Analysis – Merit per post per Section/Subsection

[DdmrDdmr]

1. Introduction

I was asked recently if I could update the merit per post ratios that I calculated back in July 2018 (see Bitcointalk – Posts per Day - evolution during past six months, specifically section 4), hence this post.

In order to calculate the data, I’ve taken what I had already calculated back then, and added an additional 4 months of data (covering now in total from the 23/01/2018 up to the 22/11/2018).
The merits per interval are calculated from the cumulative of merit.txt files, and the scraped info that allows me to derive the section/subsection. The number of posts is obtained from the official forum statistics snapshots, found on archive websites.

Notes:
- Selected dates try to be one month apart from each other (depending on archived available info).

- Average merit post ratios per section/subsection vary over the months, sometimes pretty wildly from one month to another. There are multiple factors that influence this fact such as the number of posts created in the period (being on a descending trend for months), The increase on Merit Source total aggregate pool, etc.

- Deleted posts (sometimes in mass) and moved threads influence the ratios. For example, the Mining board number of posts decreased substantially between January and March 2018, leading to a negative merit per post ratio.

- Post count includes all child boards within subsection. This means that local boards aggregate for example bitcoin discussion with Ann altcoin posts in the same counter. Taking this down one more level is very cumbersome, and is not something I wish to do (I did it once for my local board and that’s about it).

- Smaller boards have easier merit/post ratio swings from one month to another.


2. Merit per post

The merit per post table I’ve created over a 10 month period (23/01/2018 up to the 22/11/2018), allows us to see the evolution of this ratio over months per section/subsection. Since the table is pretty big, I’ve place it on an external google spreadsheet document (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1cj7zosB91OE_K6SzdmjV9PtBE1Vij1k_wZsok85mXVU/edit?usp=sharing), and only summarized the recent months on the screenshot shown below:



Things that stand-out:

- The highest merit/post ratios are (looking over 10 months): 0,566 (Development & Technical Discussion), 0,413 (Serious discussion) and 0,316 (Meta).

- The current highest merit/post ratios are (23/10/2018..22/11/2018): 0,8 (Serious discussion), 0,519 (Development & Technical Discussion) and 0,426 (Mining).

- The best ratios for a Local Board are (looking over 10 months): 0,114 (German), 0,113 (Croatian) and 0,075 (French).

- The current best ratios for a Local Board are (23/10/2018..22/11/2018): 0,426 (Japanese), 0,244 (Italian) and 0,231 (German Dutch).

- The lesser ratios are occupied by some of the Altcoin boards: Altcoin Discussion, Speculation (Altcoins), Marketplace (Altcoins).

- Negative ratios have been explained above (caused by mass deletion or movements of posts).


The above is good enough to get a general idea, but ratios on a given section/subsection have likely underlying reasons which are not analysed here, and that would require an exceedingly amount of work to try to derive.

[1713933487]

1713933487

[1miau]

Great table, especially the ratio of total posts compared to merited posts is very interesting. Maybe you can create another table of a 10 month period later again and compare the first 10 months to the next 10 months and we can figure out how it will look like in the future. I assume most Merits in Altcoin boards are airdropped ones and many boards will catch up when Merit sources are getting the main part.

But I was very surprised, that the German board was top-merited over a 10 month period, but disappeared in the recent ranking:

- The best ratios for a Local Board are (looking over 10 months): 0,114 (German), 0,113 (Croatian) and 0,075 (French).
- The current best ratios for a Local Board are (23/10/2018..22/11/2018): 0,426 (Japanese), 0,244 (Italian) and 0,231 (Dutch).

By having a look at the table I assume, you have confused Dutch and German (Deutsch). 

[DdmrDdmr]

<…>

It’s also interesting to take a look at the complete external table I referenced in the OP, since it shows both the degree of post descent per section/subsection, and the evolution of the merit per post ratio over the 10 complete referenced months. If I keep the data I can evolve it over time.
 
Of course this is a general view, and from a local board’s perspective, it would also interesting to break it down into the different child boards (in order to separate general topics from ann/bounty threads for example). Doing that nevertheless is a lot more work on all fronts (merit path cleansing/parsing, post count retrieval, bigger output table as a result). Could be done perhaps later on for some specific cases.

Note: Yes, I corrected the Dutch/Deutsch misreading (@Piggy’s Maggiordomo gave me a heads-up to your post on the German board, and I corrected it after seeing you spotted it).

[DdmrDdmr]

<...>

Yes, you right about one and two. Three would require a deeper look, but as you say, content is a driver of this multidimensional puzzle (number of posts, number and type of potential meriters, content, etc.).
 
Some of the ratios have a wild variance from month to month, and it would require a case by case study to understand the whys. For example, I was surprised by the Japanese local board being at the top of the local boards for last month’s reading. The numerical reason behind (without bearing in mind the actual content of the posts), is that a staff member has managed to award a small, but much larger than usual, amount of merits to the board. Aside from that, the Japanese local board has recently dropped the amount of generated posts by more than half, thus the combination of those two numerical factors boosted the merit/post ratio eleven fold, on what is normally a very unmerited board.

[Pmalek]

DdmrDdmr I was wondering, and I hope you wont be mad that I am going a bit off topic, would it be possible to make a list of users who are holding the most sMerits and not distributing them?
I dont mean users who have the most amount of Merits in total, but users who have the most amount of non distributed merits.

For example:
User A has 150 sMerits, but he is distributing merits almost on a daily basis, so he would not be on the list.
User B has 40 sMerits and in the last 6 months he has not sent a single merit to anyone although he is active on the Forum.

It would be interesting to know because I believe that there are still many people thinking that if they send a merit to someone they will automatically have one less themselves. Might be an interesting research to find out why they are hodling their merits and why they feel that not a single post on the forum is worth meriting.

[bananaunana]

DdmrDdmr I was wondering, and I hope you wont be mad that I am going a bit off topic, would it be possible to make a list of users who are holding the most sMerits and not distributing them?
I dont mean users who have the most amount of Merits in total, but users who have the most amount of non distributed merits.

For example:
User A has 150 sMerits, but he is distributing merits almost on a daily basis, so he would not be on the list.
User B has 40 sMerits and in the last 6 months he has not sent a single merit to anyone although he is active on the Forum.

It would be interesting to know because I believe that there are still many people thinking that if they send a merit to someone they will automatically have one less themselves. Might be an interesting research to find out why they are hodling their merits and why they feel that not a single post on the forum is worth meriting.

Coin-1 made a post here about: [TOP-200] Members who have a lot of earned sMerits

But his table doesn't include the airdropped Merits, only earned ones.

[hugeblack]

-snip-

Anything that is possible, it takes a mathematical base and speed to do calculations "or a computer that does it for you."

 A. Know the number of available sMerits:
   - You have initial sMerit that can be calculated using this equation[1] plus 1/2 sMerit for each earned merit.
   - Add members to the merit sources if the number of sendable merits is greater than the number of the above.
 B. Check the latest activity and set a time constraint for a period of time.
 C. Make calculations.

-snip-
Might be an interesting research to find out why they are hodling their merits and why they feel that not a single post on the forum is worth meriting.

Do not worry about knowing why? they will lose it soon. "I expect this to happen in less than two months"
 

I'll probably publish a dump of the initial sMerit at some point.

[1] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3342949.msg35131159#msg35131159

[Upgate]

What if the where to be a merit analysis and distribution board in the forum where analysis Can be constantly updated and issues concerning merit are discussed.

The topic "merit" is undeniable one of major interest from members of the forum but it's improper coming across it on every section(apart from the meta board)  of the forum which should not be.

[DdmrDdmr]

<…>

As @bananaunana indicates, @Coin-1’s thread provides a list of the kind, but subject to some important considerations that need to be made in my opinion:

-   It does not take into account airdropped sMerit (because it is not currently available and cannot be calculated individually, even if the formula is known (*)).

-   Sent Merit Sources sMerits are subtracted, and therefore render a lower personal sMerit Available count than what Merits Sources have (that too is unavoidable).

-   People with a large amount of available sMerits are not necessarily hoarders (this consideration should depend on whether they award sMerits and in what ratio vs earned Merits).

-   The cases on the list with 0 sent sMerits are clearer cases, but looking over the profiles, there are likely multiple different reasons for not having sent any sMerits (Satoshi is not likely to come back to play around with sMerits; quite a few are high ranking members, who likely know about merits, but don’t give a damn about earning/sending them around; some are inactive accounts; others are suspicious accounts of Merit abuse and have their own agenda; etc.).

Nevertheless (see re: [TOP-200] Members who have a lot of earned sMerits), the total amount of overall unspent earned sMerit is in the 37K area. A fair amount, but not that large really compared to the over 400K that theoretically remain unspent from the initial sMerit airdrop.That is an amount that is still kept (some on inactive accounts), and probably not expected to sum up to this amount nearly a year later. I’ve often wondered if a forum originated email to these accounts, with a clear message, could stimulate them to hop on to the game.

I’m not sure it @theymos will eventually release the initial sMerit per account as @hugeblack reminds us. I think it would be wiser to contact them from the forum (an email as I stated above), and come end of year one, remove the remainder airdropped sMerit in order to avoid mal-usage in the future. I mean, if after a year it is still unused, it would be better to figure out a solution to avoid risks and move it on to others that are playing the merit game (i.e. redistribute it proportionally amongst accounts that do participate in the game).

Likely there are forum members that still consider that sending sMerits deducts from their Merit account, and that could be part of the reasoning behind some of those 400k being kept still, but even if we listed them it would not change this fact (unless people started to harass them). Perhaps the forum originated email reminders could help there in clarifying.

(*) See re: Merit & new rank requirements and Initial sMerit for every rank?. Trying to calculate it is not feasible since we cannot backtrack the activity per member in a year prior to Merit System implementation.

<…>

I think there is much less merit buzz lately in terms of number of merit related posts, likely proportional to the drop in posts in general. Specific childboard for these topics have been discussed in the past to some degree.

[LoyceV]

A great analysis, as always! And with that, you kicked me off #3 most Merited. Congratulations

I'm curious to see which boards had most Merit for deleted posts. I don't have all data for the past 10 months, but I have stored over 99% of all posts made in the past 3 months. I'll see what I can come up with.

[DdmrDdmr]

<…>

Thanks @LoyceV (I’ll probably slip back to fourth is the short run though I guess).

Yes, checking the deleted merited post’s board could be interesting. I’ve tried to retrieve the topic manually with about 30 random cases (by ignoring the message id, and just searching for the topic), but in all cases it had been deleted. 30 random manual cases is not enough to conclude, but perhaps threads are deleted more often than individual posts themselves (under a merited posts prism). Your stored post data is the best way to go for this.

I took a look at deleted posts back in May 2018 (see Analysis of Deleted Posts with sMerit), with Rank as a centre piece. A focus on board would be interesting. Let’s see what you can come up with.

[Pmalek]

Coin-1 made a post here about: [TOP-200] Members who have a lot of earned sMerits

This post will help, thanks. I see a lot of 0 awarded merits and I am thinking of going through them one by one to check who is still active.

@DdmrDdmr I was only thinking of active users who browse the forum on almost a daily basis.
@hugeblack @DdmrDdmr was there talk about merits from inactive users being taken away from their accounts and sent proportionally to active users who award merits?
 

[manfredmann]

This is a work of DdmrDdmr as expected from a user with excellent statistics and computer skills. The data that was being gathered takes a lot of time probably in the looks of that table being presented. However, I was just wondering why he/she use the screen name as DdmrDdmr to which I could not barely understand that name and does not suit to his/her talent.

[DdmrDdmr]

<...> @DdmrDdmr I was only thinking of active users who browse the forum on almost a daily basis <…>

I can’t really retrieve the frequency on users connecting to the forum, since I only download the user profile data for the user part (and there, we only have a Last Active date, aside from the Date Registered).
Somethings can be done to get a rough idea though: i.e. compare the number of posts between two dates and if that number is above a certain threshold, classify the profile as active as per the definition you consider.

@hugeblack @DdmrDdmr was there talk about merits from inactive users being taken away from their accounts and sent proportionally to active users who award merits?

Perhaps talked about by forum members, but not officially. @theymos did state though the potential possibility of having a merit decay over time. What I think could be better perhaps, is to shift it (only the airdropped sMerits) on proportionally to current users, based on received and/or awarded sMerits, with the spirit of increasing global circulation and reducing risks of sMerits being stored in accounts that are not into the game.

<…>

I am not much of a social network fan, and basically stay away from them. With that in mind, my username was created with an old time meaning to me, but without the intent for it to be of much usage (I created the account on Bitcointalk without really intending to post much/at all). I don’t even use a personal avatar for the same reasons (I did during a certain campaign, but now that I can place whatever I wish, a blank avatar seems fitting for now).

[CryptopreneurBrainboss]

A great analysis, as always! And with that, you kicked me off #3 most Merited. Congratulations

Congratulations to him, he deserve it. he makes getting many merits on a particular topic looks very easy than usual even in a time merit rewarding is reducing drastically, he still came through with his magic as usual.

Love the analysis, very self explanatory and simple.

[LoyceV]

Yes, checking the deleted merited post’s board could be interesting.

Thanks for the list of merited and deleted posts! Out of 6291 deleted posts. I have downloaded only 582 of them in the past 3 months. That could mean there's less Merit abuse now than in the 7.5 months before I started downloading all posts.

These posts have been created, merited and delected sine September 12: not my brightest moment, it's deleted after first click.
I haven't counted them yet per board, but my couch is calling me

[DdmrDdmr]

<...> I haven't counted them yet per board, but my couch is calling me

Couch comes first always, as it should ... Let’s see what crossing the data ends up showing. I don’t know if it is possible to tell the difference between a deleted post and a deleted thread, as I commented in a post above. I’ll give it a thought tomorrow (perhaps trying to scrape the whole set of deleted posts by topic and not the full message will give me the answer: if the thread still exists it should download something).

Note: the link to file.io seems to be unavailable.

[LoyceV]

I don’t know if it is possible to tell the difference between a deleted post and a deleted thread, as I commented in a post above. I’ll give it a thought tomorrow (perhaps trying to scrape the whole set of deleted posts by topic and not the full message will give me the answer: if the thread still exists it should download something).

You can easily check if a thread still exists: just try to open the link like this: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2895261 (this topic received 316 Merit and is deleted or off limits to non-Mods.

Note: the link to file.io seems to be unavailable.

I really need new hosting This works, but changed the Russian into something else: link removed.

[DdmrDdmr]

<…>You can easily check if a thread still exists: just try to open the link like this: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2895261 (this topic received 316 Merit and is deleted or off limits to non-Mods.

Yes, that is what I tried yesterday manually in 30 or so cases, and today I scraped all deleted posts but trimming the URL to topic is the same manner. Here’s what I found: only 3 of the threads still exists (managed to scrape thread content - they are self moderated threads in this case), but all the remaining 4.311 distinct threads do not (could not scrape content).

That kind of leads me to think that:
-   Deleted merited posts are on threads that are either deleted or moved to another section.
-   There are barely any self deleted posts after being merited (which I find strange).

If the above is so, thread movement is going to show as false positives in some cases of deleted merited posts. Since this is unavoidable, the deleted posts are conceptually a set of: deleted, moved, or unreachable (i.e in cases that require login and the scraper does not perform one).
I still find it weird though not to finding barely cases of merited posts being self-deleted.

I really need new hosting This works, but changed the Russian into something else: [self-removed link]

For some reason, Avast marks the link as a phishing link …

[LoyceV]

That kind of leads me to think that:
-   Deleted merited posts are on threads that are either deleted or moved to another section.
-   There are barely any self deleted posts after being merited (which I find strange).

If a post is moved to another thread, the data in theymos' data dump changes too. If it happened within the last 120 days, it shouldn't be the cause of many missing posts.

I still find it weird though not to finding barely cases of merited posts being self-deleted.

My guess would be most of the merit-abuse happened in the early days.

For some reason, Avast marks the link as a phishing link …

Just in case: please remove the link from your quote. I used a random site to upload, it could actually be fishy.

To answer the initial question: xx ("first number") many unique Merited posts (made on or after September 12, 2018)  have been deleted after receiving 1 or more Merit on the following boards:
     83 Alternate cryptocurrencies / Altcoin Discussion /
     70 Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion /
     37 Local / &#1040;&#1083;&#1100;&#1090;&#1077;&#1088;&#1085;&#1072;&#1090;&#1080;&#1074;&#1085;&#1099;&#1077; &#1082;&#1088;&#1080;&#1087;&#1090;&#1086;&#1074;&#1072;&#1083;&#1102;&#1090;&#1099; /
     30 Local / Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian) /
     29 Other / Meta /
     26 Local / &#1056;&#1072;&#1079;&#1085;&#1086;&#1077; /
     25 Alternate cryptocurrencies / Announcements (Altcoins) /
     23 Other / Beginners &amp; Help /
     20 Local / &#1053;&#1086;&#1074;&#1080;&#1095;&#1082;&#1080; /
     19 Alternate cryptocurrencies / Bounties (Altcoins) /
     19 Local / &#1053;&#1086;&#1074;&#1086;&#1089;&#1090;&#1080; /
     13 Local / &#1058;&#1088;&#1077;&#1081;&#1076;&#1077;&#1088;&#1099; /
      9 Economy / Speculation /
      9 Bitcoin / Development &amp; Technical Discussion /
      8 Local / Português (Portuguese) /
      8 Economy / Trading Discussion /
      8 Economy / Gambling /
      7 Alternate cryptocurrencies / Tokens (Altcoins) /
      7 Other / Off-topic /
      7 Other / Politics &amp; Society /
      7 Economy / Economics /
      6 Economy / Services /
      5 Alternate cryptocurrencies / Marketplace (Altcoins) /
      5 Local / Español (Spanish) /
      5 Local / &#1575;&#1604;&#1593;&#1585;&#1576;&#1610;&#1577; (Arabic) /
      5 Local / Hrvatski (Croatian) /
      5 Local / &#1056;&#1091;&#1089;&#1089;&#1082;&#1080;&#1081; (Russian) /
      4 Local / Altcoins (Bahasa Indonesia) /
      4 Other / Serious discussion /
      4 Economy / Gambling discussion /
      4 Bitcoin / Mining software (miners) /
      4 Bitcoin / Mining /
      3 Alternate cryptocurrencies / Mining (Altcoins) /
      3 Local / Alternatif Kripto-Paralar /
      3 Local / Other languages/locations /
      3 Economy / Service Announcements /
      3 Economy / Lending /
      3 Economy / Marketplace /
      3 Bitcoin / Hardware /
      3 Bitcoin / Mining support /
      3 Bitcoin / Project Development /
      2 Alternate cryptocurrencies / Speculation (Altcoins) /
      2 Local / &#1055;&#1086;&#1083;&#1080;&#1090;&#1080;&#1082;&#1072; /
      2 Local / &#1048;&#1076;&#1077;&#1080; /
      2 Local / Türkçe (Turkish) /
      2 Economy / Service Discussion /
      2 Economy / Goods /
      2 Bitcoin / Mining speculation /
      1 Local / &#1050;&#1086;&#1076;&#1077;&#1088;&#1099; /
      1 Local / Italiano (Italian) /
      1 Local / &#1041;ay&#1085;&#1090;&#1080; &#1080; a&#1080;p&#1076;po&#1087;&#1099; /
      1 Local / &#26085;&#26412;&#35486; (Japanese) /
      1 Local / Altcoins (Philippines) /
      1 Local / &#1041;&#1080;&#1079;&#1085;&#1077;&#1089; /
      1 Local / Altcoins (Hrvatski) /
      1 Local / Discussioni avanzate e sviluppo /
      1 Local / &#1070;&#1088;&#1080;&#1089;&#1090;&#1099; /
      1 Local / Ekonomi /
      1 Local / Économie et spéculation /
      1 Local / Vos sites et projets /
      1 Local / Bitcoin Haberleri /
      1 Local / Deutsch (German) /
      1 Local / Konu D&#305;&#351;&#305; /
      1 Local / Altcoins (criptomonedas alternativas) /
      1 Local / Brasil /
      1 Local / Mining (India) /
      1 Economy / Scam Accusations /
      1 Economy / Securities /
      1 Economy / Games and rounds /
      1 Economy / Reputation /
      1 Bitcoin / Electrum /
      1 Bitcoin / Press /
      1 Bitcoin / Legal /
      1 Bitcoin / Bitcoin Technical Support /

Disclaimer: I may have missed a few posts due to short down times. It's raw HTML, that would work fine if a browser processes it, but the bbcode doesn't work well with Russian this way. Click the link to see the board.