sMerit participants – a worrying descending trend (!/?)

[Jet Cash]

Should change the concept, think more about the purpose of posting, rather than just looking at the post is really helpful.

This is the reason we don't need more merit sources. I often look at the purpose behind a post, and it may stop me awarding merits.

We should always look at the posts, and use our opinion of the post to judge its quality.

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[TomCrypto]

As always, good post from OP, thank you for your work.
Here is my analysis from your graphs and it's just my opinion.

At the beggining of the merit system, each forum user was rewarded with merit depending on their activity. Therefore there was a huge pool of merits to distribute. As merit were new to them, forum users didn't know the value of merit, how it will lack or not and how fast merit source will generate and distribute it. Therefore they distributed all their merits quite fast and the month after the cascade of distributed merit was the main source of merit distribution in addition to the merit from the source. But now a huge part of the initial merit pool as well of the cascaded merit pool.
After some time the main part of available merit was the pool from the merit sources. And that correspond to the floor that we can see on your graphs.
This phenomenon of flooring in sent merits is also not helped by some desinterest on the forum (and on the crypto in general lately) due to the bear market and less and less posts on the forum as shown on the graphs of the OP on other posts.

If the forum team want to increase this merit floor (I dunno if they want that or not) I don't know which solution is the best to make this floor higher between allow faster regerating merit for each source or to add more sources. 

[Taki]

The role of merit is definitely getting more and more important, especially for new people on the forum. Add to that more and more new signature campaigns began to ask a minimum number of merits as necessary to have to join and this minimum is raising. That's why I decided to give merits only to ranks under Hero member to help them.

[DdmrDdmr]

There are a few dimensions to the problem that are interrelated yet distinct:  sMerit in circulation (in a given period of time), the number of Senders that participate in the Merit System and the number of Receivers.

The sMerit in circulation has got to do with what forum members have, their meriting standards (and the evolution of the standards), the amount of time they can spend playing the meriting game, and what’s on the other end of the TX: the decent to good post, sometimes well placed and visible, others hidden under a pile of debris/detritus. Topic and degree of technicality also plays a role. This dimension determines both the number of people that can rank-up, and the speed.

The sMerit Senders are a critical dimension, since they are both a player and a referee at the same time in the game. There comes a time (and we may be there right now) when the number of players get too low for what was set-out to be a fairly universal game in principle. The Merit System I figure should be played by more than 657 players per week. For the size of the member base of this forum, the number of players is weak. Fortunately, we have some real heavy players (Merit Sources) here, but the set of eyes to scout and merit is pretty small for all the posting that goes on. This is for me a key aspect: increasing the number of eyes in the game. If they end up meriting the same guys as before, so be it, but I’d say they will bring more merit Receivers into the game which should be good.
Increasing Merit Sources and placing them strategically in the right places (and that is the most difficult part) would be part of the process, but the ultimate goal would be to get more people into the game of sending, not “just” Merit Sources.  

The sMerit Receivers are the active/passive dimension to the game. Their role is to create content that is decent enough, distinguishing their post from the cesspit of spam. Increasing this dimension is an ultimate goal of the game, but that depends on the personal intentions here, the innate capabilities one has, and how well the other two dimensions are balanced and dimensioned.
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<…>
Though you don't clearly state out but I think you have the same opinion with me: there should be more merit sources. I see some nice applications out there but unfortunately no one has been approved yet.

Yes we concur here, but as part of the path to get more players into the awarding game. The trends shown in the OP on the Senders chart are increasingly descending, granted that at a slower pace in Q3 than Q2 and Q2 than Q1, but still descending 19% in Q3 so far. That does not strike me as too great.

<…>

The reasons you say are true, but what I’m stressing here is that the Merit System should be played by more people on the sender’s side, to give everyone a healthy chance at being merited if they deserve it. The more eyes on the board the easier this should become.

With regards to the Alts self-meriting, these will logically have done so by now for the most I guess, but I can’t back this up with data. What is a big question mark for me is what could happen with all the sMerit from the initial airdrop that has not been put into their first circulation at any point. The quantity of such is way above what has actually been awarded in total so far, so that is a potential pool of merit abuse that can be slowly leaked into the system at any time… or not. It’s just that there is a lot from the airdrop that is stalled, and you never know how it could be played with if at all.

<…>
The question is whether we are happy at the steady state level we are at, and I think the general consensus is no. I don't think we should be forcing people to give out more merit than they would otherwise - better instead to make more merit sources and therefore keep the merit system as decentralized as possible.

That is my main concern really, getting more people into the awarding game in order to give potential board-wide forum members a decent chance to be spotted and merited. That dimension (Senders) is decreasing quarter after quarter in two digit figures. The second concern (in a lesser degree than the former) would be quantity per TX. This latter affects the speed of people ranking (you only have to see how the Ranking-up pipeline is clogged on the Merit Dashboard).

Perhaps the merit system has just been implemented, many merit sources may be too harsh for Smerit's send, only demanding high-quality posts, have to say that some posts may not be of such high quality, <…>

That is something I personally try to correct, although it is not that easy. I find that my criteria evolves over time, but try to change the mind-set when visiting sections such as the Beginners & Help. What I do find is that things tend to be repetitive to some extent, so it often happens that the early worm gets the bird and that later replies of a similar nature in other threads go unmerited.

<..>

Good read of the situation. My only additional comment is that Merit Sources should be a booster to the Merit System, but really just a steppingstone to getting more people into the game.

The role of merit is definitely getting more and more important, especially for new people on the forum. Add to that more and more new signature campaigns began to ask a minimum number of merits as necessary to have to join and this minimum is raising. That's why I decided to give merits only to ranks under Hero member to help them.

Heroes have an urge for merit too really. Currently there are 426 Heroes lacking merit to rank-up, 406 of them have only between 40% and 60% of the required sMerit (that is, most of it is originated in the initial sMerit airdrop).

In my personal case, I’ve awarded less than 20% of my 363 sent sMerits to Legendries. Really, if campaigns signatures start demanding earned merit as a requirement more often, they too will need it to participate. What before seemed conceptually unnecessary (but served as a means for recognizing their posts), could soon turn 180 degrees and be a necessity for them too.

[Alone055]

The reason behind the weekly decrement of participation in giving away sMerits might be the increment in the spamming industry of the forum. People tend to find high-quality posts to give away their sMerits, as theymos himself said:

While we will not be directly moderating this, I encourage people to give merit to posts that are objectively high-quality, not just posts that you agree with.

So, I think people are taking that very seriously and that might have affected the circulation a little bit.
Other than that, as someone else also said in a post earlier, the system is designed in a way that such changes with time are not really surprising. Getting 1 Merit produces only 0.5 sMerits for you which means only 50 sMerits are generated from 100 Merits given away. That is also one of the reasons of why this is happening, I believe.

[jonemil24]

If only the max merits we can send was set to 2 and 20 per month for each user, we won't be seeing this fast downtrend of merit circulation. Maybe theymos should review those merit source applicants, but I'm not yet sure if trust is the issue or he might have a better plan.

Few more months and these merit sources are becoming more like  __________ for bounty hunters. There must be a balance, and the forum must also benefit from these bounty hunters.

Still waiting for the data I asked to someone(my subconscious is telling me that I shouldn't have) and I hope that he would accept merit as a sign of gratitude, if ever it comes out.

@DdmrDdmr congrats for reaching Sr.Member.

[DdmrDdmr]

<…>

Even mid-quality are candidate to be merited I’d say, not just high-quality. Although this is totally subjective, anything that stands out from a one liner non-contribute post, and that is rather well constructed, has a chance, but there need to be enough eyes out here to see them, and that is where we are falling short.
The sMerit halving is logically part of the reasons behind it all, but that is known from the design, and the system should have the means to equilibrate this factor. Merit Sources are there for that, but my stress again is on the decreasing amount of people that, as a result of it all, are able/willing to play the meriting game. We don’t want to end-up relying only on Merit Sources and little more …

If only the max merits we can send was set to 2 and 20 per month for each user, we won't be seeing this fast downtrend of merit circulation. <…>

Thanks for the congrats. I don’t get what you mean throughout all your post, but I’ve taken a look at the part that is clear.
Going over a recent period (14/08/2018..13/09/2018), the total amount of awarded sMerit has been 15.736 in a total of 8.162 TXs. 84,15% of those TXs are for 2 sMerits or less, but they represent 51,79% of the sMerit awarded in the period. So most TXs are of a very small quantity, but some are larger and represent half of that awarded in terms of total sMerit.
Is that good or bad? It depends where you are sitting. I like the to use following example: 2 sMerits for a Jr. Member represent 20% of the sMerit needed to get to Member rank. Those same 2 sMerits for a Hero represent 0,40% of the needed merit to reach the Legendary rank (from the baseline). Large quantities in my opinion are not an issue (except for cases of merit abuse), and 2 is rather low really.

As to receiving a max of 20 sMerit per month (I figure you mean as a limit per person, where the limit is now of 50), that would barely do anything really. Even if you meant delimiting to 20 per month per person in total (adding all TXs received from any person), the total of people that have more than 20 sMerits during the last month is 6,52% out of those awarded sMerit. Placing a limit would make the richer less rich, but would not lead to much more really.

 

[petyang12]

When sending 4 smerits or more will help rank fast starting from member to legendary as it needs a lot of merit required before ranking up as we know. Even though merit sources or generous merit senders able to send smerits but most post nowadays are not good enough for the merit to be rewarded to posters especially newbies, jr. members like me and some higher rank that doesn't even care about the forum. So, most users are not good posters enough to receive merit and even the senders send 10 smerit but not all would be able to receive unless he/she will create thread or reply to a thread that is worthy of merit and the merit circulation will remain as it is not because of the smerit senders but the posters post quality.

[eddie13]

What is a big question mark for me is what could happen with all the sMerit from the initial airdrop that has not been put into their first circulation at any point. The quantity of such is way above what has actually been awarded in total so far, so that is a potential pool of merit abuse that can be slowly leaked into the system at any time… or not. It’s just that there is a lot from the airdrop that is stalled, and you never know how it could be played with if at all.

This is interesting, what do you have for stats on this? By quantity of dormant smerit and % of accounts that have just never used their smerit?

How possible do you think it is that a good portion of these people are still unaware of the whole merit thing and don't realize they have them and should be giving them away?
What if they just don't know?


A reason I suggested what I did (giving higher numbers), not that I think it's the best action possible, but it is a readily available action that doesn't require asking Theymos for anything, which would likely be a nonstarter..
Maybe more sources would be better, but it's not something that can just be done..

[LoyceMobile]

What is a big question mark for me is what could happen with all the sMerit from the initial airdrop that has not been put into their first circulation at any point. The quantity of such is way above what has actually been awarded in total so far, so that is a potential pool of merit abuse that can be slowly leaked into the system at any time… or not. It’s just that there is a lot from the airdrop that is stalled, and you never know how it could be played with if at all.

This is interesting, what do you have for stats on this? By quantity of dormant smerit and % of accounts that have just never used their smerit?

Less than 1% of all 2 million+ accounts has ever sent or received merit. Theymos said about 600k sMerit was airdropped, and currently just over 200k has been sent. This partially came from sources, and generated another 100k+ sMerit.

My guess, since must users only spam for earning money, is that most users don't care about sending it to quality posts. Even worse: I'm pretty sure they don't even bother reading anything in their click farms.

[JetAid]

The sMerit Receivers are the active/passive dimension to the game.

Maybe this is the root of the problem. Don't forget that only about half of the awardable merits come from the merit sources. The other half comes from the merit receivers. Maybe we should be discussing their involvement in the forum, rather than just creating more sources who may not be recivers. Encouraging the creation of good threads for discussion will attract merits, and the result is the potential for more members to award merits. Those will aspirations to become merit sources can start their career as merit receivers.

[DdmrDdmr]

<...>
This is interesting, what do you have for stats on this? By quantity of dormant smerit and % of accounts that have just never used their smerit?

Regarding the amount of dormant airdropped sMerit, it’s as @LoyceMobile said. It’s an extremely large figure that more than doubles what has already being awarded overall (223.051), and on top of that we need to consider that the 223.051 total comes not just from the initial airdrop, but from Merit Sources and generated halving’s.

Determining the % of accounts that still have not spent any airdropped sMerit is not feasible, since we do not know how much each account received and who infact did receive it (the formula as per theymos’ description is based on activity in the year prior to merit system kick-off and rank, but we(I) cannot derive the activity in order to backtrack the initial amount per user. A wild linear guess based on actually distributed merit vs the 600K initial airdrop would say that only 1/3 have played the game, while 2/3 are stalled.

What I can tell you is this:
Out of all the 19.453 sMerited users, 2.666 have received at least 4 merits (therefore have at least 2 to send) and not sent any at all. On top of that, they may or may not have airdropped sMerit available. That’s 13,70% of all merited users just there, adding up to over 17K aggregate of sendable sMerit.
Fine, many with a small chunk may be holding it back as a treasure in hope of an advantaged use is some sense or other, and I’m not even taking TX age into consideration, but it gives as un idea that even within the merited users, nearly 14% are not playing ball yet.

If we perform the same exercise on those that have gained at least 10 Merits (that means at least 5 spendable merits in their account) and not sent any yet, we get 1.319 forum members (6,78% of all the merited user base).

How possible do you think it is that a good portion of these people are still unaware of the whole merit thing and don't realize they have them and should be giving them away?
What if they just don't know?

That is part of my concern. "Don’t know" is probably a lesser case than "don’t care". That is, many of the potential dormant sMeriters may not regard merit as a personal need, are satisfied with their rank for their purposes, and not care much for it really (if campaigns start to consider earned sMerit as a general requirement then this may change). Others may not even be active really. Remember the airdrop formula was based on activity during the prio kick-off year. Many of those may not be active at all really.

The two key features to address are Ranking-up speed and number of regular sMerit participants in the game.

<...>
 

Sure receivers have to do their task, and sub-standard posts should not get merited in any way. But my main concern here is that, as weeks go by, less people play the sender role, so less eyes on the board (less scope of vision) and less diversity in criteria for meriting.

Also the ranking-up speed is pretty slow. That could be partly strategical, but if not, the low amount of merit per TX or low number of meriters per post could become a demoralizer for those that, posting decently, improve their position at a rather slow pace. I mean if we take away the top 100 merited people, what’s left is a pretty slow moving ranking-up pipeline for the most …

[Buttermellow]

I might be guilty of this. I'm having a major sort out in my personal life, and I'm gettng rid of some of the shackles from the past. I spent yesterday scrapping one of my vans. It should have been an easy job, but anything that could go wrong did. I got up at 5am today to finish it off, and it's gone now, but I feel a bit tired. I didn't use the computer at all yesterday.  Hopefully I'll be back to normal tomorrow with loads of sMerits to give away.

Well good thing you are here in the forum that could change that descending graph of meit giving. I know you JetCash on how you put your effort to get a good and health environment for the forum and you even posted that you are sad by those members who are not following rules and regulations and just spam there becuase they are complying bounty campaign rulings on the numberbof post needed to get a stake. Anyway goodluck on your scouting and giving merits that is worth of your time.

[Jet Cash]

Well good thing you are here in the forum that could change that descending graph of meit giving. I know you JetCash on how you put your effort to get a good and health environment for the forum and you even posted that you are sad by those members who are not following rules and regulations and just spam there becuase they are complying bounty campaign rulings on the numberbof post needed to get a stake.

Actually moderation is also part of the problem. I've had some posts deleted or moved, and they were ones that I thought would help in the improvement of post quality. As a result of these deletions, I decided to use off forum domains to build the help pages. There is quite a bit of work involved in building the pages, and deleting them, or allowing them to sink into the spam mire is a massive disincentive. Of course, one result of the move offsite is that members can't comment or add to pages to help the forum.

[Theb]

Speaking of Merit Sources does anyone of you here knows what happened to QuestionAuthority? The last merit he has sent was on August 14 which was more than a month ago. Sorry if I had to bring this up over this topic but I think it is related to what is happening as QuestionAuthority is one of our top 3 merit senders and he suddenly stopped sending merits for some time now and it might have somehow affected your results.

This also shows how merit sources (especially the top ones) are important to the community as they are really the ones who are sending most of the merits to new people and although they are not obligated to flush out all of their new merits it shows here how it affects the whole community as a whole.

[Taki]

Well good thing you are here in the forum that could change that descending graph of meit giving. I know you JetCash on how you put your effort to get a good and health environment for the forum and you even posted that you are sad by those members who are not following rules and regulations and just spam there becuase they are complying bounty campaign rulings on the numberbof post needed to get a stake.

Actually moderation is also part of the problem. I've had some posts deleted or moved, and they were ones that I thought would help in the improvement of post quality. As a result of these deletions, I decided to use off forum domains to build the help pages. There is quite a bit of work involved in building the pages, and deleting them, or allowing them to sink into the spam mire is a massive disincentive. Of course, one result of the move offsite is that members can't comment or add to pages to help the forum.

You are well known member here and I was surprised that even some of your posts got deleted.
I agree about moderation problem of the forum, some boards seem really abandoned or a moderator just doesn't make its work good enough due to missing of time and a lot of topics to check.

[coolcoinz]

I think that laziness also has something to do with that. I haven't been posting a lot recently, but I can tell you in short what I've noticed.
When the system was introduced people were eager to check it out and started to merit each other. It quickly went into what I'd call "the abuse phase" when people noticed they won't rank up without merit and started making new ways of meriting their alts, friends, making money selling merit. This made people start to pursue ehem and counter it. Some people got banned for it, some got scared, some had their alts exposed.
I think that it was the main reason for the constant and steady decline that went into "exhaustion phase". Jet Cash for example said that he's tired by trying to merit people who don't care about the quality but focus on quantity and many people who had a lot of merit got fed up with going through hundreds of posts just to award someone.

How can we change something? I guess by not trying too hard. By finding the time to press that merit button when we see something interesting. Maybe by awarding effort, even if the poster lacks knowledge, experience, proper grammar.

[Astargath]

Well personally I have been giving out all my smerits but obviously you start with a lot at first, now I can only send 1 for each 2 merits, right? So it's hard to send when you don't have. There should be some way for high rank accounts to get more smerits to send.

[MULTIK888]

In my opinion, the downtrend of receiving and issuing Merit is a normal situation and there are several explanations for this:
1.  As well as everywhere when give out something new to them actively use. So we enter new rules with the introduction of merit was given to all the old forum members the number of merit proportional to their rank. Accordingly, as can be seen from the graphs, the users in the first months of actively spent and gave merits for good posts.
2. From thousands of users registered and active at that time, many lost accounts were hacked or just left the forum due to the changing situation in your personal life or even worse their diseases or even death from this, though small amount but also decreased participants able to give merits.
3. Every month, the forum is growing with great speed and the number of users having the right to give merits if it is not growing at a pace. Information on the forum to become a huge amount and normal messages, or just get lost in the flow of debris or are skipped between the lines, because as you know all senders of merit simply are not able to see all dostoinye messages.
4. Posts worthy of merit in my opinion is also becoming less as the a lot of important and interesting information has already been written, and all the similar is perceived not so.
5. The new positions of the forum participants are often simply not assessed as can be seen, at least these posts and worthy of merit, on the contrary, we have increasingly practiced the transfer of merit from high grade to high because people know each other and he wrote "Normal" post. In the same situation, the same position is written with the novice or younger participant just will not appreciate.
Maybe to change this trend, participants more actively giving merit should receive a little more merit at their own expense?. Because many sources of merit are not active on the network and go just for reporting

[Alone055]

Greed has taken over the merit system just as spam has taken over Bitcoin Discussion thread

I don't think there can be any involvement of greed for something that benefits you in no way even if you keep it with you all the time, and if someone thinks of collecting sMerits and keeping them as a collection, that would totally be an idiotic mindset to have. I think just because the spam has taken over the complete forum (Bitcoin Discussion might be on top 5 of most corrupted (by spammers) boards, but the whole forum is bleeding, TBH), the posts that are actually meant to be Merited are mostly missed because of the excessive spam posts submitted after them, and are that's why not seen by people who are willing to give away their sMerits.

Less than 1% of all 2 million+ accounts has ever sent or received merit. Theymos said about 600k sMerit was airdropped, and currently just over 200k has been sent. This partially came from sources, and generated another 100k+ sMerit.

My guess, since must users only spam for earning money, is that most users don't care about sending it to quality posts. Even worse: I'm pretty sure they don't even bother reading anything in their click farms.

What about the accounts that are inactive from before the system was implemented? There are hundreds or thousands of accounts that are not being used anymore. Some because the people using them have left the forum, and most of them because they had been red tagged and left unused after that by the signature spammers. All of those accounts must have also gotten sMerits from the airdrop, but since they have not been used, the sMerits are frozen within those accounts. I think those frozen sMerits would probably have made a difference assuming the inactive accounts would be quite large in number.