There are far too many accounts with 1 merit

[AverageGlabella]

I have recently been making an effort to report all spam comments in the Bitcoin discussion board and I have come across a trend which is worrying. There are a lot of accounts which are posting generic one liners and getting merits for it. A common theme is people rewarding merit in spam megathreads and hoping it goes unnoticed. I plan on making a list of accounts that are doing this and release it once I've hit 50+. When further looking at the accounts it looks like they go on to spam their stuff in bounties and participate in them. I thinking is that there's a lot of accounts that are connected to the same person or group and they are doing this to either be able to bump topics or earn money on bounties and are merit farming. What's going on here?

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[joniboini]

I thinking is that there's a lot of accounts that are connected to the same person or group and they are doing this to either be able to bump topics or earn money on bounties and are merit farming.

Exactly like you thought. It's highly possible that they're merit farming or trading merit. In fact, I'm a bit surprised that you're surprised about this tbh. I found a case like this many times, but it's difficult to prevent it and provide hard proof evidence even if our gut feeling told us that this is a shady activity.

You don't have to worry that much though, they'll run out of merit eventually, and they won't make lots of money when their rank is only a Jr. Member.

[The Cryptovator]

Don't waste your time by making list. We know everyone that they abuse or somehow bought 1 merit. But it's not possible to tag them just for 1 merit if there is not clear evidence that they have bought. Theymos isn't encourage to tag merit abuser if really not some strong evidence against them. It will never end, let them do it. At least merits are not drying. Making list isn't going to stop this abuse. We have made something like that previously, but nothing changes. Spreading merit better then dry.

[Lauda]

If you could create graphs for this analysis, that would be very helpful for seeing the bigger picture IMO.

[o_e_l_e_o]

There are a lot of accounts which are posting generic one liners and getting merits for it.

People buy or trade merits for this exact reason - they are shitposters who will never rank up by making a good post, so they buy a single merit or trade with their alts. They need to get to junior member to enable them to take part in some trash bounty campaign.

As Coolcryptovator says, there is very rarely proof that this one merit was bought or farmed, so there is nothing you can do about the individual users. What we need is the requirement for a signature to be displayed to be increased to 10 merit, which would make it far harder to buy or trade, and would make these spammers' merit supply dry up much more quickly. I also feel we should be more liberal with the bans for these spammers. I keep seeing the same names pop up again and again on my report list with the same one-line nonsense, but for some reason we just let them keep going.

[CryptopreneurBrainboss]

The only time an account should be investigated for merit abuse is when the account receives 5-10merits or above for a shitpost especially one line replies. Even though an account receive 20-50merit for a quality post that shouldn't be considered as merit abuse because even theymos said

you only see 3 merit-worthy posts in a month, then I'd rather you over-give each of them 50 merit than let the merit expire. That way there are more people capable of sending merit, and the "merit economy" is less top-down.

I know he was referring to merit source but average users can also send that amount not everyone is willing to search through forum and be meriting every quality post they see 1merit until they finish  their smerit.

In conclusion leave the accounts with just 1merit alone and search for bigger fish.

[Rindertiger]

I've noticed an advertisement about a Merit Buy group on Telegram a few days ago in a random shitcoin group. The group was created in late September, but is most likely still active due to the advertisement. It's maybe worth to find out which accounts are responsible but I see no chance to find it out without buying Merit and see which account sends it.

Screenshots of the group:

https://i.imgur.com/sbNyFqv.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/C4oZbxR.jpg

Group name: @merits
Merit seller (Telegram name): @milinatimosha