I’ve read your article and I thought at first that the “Fake” red alert image that you’ve inserted, was in fact a slip of the subconscious that drew you to qualify your own article in this manner. It’s very similar to those “Scam” video alerts that you see on the internet, which have no substance at all and do not depicts the facts by using solid proof. This is what happens in your article, thus turning into an opinion based article and not a contrasted research. You are entitled to your opinion, but we may differ as is natural. I do for one.
Being a self-proclaimed crypto advisor, with 123 followers on Medium and 33 on Twitter is more of a wannabe situation than a de facto one, so credibility only goes so far.
Anyway, regarding the article specifically, corruption accusations should be backed with facts, and these are not forwarded for the eye of the reader in your article. Court case does therefore not stand and should be dismissed due to lack of evidence.
The forum is centralized only to some extent, since you need a minimum control and not complete anarchy. The idea is to have a collaborative Forum, and not a spam-fest place where ludicrous posts would too easily drown out any substance from the Forum if left to run wild. So yes, some centralization is required and some rules need to be added and fine-tuned over time as the Forum’s society evolves, opening up to the masses (I’m part of the masses by the way).
You seem to have got the account ranking system wrong: “You can spot them by their accounts as they all have Full Member, Hero or Legendary accounts.”
Sr. Members are left out of the tyrant oligarchy in your article, unless the “Sr.” is interpreted as “Sir/Señor” and thus are given the polite benefit of the doubt due to curtesy traditions.
The closed clan of tyrant old ranks are accused of not giving merit to the new ones. Old and New are not synonyms of Evil and Good, and the distinction is not boolean either. There are many old accounts that do not get any merit, and newer ones that do.
We could take a break here and agree that circulating sMerit is rather low objectively, buy we also need to take a look at what and how many posters write, and merit is not a word that comes close to what they often deserve (a double rehashing of the word merit could give us some close adjectives which I refrain from writing here).
Since I like data, I think it would be good to throw some into the picture here for the show:
• Legendries send 67,08 % of their sMerit to ranks lower than theirs (22,36% to Members and below which are the lower ranks).
• Heroes send 64,02 % of their sMerit to ranks lower than theirs (28,23% to Members and below which are the lower ranks).
• Sr. Members send 56,83 % of their sMerit to ranks lower than theirs (35,23% to Members and below which are the lower ranks).
• Full Members send 42,64 % of their sMerit to ranks lower than theirs (that’s all 42,64% to Members and below which are the lower ranks).
That data is drawn from the/my/our Merit Dashboard, derived from information provided or, let’s say, ingeniously derived from a centralized system.
What it goes to show is that people here (we are people after all) make a large effort to award sMerit to others, specifically to those lower ranks. While being on the topic, I know of (different from know directly) who go out of their way and spend large amounts of time searching for posts to Merit, often with a specific focus on newer forum users for part of the day (which I assure you is harder that in seems). We’d be better off personally with some sort of AI that did this task for us, therefore freeing-up some of our time and avoiding subjectivity. But it is 2018, so let´s move on...
Trust is something I personally don’t like too much, since it is subjective by nature (so is Merit, but the focus of trust is different) and I kind of hate false positives which demean the general intent of the Trust System. Frankly, I would rather see accounts being banned that having negative trust (some are later banned) although criteria would need to be very well versed for this to work properly.
I don’t believe negative trust is being given to harm people deliberately, but I know of a few that would differ from my thought on the matter. Even so, these are exceptional cases.
Finally, your solution to the problem is like proposing to rob a bank if you don’t have money (yes, I know, I mentioned FIAT on a crypto Forum – maybe I could shift the analogy to “hack an exchange”). That is not an ethical solution, and will not be a solution at all if caught red handed.
How did the saying go ... “Give a man a fish, and he’ll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he’ll eat for a lifetime.” This kind of sums-up the basics needed here on the Forum.
P.D. I'm rather new here, so my opinion cannot be rules out for being a high-ranked member according to OPs criteria.
