Incentive to the Merit Sources to Achieve their Quota?

[Quickseller]

That is, 93,33% have between awarded between 1 and 29 sMerits since the Merit System kick-off, 3,64% between 30 and 59, 1,15% between 60 and 89 and only 1,88% are in the range of having received 90 sMerits or above...

I made a list, updated weekly.
Last Friday, 100 users had received at least 180 Merit, and 316 users had received 90 Merit.

Thanks for this.

It looks like roughly 0.6% of users (who have received merit) are receiving sufficient merit to rank up in a timely fashion, and an additional 1.28% of users are accumulating sufficient merit to rank up at half the rate that activity would previously allow. This doesn't account for the thousands of people who have received zero merit. A good number of members who have received a lot of merit do not need any merit to rank up.

According to Vod's BPIP, there are over a million active accounts, although I am not sure how many of them are spam accounts that have been banned. But by any reasonable measure, well under 1% of active accounts have received any merit at all.

I am not sure if this is a accurate representation of the percentage of users who have sufficient post quality to be deserving merit. Maybe if theymos were to run a report of the number of users who meet all of the below criteria, we could compare that number to how many users have received merit:

• At least one post in the last 6 months
• Average post length, excluding BB code, outside of any quote tags to be greater than 100 characters
• Total time logged in divided by number of posts is greater than 3 minutes
• No bans in the past year

[1715090923]

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[LoyceV]

I am not sure if this is a accurate representation of the percentage of users who have sufficient post quality to be deserving merit. Maybe if theymos were to run a report of the number of users who meet all of the below criteria, we could compare that number to how many users have received merit:

• At least one post in the last 6 months
• Average post length, excluding BB code, outside of any quote tags to be greater than 100 characters
• Total time logged in divided by number of posts is greater than 3 minutes
• No bans in the past year

I think it's safe to assume users who didn't receive any merit at all don't deserve to rank up. In other words: I think it's very unlikely anybody with many good post quality would have received at least one Merit by now. That means you can ignore all others for this analysis.

For the rest: Let me take a random number between 500 and 1000: random.org gives 631.
This is number 631:

Code:

   631. 50 Merit received by mthcl (#168348) from 1 unique users in 1 transactions

mthcl has received 50 Merit in one transaction. for a recently deleted post (I know it's recent, because I could scrape the title not so long ago). I highly doubt it was worth 50 Merit.
Most of his posts are in Russian, so I can't read them, and he's only made one post this year.

Let's do this again: random.org gives 873:

Code:

   873. 37 Merit received by pvk444 (#923699) from 14 unique users in 15 transactions

pvk444 has received 37 Merit in 15 transactions. He seems like a decent poster, but his last post was more than 2 months ago.

Feel free to analyse a few more, but my guess is you'll find a lot of Merit abuse, and not many posters who should have been able to rank up by now.

[DdmrDdmr]

<...>
Besides, one of the most confrontational parts of the merit system is that merits are given 1 by 1, the most of the time. I think this make truly difficult to rank-up, so I kind of understand how can a good poster get desperate, for example, ranking-up from member to full member is going to take a while, at least you are a genius (there are few in this forum by the way).
<...>

Just to backup your argument with data, the number of sMerits awarded per TX during the current month of June (01/06/2018 .. 22/06/2018) is as follows:

Code:

Merit	NumTX	%
1	4.136	68,30%
2	942	15,55%
3	233	3,85%
4	93	1,54%
5	395	6,52%
6	46	0,76%
7	14	0,23%
8	4	0,07%
9	4	0,07%
10	107	1,77%
11+	82	1,35%

So 68,30% of awarding involves 1 sMerit, an additional 15,55% involves 2 sMerits, and 16,15% of TXs involve 3 or more sMerits.

Contrary to what I believed, these proportions are roughly the same whether we focus on this current month, or we consider the whole history of transactions from January 2018 onwards.


The question is perhaps not only the number of merits per TXs, but the number of times a post actualy gets merited (number of different meriters). The overall distribution is as follows:

Code:

nTXs	nPosts	%
1	45.513	81,43%
2	6.372	11,40%
3	1.932	3,46%
4	786	1,41%
5	404	0,72%
6	255	0,46%
7	139	0,25%
8	119	0,21%
9	70	0,13%
10	48	0,09%
11+	255	0,46%

81,43% of posts have been merited only by one person, another 11,40% by two people, and so on.

Maybe there is a kind of "the post has already been merited before/got enough merits" hand brake that works behind our awarding habits.

EDIT:  Added the above to the Merit Dashboard (Post Summary Tab), although still needs a bit of tweaking .

[mdayonliner]

I made a list, updated weekly.
Last Friday, 100 users had received at least 180 Merit, and 316 users had received 90 Merit.

Code:

 137. 150 Merit received by mdayonliner (#1432468) from 64 unique users in 94 transactions

I am very happy with this 

[KianSantang96]

Given that there are reports that the current actual number of merits given in the past months did not meet the expected merits for circulation, please let me propose an idea.

Give an incentive to the Merit Sources for them to be proactive in achieving their quota.

This will serve as a positive reinforcement to the Merit Sources to encourage them to attain the quota of number of merits for circulation for the month (or for a given period).

An incentive can be a form of payment (bitcoin?), special privilege (additional feature on their profile?), or anything that is beneficial to them.

What do you think?

some of them will only misuse merit source only to get incentive only

[TheUltraElite]

I think your idea is good, it will encourage merit circulation increasing to reward the good post in high quality classification.

The idea is bad and is evident by the discussion and points raised by other people here. Do you even read the replies before you post (or shitpost)?

But that should be specify the privilege since as merit source also is the privilege for them.

Stop coming to this forum to shitpost to get paid or trying to asslick others in "failed" attempt the beg for merits. It makes you look like a dumb baboon who says "Great project sir" to every ANN and says good to everything they see nodding their heads in unison.

GTFO this forum and find a new home.

some of them will only misuse merit source only to get incentive only

Being a merit source is itself and incentive - like a new role in shaping the forum. In my opinion no other incentive is needed and hence if there is no so-called "monetary" incentive, how will misuse happen?

[suchmoon]

GTFO this forum and find a new home.

Just report them to mods... don't waste time replying, they will never come back to read or respond.

[Quickseller]

I am not sure if this is a accurate representation of the percentage of users who have sufficient post quality to be deserving merit. Maybe if theymos were to run a report of the number of users who meet all of the below criteria, we could compare that number to how many users have received merit:

• At least one post in the last 6 months
• Average post length, excluding BB code, outside of any quote tags to be greater than 100 characters
• Total time logged in divided by number of posts is greater than 3 minutes
• No bans in the past year

I think it's safe to assume users who didn't receive any merit at all don't deserve to rank up. In other words: I think it's very unlikely anybody with many good post quality would have received at least one Merit by now. That means you can ignore all others for this analysis.

For the rest: Let me take a random number between 500 and 1000: random.org gives 631.
This is number 631:

Code:

   631. 50 Merit received by mthcl (#168348) from 1 unique users in 1 transactions

mthcl has received 50 Merit in one transaction. for a recently deleted post (I know it's recent, because I could scrape the title not so long ago). I highly doubt it was worth 50 Merit.
Most of his posts are in Russian, so I can't read them, and he's only made one post this year.

Let's do this again: random.org gives 873:

Code:

   873. 37 Merit received by pvk444 (#923699) from 14 unique users in 15 transactions

pvk444 has received 37 Merit in 15 transactions. He seems like a decent poster, but his last post was more than 2 months ago.

Feel free to analyse a few more, but my guess is you'll find a lot of Merit abuse, and not many posters who should have been able to rank up by now.

I think you have found some examples of users receiving merit that were probably not deserved. In some cases this may have been people giving merits to their actual friends who happen to not make good posts, while in others, this may have been people giving merit to their alternate accounts (and there may be some cases in which people have given merit to random people to 'try it out').

I am not sure if everyone who "deserves" merit has received at least one merit or not. I know we have a problem with people making shit posts, and spamming the forum, however I somewhat find it hard to believe this problem is so bad that less than 1/50^th of 1% of active users are deserving merit. If the problem really is so bad that >99.8% of active users do not deserve merit, then frankly, the solution is to get rid of signatures.

[LoyceV]

I am not sure if everyone who "deserves" merit has received at least one merit or not.

Me neither, that's why I said they won't have enough to rank up (10+).

I know we have a problem with people making shit posts, and spamming the forum, however I somewhat find it hard to believe this problem is so bad that less than 1/50^th of 1% of active users are deserving merit.

Take a look at unread posts since last visit (without boards on your ignore list), and check the last few posts. Chances are they're all bounty/altcoin-spammers. It won't be 99%, but I expect the large majority of accounts is only spamming.

Each week, hundreds of users receive their first Merit.

If the problem really is so bad that >99.8% of active users do not deserve merit, then frankly, the solution is to get rid of signatures.

That's unlikely to happen:

The things on the forum which encourage spam are allowed mainly because it's part of the forum's mission to be as free as possible. Eg. banning bounties would undoubtedly reduce spam, but that'd be destroying an entire economy/population/culture which has been able to develop due to the forum's freedom. I am willing to take this sort of action, but only as an absolute last resort. It's always preferable to handle these problems by reshaping the environment to make them non-problems, rather than removing some freedom.