1. Introduction.On the
Merit Dashboard there’s a section where we can see the current (as of last Friday) 2.561 total users that have ranked-up, needing merit as a requirement. I recently looked-up how many were from my local board (a measly 22), and thought it may be interesting to see a summary for the other local boards too. Since that would only be a subset, I went ahead and did the exercise for the whole 2.561 users to see if there was any interesting information that could be derived, and there is ….
Note: I am considering here all the current merit received for the above set of users up to date, not just the exact amount needed just to reach their current rank.
2. Ranked-up users.The ranked-up user summary is as follows as can be seen on the
Merit Dashboard (see Tab labelled Ranked-up):
The detail of the usernames behind each of the above numbers can be seen on the Dashboard, so there is no need to replicate it here.
I will be treating the ranked-up users as a whole in the following sections, without separating by rank. This is due to the fact that 93% of ranked-up users are those that have reached the Member rank, and only 7% have reached higher ranks. Replicating the below information tables by rank may make the post too long, although if required I can add it later on.
3. Number of Merited SubsectionsThe following is a distribution of the number of Subsections a ranked-up forum member has been merited in:
It turns out that 58,65% of ranked-up users have been merited in a single subsection (be it a local board or otherwise as we’ll see further down), 28,50% have done so on 2 subsections, 12,57% on 3 subsections, and 10,27% on 4 subsections or above.
4. Subsections in which ranked-up members have been merited in.This is the most interesting table really, and we can derive some interesting insights based on its content.
Columns:
Section: Forum Section.
Subsection: Forum subsection.
nUsers: Number of ranked-up users that have been merited in the subsection. The total of this column is more than the number of ranked-up members, since some are merited on multiple subsections.
%RankedUp: % of ranked-up users that have been merited in the subsection.
SingleSS: Number of ranked-up users that have been merited
only in the subsection (and nowhere else).
%SingleSS: % of ranked-up users that have been merited
only in the subsection.
nReceivedMerit: Total Received sMerit by the ranked-up users in the subsection.
avgMerit: Average merit per ranked-up user in the subsection.
stdDevP: Standard deviation associated to the avgMerit.
Example of interpretation: 471 ranked-up users have received sMerit in the Altcoin Discussion subsection. That is 18,39% of all the ranked-up users. Singularly, 77 of these users have ranked-up solely based on the sMerit received in the Altcoin Discussion subsection (that is 16,35% of the 471 users ranked-up merited in this subsection).
On aggregate, the 471 ranked-up users have received 3.504 sMerits in the Altcoin Discussion subsection. That is an average of 7,44 sMerits per user (with a high standard deviation of 10,96 sMerits).
What stands out:a) 30,89% of ranked-up users have received at least 1 sMerit on a post that has later been deleted. That is a rather high percentage, that makes it more difficult to track merit abuse unfortunately (even though it is not moderated). Nevertheless, only 9,73% of these ranked-up receive all their sMerit on deleted posts (77 people).
b) The subsections most related to ranked-up members are Russian (28,66%), Altcoin Discussion (18,39%), Ann Altcoins (15,03%) and Bitcoin Discussion (12,65%). Meta is related to 8,98% of ranked-up users, so although meta is a rather well merited section, it is not to date a key section to ranking-up.
c) Subsections such as Mining (Altcoins) with 2,11% influence, Bitcoin Technical Support (0,86%), Mining (0,74%) and Project Development (0,55%) are the least influential in the overall figure of ranked-up people.
That says something: the most Bitcointalk/technological sections are the sections are the least influential for ranking-up.
That does not mean you cannot do so, don’t read this wrong, but rather that the profile of people on Bitcointalk that have so far ranked-up with the Merit System is not too technological.
d) Some subsections have a larger degree of people that have received sMerit solely on that subsection: Announcement Altcoins (33,77%) or all those that received sMerit in that subsection, Mining (29,63%) of those ranked-up members merited in the subsection, and Mining Bitcoin (26,32%).
Although the user base is not really too large to draw solid conclusions, it tells us that mining profiles are rather specific and have a rather large fidelity to their subsection, and similarly in Altcoins (although in Altcoins we’ve all seen shady stuff going on and that may well be the reason).
e) I would not pay too much attention to the AvgMerit really, since the standard deviations are rather high in most cases. This means that ranked-up people awarded merit in a given subsection do so in a widespread fan of sMerit amounts, differing quite a bit in many cases from the average.
f) I’ve deliberately left the local boards to be treated last but not least. Roughly, a bit more than half of the ranked-up forum members are related (through merit) to a local board. That I figure is good, and it means that an international forum such as Bitcointalk has contributions from all around and, consequently, people from different countries are ranking-up (slowly).
Nevertheless, if we look at this in detail, there are some locals that numerically count with a large share of ranked-up local members (I’m talking about absolute ranked-up numbers here, not in comparison to the population on each local board). Russian local boards stands out with 734 ranked-up users, followed by the Turkish Local Board (215), the Indonesian (160), and the Chinese (122). They are surely the largest local boards, so the higher quantity of local ranked-up members are theirs (even if in reality the figures are probably rather small, compared to the number of the distinct local posters there).
There’s a whole array of mid/low-level local boards (Croatian, Spanish, Italian, French, German, etc.), and then there’s the nearly impossible boards (Arabic, Dutch, Greek, Indian, Korean, Polish, Romanian and Scandinavian). Again, we do not know to total distinct posters on these boards to compare and see the ratio, but the absolute number is measly and either indicates a grave merit problem, or a potential to boost Bitcointalk in those areas (as in the above mid/low ranked-up level countries really too).
Even between countries, there are large “fidelity” differences. For example, out of the 122 local Chinese that have ranked-up, 88,52% of them have done so being merited only on their local board. The Turkish board follows a similar patter, while the Russian local board has more than half of its ranked-up members that have been awarded sMerit on other boards too.
The lower the percentage (column %SingleSS), the more that the local ranked-up members have emigrated to the English boards in order to be merited for their contribution there. A certain command of English is required there, so it is logically related to the educational system in each country in terms of learning the English language.
Notes:
- I’ve assumed that people on local boards are from the local board if they have been merited there at least once. That is true for the most, although there are a few exceptions (19 to be precise) that have been merited on more than one local board. The most extreme case is Leteravian, who has been merited on 7 local boards (often by translating himself his posts into multiple languages).
- Bear in mind that I’ve analysed all the merit for the ranked-up members, not just the merit that took them to their next rank. The latter is a much more tedious task, and the results would probably not differ too much from the above, since most users that have ranked-up are Members with not too much merit above the required baseline.
