining. It is like a natural selection from there. The forum will see which member who still contributing even if they dont get merit as much as he/she deserved, and who stays on doing it.

Someone who keep sticking on their constructive approach will have higher probability to earn merits in the future when spammers give up. As a result of this, constructive threads will have more chances to show up in eyes of higher ranked members, then get more chances to receive merits.
By now, constructive threads have been covered by shitty ones.

[imking]

zentdex always creates an informative analysis regarding the merit system.
Some of his works that I like are the following;
10 Basic Info about Merit
3 Merit Stat After a Month of Merit
Merit Stat from theymos data
Where the Merit Pours?
I am pretty sure that this will be not the last. Thank you very much for all the information.
This is easy for us to understand the Merits system thoroughly. Keep the excellent work OP.

[Taki]

The tread is cool and all those graphics are just awesome! I guess you spent a lot of time for that. But the main point stays uncovered - merit trading and how to stay noticeable among all those other users with all kinds of posts? We can see on the example of this post that in the most of case just few first comments in the thread get merit, I guess it is because of users do not bother to read tons of remaining comments to the thread,  it is actually true,  well,  one more idea for a new graphic  

[Theb]

I think that the decrease in merits receives is due a lot of the non-merit source users have exhausted their sMerits to give while some are still keeping their sMerits as like what you have said earning Merits is now pretty hard. During the first few weeks of the ongoing system we saw a lot of users sending 30 to 50 sMerits (which is the maximum a member can give to another user) to worthless post but the bright side of that is they become a suspect for cheating the system and was tagged immediately by some DT members.

Even with the lack of merits to give I do still think that there is no need to add more merit-sources for now as we still need more time for the merit system to do its thing which is to reduce spam and create more sensible post.