Is merit abuse an issue worthy of temp banning or at least DT negative trust?

[qwk]

I have been trying to enforce the merit abuse rules. 

Where can one find these rules? How were these rules enacted?

Rules can be implicit / common practice.
It would be nice to have someone come up with a list of DOs /DONTs regarding merit based on roughly 1 year of practice sooner or later.

So far, I guess it's safe to assume that it's considered "blatant merit abuse" if you receive merit in an "obvious" return of merit.
Since that's heavily subjective, usually only cases of "considerable" amounts of merit are sanctioned.
Also, a single merit to a newbie may be scrutinized.

Other than that, I'm at a loss when it comes to "rules".

[1714040174]

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[cryptohunter]

I have been trying to enforce the merit abuse rules.  

Where can one find these rules? How were these rules enacted?

I'm not one for too many rules. However, if you can just give 50 merits to your alts or mates for making the same 2 posts then let's just stop worrying about merit and I would say after making full member merit should not be really be linked to rank. Lots of good posters in the ALT section will never rank up. Merit can just be a nice way of tipping your hat to a post you agree with or as a friendly gesture. The danger is trying to imply it correlates to the net value of the user in anyway.

I have seen even high merit and high rank members give chunks of merit to posts that are incorrect based on hard observable evidence contained within the same thread. Merit is more for sharing an opinion that demonstrating the post has real objective value.

Also the most damning of all was a bunch of stats that show if you remove all merit passed between the top 0.13% of users on this board (that's if we say 150k real users that have posted this month not the 2 million members that have joined at some point) ... so going towards a 1/10th of 1%.

If you remove their internal merit swapping their merits crash by 50-75%

If you remove the merits gained in meta you would likely see no body except a handful have more than 150 earned merits. I am talking satoshi, theymos and perhaps literally a handful of others.

Those that never leave the alt boards are likely to have zero earned merits whatever they post and bitcoin talk does a bit better.

So to me meta has 2 real applications if taken at face value

1. a weapon against scammers  account farmers (that could be used with way more power with junior boards)
2. a friendly hat tipping and acknowledgement of sharing a view or stance on something and saying thanks for a request.

I have seen so many persons using their merit score as part of an argument as it if lends weight. To me it does not.

I don't actually think there is anything wrong with merit as it is because already it is helping with scammers, account farmers, and is very net positive. However implying there is some deeper objective meaning to it is false.  

I think if we had junior boards even just for the alt discussion board you would over night see the people here just trying to cash cow this board would drop away.

[pugman]

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Overall merit is just a stupid intangible shit that is made of thin air, and people give so big fucks about it, whilst they could be doing so many better things in life. I guess this is what it feels to be , when you're broke and anti-social, so you come out here in an internet forum , and try to make yourself feel better whilst earning in small bits and pieces of bitcoin.

I don't get how exactly merit is stopping scammers? Spammers would make sense, scammers not so much.

People really also need to get over merit, its almost a year now, go and actually do something productive.

[cryptohunter]

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Overall merit is just a stupid intangible shit that is made of thin air, and people give so big fucks about it, whilst they could be doing so many better things in life. I guess this is what it feels to be , when you're broke and anti-social, so you come out here in an internet forum , and try to make yourself feel better whilst earning in small bits and pieces of bitcoin.

I don't get how exactly merit is stopping scammers? Spammers would make sense, scammers not so much.

People really also need to get over merit, its almost a year now, go and actually do something productive.

Agreed.

Well, spammers directly for sure. However it also does prevent account farmers powering up and selling them to scammers. I would also hope that cutting off all spammers of sigs promoting scamming icos will stop them attracting funds and eventually hopefully even stop launching them. I personally view capped icos that meet their hard limit in 30 seconds a huge scam. This is like a huge instamine or even premine in the old pow days. That's not allowing for the icos that just collect and leave with the btc/eth

[Quickseller]

I have been trying to enforce the merit abuse rules. 

Where can one find these rules? How were these rules enacted?

Rules can be implicit / common practice.
It would be nice to have someone come up with a list of DOs /DONTs regarding merit based on roughly 1 year of practice sooner or later.

So far, I guess it's safe to assume that it's considered "blatant merit abuse" if you receive merit in an "obvious" return of merit.
Since that's heavily subjective, usually only cases of "considerable" amounts of merit are sanctioned.
Also, a single merit to a newbie may be scrutinized.

Other than that, I'm at a loss when it comes to "rules".

I am strongly against telling people what they can and cannot do with things they have duely earned, and merit falls into this category by way of the fact they ultimately received merit for making a ‘good’ post at one point.

Also these ‘rules’ are something that a dozen or so people have implemented (and enforce unevenly) out of two million registered users and hundreds of thousands of active users. These people were in no way elected to make the rules and you can’t argue this is a private forum because it’s own is on the record as being against these rules.

Further, the concept of merit, or limited amount of karma that can be sent based on the amount received is a very uncommon concept and I would not be surprised to see many who are unfamiliar with merit testing it out with their alts. Sending merit is not reversible, so if someone does this and later sees it is “against the rules” they are liable to receive negative trust forever even if they conduct themselves in a trustworthy way.

Sending merit to an alt is not akin to scamming, however the presence of a negative rating implies someone is a scammer. If someone sees many people with negative ratings for this reason, they will give less weight to a negative rating to an actual scammer who has legitimately (attempted to) stolen money.

[suchmoon]

Sending merit to an alt is not akin to scamming

Relax, Quicksy. We've already seen this kind of attempt to redefine "scam" as something that steals money so that you could claim you're not a scammer. However to most sane folks here a scam is a fraudulent scheme even if it doesn't result in actual monetary loss. Pretending to be someone you're not (a high-ranked/meritorious user) is one such scheme. Wear your red tags proudly, you deserve them.