[...] and will gladly return the favour.
well thats not exactly how merits are supposed to work..
It is exactly how many people that you interact with use it. Rules for Thee?
paco92x just don't say those things in public, that is how the other senior members do it. Merits are most often given based on who says something and whether they have given you merits before, this is evident in the historical merit behavior and in the merit clusters. The current reality behind this system is very far away from the original vision of the ideal system.
I think that there should be more merit source members, yet there likely are even subliminal influences that contribute towards smerits to be sent to the same people over and over and over.. so how to break into such merit circles that likely exist (or maybe somewhat obviously exist?)?
It does seem a bit problematic for forum members to communicate in public threads that they are trading merits or that they are going to pay back other members for their having had received merits, even though surely we sometimes will see those kinds of behaviors happening on either an unspoken basis or a less direct basis.. yet it seems proper to mention that it is problematic for members to be publicly proclaiming to be trading merits or engaging in
quid pro quo, even if it might not be exactly against any forum rule. Maybe some forum members would lose trust in forum members who talk like trading merits, or maybe if no one said anything, then other forum members might believe that there is nothing wrong with
quid pro quo in regards to merit, which in your defense of the matter, seems to be almost what you are suggesting Satofan44
Maybe about 6 months ago when theymos reduced the merit sources from 109 to 88, he was concerned that increasing the merit sources was not necessarily going to help the merit sending situation, even though we would think that it would be better to have more merit source members rather than fewer.. since part of your presumption, Satofan44, is that deserving members are not receiving enough love (smerits) .
I am not proclaiming to know how to improve the merit systems for the better except to increase the number of merit source members, yet that is likely more work to have more merit source members.
I also don't have many clues about how to potentially take away some of the circular dynamics in regards to merits to the extent that there is likely a decent amount of support for those claims, even since there is ONLY so many posts that any merit source member can actually read in order to figure out if such post might be merit-worthy or perhaps written by a bot or perhaps written by some kind of a merit farmer or perhaps written by some disingenuine twat of a human who does not deserve merits.. .. and sometimes some posts are difficult to figure out if there is something of value contained therein or not.
Also I have seen posts from some forum members in which the forum member engages in a lot of attacks on other forum members or even engages in a lot of self-promotion and/or bragging, and even though I personally try NOT to hold grudges, forum members can sometimes contribute to the impressions that other members develop and some forum members will not forget the earlier perception of negative behavior of the other forum member or be able to put such earlier behavior past them... Whether that is trust of merit? I am not sure. The ideas might sometimes overlap, whether it is fair or not.?. or whether someone is being unfairly judged or not?.. it can be difficult to know.
Admittedly there is a bit of a subjective element to smerit sending that is difficult to overcome.. yet in his most recent iteration, theymos still has allowed ONLY 88 forum members to have such merit source status.
I bet that even getting theymos agree to the assignment of a merit Czar who would oversee the merit system matter in order to increase the number of merit source members, that would not be an easy feat to accomplish.. which seems to be evidenced by theymos's not seeming to have had created any such merit Czar position in the past 8-ish years since the merit system has been in place.. Go figure?
By the way, I have read through a lot of posts through my years on the forum, and sometimes it is just easier to send merits to the same members who tend to put out good contents and I might not even need to read their whole post to recognize and appreciate that the post is of good content and if it is not of good content, that forum member tends to put out good content on a regular and consistent basis.. and when I look at the post, I happen to recognize the member's name based on my previously having had seen a lot of good posts from that same member, then what am I going to do? Maybe i have ONLY a few seconds to decide what to do? There are some forum members who are amazing within the content and character and critical thinking attributions that come through their posts - - thinking about many of the posts of
o_e_l_e_o (since he is no longer with us).
