<…>The questions really are, why is it so hard now to rise up lower ranks from Junior and what are the basis to get that promotion for higher ranks? I just hope we could get some information so we could do and apply what is needed.
This topic should be moved to Beginners & Help, so it would be wise for the OP to do so.
So far, 2.274 forum users have ranked up to Member with the need of Merit (see
Merit Dashboard, specifically on the “Ranked-Up” tab). Not a tremendous figure, but certainly achievable by the looks of it. Honestly, earning 10 sMerits from scratch is not that difficult. I didn’t say easy either.
I think that the first Merit or two are the most difficult ones to get. It took me almost two months to get my first Merit, and at the time I thought it was rather a difficult quest. Of course, back when I started posting I really didn’t have much of a clue about the forum itself, and not enough knowledge on most topics discussed here. I probably still don’t.
In order to be awarded sMerit, you need to first understand what kind of posts gets merited. Forget looking through the obvious cases of merit abuse, and the exceptional cases of outlier posters, but concentrate on the core cases. Understand why they get merited, by reading their posts. You’ll likely find them contribute and often thoughtful, with a tendency to be more than one-liners.
A good place to start is here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=merit;stats.
Really, you needed to: Invest time, think things through content-wise, be argumentative, be rather well versed with words in the language you post ,be non-repetitive with your posts vs other posts on the forum, and so on. It’s also better to avoid mega-threads (when I read posts, I normally visually filter directly to the smaller threads, with a few exceptions, in order to avoid all the spam).
One key question is deciding if you’re here for bounties, contributing to the forum, or both. I find that bounties are the worst enemy of merits, so if you’re here just for the bounties, Merit will always be a distant echo. This assertion is aligned with what I said above, since if that is your sole purpose here you will never focus on the post content, but rather on activity and post counts per week.
I’ve seen quite a few hybrid cases, where people that do bounty hunting and also manage to contribute to the forum itself. This is not a norm I find, but rather an exceptional pattern (being contribution interpreted as what I exposed above).
The vast majority of merited people around are not bounty hunters (but may be signature bearers), and are miles away in posting stile to those just bounty hunting.
Related to this, one’s post history is very important when it comes to being merited. A decent post may go unmerited because of a history of wall quoted bounty reports. The opposite may happen too: one may be merited for an average post, but where a decent non-spamming history help towards the overall appreciation on the post.
If you think moving from Jr. to Member is difficult, take a look on the Merit Dashboard just how difficult it get from there on.
Historically, 68,59% of merit awarding consists on 1 single sMerit. That is 10% what a Jr. requires to rank-up, but 0,2% of what Hero requires to get to Legendary. Most posts get merited by a single user (81,32%), so ranking-up after Hero is quite a chimera.
Let’s take into consideration that the overall amount of sMerit per week is not too great either (in the 4k weekly area, and even below lately – I hope it’s a summertime effect). This all adds up to the fact that, in order to rank-up nowadays (for the higher ranks), you need to stand-out and/or be very persistent in doing great work.
Being a Jr. Member, the question is really down to whether you’re really willing to invest the time and effort it takes, or are just happy bounty hunting at Jr level (I don’t mean you specifically, but rather anyone on this rank).
I could add quite a bit more, but there are plenty of other personal experiences and guides here on the forum. The “search function” is also one of those features we need to master...
