Merit source observations

[tranthidung]

Many months ago, on 24th January 2018, merit appeared in the forum, as airdropped merits (and sMerits) for grandfather accounts, then it has become a gift for good posters.
There is no benefits to beg for merits as well as merit sources, because merit beggars might get negative trust or bad feedback in return.

In the thread, I publish observations on merit source growth over months.
For more details, there are some threads to read:
Merit & new rank requirement
Enhanced newbie restrictions & requirements
One year anniversary of merit system
Merit source growth history, if you know it, please help me (I appreciated all kindly help from users in that thread).

Merit source stats page

{list} Open Merit Source Applications,waiting list.
{LIST}of the Merit Sources asking for more smerit. Done! Thank you theymos. (locked for now but @iasenko might reopen it anytime later).

Some helpful opinion of theymos on merit sources:

Certain users are designated as "merit sources". They can create new merit out of nothing, up to a limited number per month (which differs per source). I will not be posting a definitive list of merit sources (so that people don't bug them too much), though you'll soon figure out who they are if you pay attention.

Merit sources are free to reveal their source amounts, though I think it may be a bit unwise. While it will eventually become obvious roughly what the source amounts are from the stats, there's a huge difference between showing up in a "list of probable merit sources" and having a quote out there of you basically saying "I'm a merit source, come beg me for merit, complain about every merit I send, and accuse me of being part of the anti-X/pro-Y conspiracy."

Notes:
- Update will be made in last post, not in OP.
- If you find something, or discover incorrect data, please let me know.
- Date presents in the format: dd/mm/yyyy.
- Dates present in the dataset might not exactly the day when total merit sources reach those figures, they are just dates recorded arbitrarily by users.
- The first datapoint (24/1/2018), I got the smerits at 8125 smerits (it might be incorrect), from that post

Each source has a different limit per 30 days. The current average is 185, and in total up to 8125 merit could be created per month.

Nevertheless, I think it is correct, because about 4 hours after that post, theymos made this one, in which we see there was still 35 total merit sources

I added stats pages:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=merit;stats
And per-user summary pages like:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=merit;u=35

Dataset:

Code:

. list id day month2 year date meritsource smerit, abb(30)

     +-------------------------------------------------------------+
     | id   day   month2   year        date   meritsource   smerit |
     |-------------------------------------------------------------|
  1. |  1    24        1   2018   24jan2018            35     8125 |
  2. |  2    26        1   2018   26jan2018            49     9025 |
  3. |  3     1        3   2018   01mar2018            57    11975 |
  4. |  4    12        3   2018   12mar2018            77    17650 |
  5. |  5    22        3   2018   22mar2018            80    17800 |
     |-------------------------------------------------------------|
  6. |  6    18        5   2018   18may2018            80    18500 |
  7. |  7     6        7   2018   06jul2018            82    18900 |
  8. |  8    11        7   2018   11jul2018            83    19100 |
  9. |  9    17        9   2018   17sep2018           120    23045 |
 10. | 10    17       11   2018   17nov2018           119    22045 |
     |-------------------------------------------------------------|
 11. | 11    22       12   2018   22dec2018           120    22055 |
 12. | 12     5        1   2019   05jan2019           123    20735 |
 13. | 13     6        2   2019   06feb2019           122    20835 |
 14. | 14    15        3   2019   15mar2019           130    20605 |
 15. | 15    27        6   2019   27jun2019           131    21045 |
     |-------------------------------------------------------------|
 16. | 16    30       10   2019   30oct2019           130    20895 |
 17. | 17    14       11   2019   14nov2019            90    18821 |
 18. | 18    15       11   2019   15nov2019            98    21671 |
     +-------------------------------------------------------------+

Time series plots

Combined plot
Note:
- To make combined plot looks better, I created a new variable, meritsource100, that equals meritsource * 100

[1714501424]

1714501424

[The Sceptical Chymist]

OP, this is good data to see, but I'm confused as to whether the sMerit is what's held by the merit sources or what the sources have distributed.  I looked for the answer to that in your post but perhaps I'm missing something.

Looks like Theymos hasn't been adding a lot of new merit sources in the past year--I sort of figured as much, since I hadn't seen that many applications and hadn't heard about new sources being added.  But at least there are more now than there were last September, and since Meta hasn't been flooded with "how I earn meritz" threads lately, I'm assuming the situation isn't too bad.  When newbies are constantly whining about how they're not earning merits, you know there aren't enough being circulated.

Might be good to overlay those graphs as well, but either way props for posting the data.

[tranthidung]

OP, this is good data to see, but I'm confused as to whether the sMerit is what's held by the merit sources or what the sources have distributed.  I looked for the answer to that in your post but perhaps I'm missing something.

My dataset only presents total merit sources and total smerits allocated to all those sources per each 30 days.
You can observe it there: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=merit;stats=sources. For now, we have:

Code:

There are 131 merit sources with a total merit generation of up to 21045 sMerit per 30 days

For your question, I do think @DdmrDdmr can give you an answer, but I don't know it will satisfy your curiousity or not. Because I believe he might only give you raw figures, and of course not exactly what you wanted.
He can give you total merits/ smerits earned, and distributed of each sources, but it is difficult to screen and differentiate between smerits get from earned merits and smerits get as sources from theymos.
Even DdmrDdmr can get it, he might not publicly disclose because core ideas of theymos is not give merit beggars more details to annoying begging merit sources.

Looks like Theymos hasn't been adding a lot of new merit sources in the past year--I sort of figured as much, since I hadn't seen that many applications and hadn't heard about new sources being added.  But at least there are more now than there were last September, and since Meta hasn't been flooded with "how I earn meritz" threads lately, I'm assuming the situation isn't too bad.  When newbies are constantly whining about how they're not earning merits, you know there aren't enough being circulated.

As I know of, theymos pay more attention on merit source application in local boards, recent months.

Might be good to overlay those graphs as well, but either way props for posting the data.

I actually made it with an initial OP, but there are huge gaps between to variables, meritsource and smerits, in hundreds and thousands, so combined plot looks not good.

Ok, fine!
Note:
- To make combined plot looks better, I created a new variable, meritsource100, that equals meritsource * 100

[DdmrDdmr]

<…>

I don’t really keep track of who the Merit Sources are, although @Coin-1 does a pretty good job to identify the majority of them in his thread (see [TOP-200] The most generous users giving merits). Not all have been detected though (specially the smaller or most recent additions that earn merits per se).

I therefore do not track nor try to infer each one’s allocation and how much of it they spend, although on an individual basis, you can get a rough idea by taking a look at their Sent Merit on the Personal Summary (simply type the username and press enter).

[tranthidung]

I don’t really keep track of who the Merit Sources are
< ... >
I therefore do not track nor try to infer each one’s allocation and how much of it they spend, although on an individual basis

Thank you for your reply, that gives detailed answer for @The Pharmacist's question, but honestly I don't have interest about those things. Because it is not my business, and I think we just let merit sources do their works. There is no good reasons to follow their works as sources, because they actually good users / sources, and know how to do their works, and months passed since the last remove of merit sources (one or two) due to abusements or misuses of merits from sources; not from their own request like @Vod.

Dataset in OP is good enough to give us an overview on merit sources and available smerits from them per month.
With current statistics:
- Total users (includes inactive ones too) at 2659437, due to Statistics center
- Total smerits for all sources per 30 days at 21045

There are 131 merit sources with a total merit generation of up to 21045 sMerit per 30 days

It means within each 30 days, one user can get around 0.008 merit.

Code:

. di 21045/2659437
.00791333

However, if we assume that there are only 1 percent of those users ( ~ 26595 = 2659437/100) are active and good ones, each of them will get nearly 0.8 merits per 30 days from all sources.

Code:

. di 21045/(2659437/100)
.7913329

Yes, this is estimated one good users can get from merit sources, but they can earn more from non-merit-source users (with above assumptions). I don't believe the forum has around 27k active and good users.
If you can, please scrap figure on total active merited users last 30 days (active merited means receive above 2 merits).

[DdmrDdmr]

<…> If you can, please scrap figure on total active merited users last 30 days (active merited means receive above 2 merits).<…>

Active is subject to multiple definitions. For example, @vod makes it 149.405, being that of the count of all profiles that have logged in within the last three months.

Your definition would be that of merited >= 2 merits gained in the last 30 days, and results in 1.145 distinct profiles (31/07/2019 .. early morning of 30/08/2019), with the following distribution:

Code:

nMerits	nUsers
1	727 (not included in the 1.145 above reported total)
2	285
3	148
4	91
5	93
6	45
7	48
8	33
9	28
10	31
11	16
12	20
13	21
14	20
15	23
16	11
17	11
18	7
19	9
20	7
21	10
22	8
23	7
24	5
25	9
26	3
27	6
28	3
29	6
30	6
31	6
32	6
33	3
34	5
35	8
36	7
37	3
38	1
39	3
40	1
41	3
42	3
43	2
44	3
45	1
46	6
47	5
48	3
49	5
50	3
51	2
52	1
53	2
54	3
56	1
57	3
58	1
59	1
61	1
62	1
63	2
64	2
65	1
66	1
67	3
69	2
70	1
71	1
73	1
78	1
79	1
80	1
81	2
83	1
84	1
85	2
89	1
90	1
92	1
99	1
100	1
105	1
111	2
114	1
116	1
117	1
118	1
119	1
145	1
155	1
176	1
186	1
187	1
222	1

[tranthidung]

Active is subject to multiple definitions. For example, @vod makes it 149.405, being that of the count of all profiles that have logged in within the last three months.

Your definition would be that of merited >= 2 merits gained in the last 30 days, and results in 1.145 distinct profiles (31/07/2019 .. early morning of 30/08/2019), with the following distribution:

It is just an assumption to see how merit circulated in the forum, and do current smerits allocation to merit sources per month enough for active and good users or not. Sticking with this assumption, and your simple analysis result, we can see that there are around 18 merits for each active and good users per 30 days, only from 131 merit sources. Some users might earn more than 18 merits per month, some others might earn less. It is not correct estimation, because there are so many bias factors, but at least from the estimation, I do think current sMerit supply from merit sources is enough for good users to rank up. The rest thing totally depends on their works.

Code:

. di 21045/1145
18.379913

Interesting finding that with the assumption (actively posting, and received >= 2 merits per 30 days), there are only 0.43% of forum users (at 2659437) are active, and good ones.  It makes me shocked, honestly.

Code:

. di 1145/2659437*100
.04305423

[tranthidung]

Update:

I don't know which day it happened but today, the forum has only 130 merit sources in total. One merit source was removed.
I believe it happened within last few days.

There are 130 merit sources with a total merit generation of up to 20895 sMerit per 30 days

Updated data:

Code:

. list id day month2 year date meritsource smerit, abb(30)

     +-------------------------------------------------------------+
     | id   day   month2   year        date   meritsource   smerit |
     |-------------------------------------------------------------|
  1. |  1    24        1   2018   24jan2018            35        . |
  2. |  2    26        1   2018   26jan2018            49     9025 |
  3. |  3     1        3   2018   01mar2018            57    11975 |
  4. |  4    12        3   2018   12mar2018            77    17650 |
  5. |  5    22        3   2018   22mar2018            80    17800 |
     |-------------------------------------------------------------|
  6. |  6    18        5   2018   18may2018            80    18500 |
  7. |  7     6        7   2018   06jul2018            82    18900 |
  8. |  8    11        7   2018   11jul2018            83    19100 |
  9. |  9    17        9   2018   17sep2018           120    23045 |
 10. | 10    17       11   2018   17nov2018           119    22045 |
     |-------------------------------------------------------------|
 11. | 11    22       12   2018   22dec2018           120    22055 |
 12. | 12     5        1   2019   05jan2019           123    20735 |
 13. | 13     6        2   2019   06feb2019           122    20835 |
 14. | 14    15        3   2019   15mar2019           130    20605 |
 15. | 15    27        6   2019   27jun2019           131    21045 |
     |-------------------------------------------------------------|
 16. | 16    30       10   2019   30oct2019           130    20895 |
     +-------------------------------------------------------------+

Last time when theymos removed one or two merit sources, he added dozen of new merit sources (some months ago). Good luck for all merit source applicants.

[Quickseller]

Update:

I don't know which day it happened but today, the forum has only 130 merit sources in total. One merit source was removed.
I believe it happened within last few days.

There are 130 merit sources with a total merit generation of up to 20895 sMerit per 30 days

Assuming that exactly one person was removed (in theory, two people could have been removed, and one added, or whatever), the person removed had a monthly source of 150.

This might allow someone to look at sent data and narrow who was removed.

[tranthidung]

Assuming that exactly one person was removed (in theory, two people could have been removed, and one added, or whatever), the person removed had a monthly source of 150.

This might allow someone to look at sent data and narrow who was removed.

You are right.
I usually check merit stat page every day but sometimes I forget to check it daily, so that change assumed to happen very recently.

[suchmoon]

I don't know which day it happened but today, the forum has only 130 merit sources in total. One merit source was removed.

Could be this: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5196076

[Quickseller]

Assuming that exactly one person was removed (in theory, two people could have been removed, and one added, or whatever), the person removed had a monthly source of 150.

This might allow someone to look at sent data and narrow who was removed.

You are right.
I usually check merit stat page every day but sometimes I forget to check it daily, so that change assumed to happen very recently.

I would not be surprised if theymos were to add a replacement merit source at the same time a merit source resigns/gets fired. I believe theymos added multiple merit sources when Vod resigned from being a merit source.

In all likelihood, this was only Vadi2323 being removed as per the thread suchmoon posted above.

[tranthidung]

Update:

I don't know which day it happened but yesterday (I did check the merit source stat page recent days), the forum has only 90 merit sources in total (from the previous figure at 130). 40 merit sources were removed. The last time we saw such very low total merit sources is at 11/7/2018 with 83 merit sources in total. Simultaneously, the total sMerits allocated to merit sources decreased to 18821

Fortunately, today, the forum has 98 merit sources in total (from the previous figure at 130) and the total sMerits allocation for each 30 days increase to 21671 (from the previous figure at 20895).

• Total merit sources: decrease 24.6%
• Total sMerits allocated each 30 days: increase 3.7%

Code:

. di (130-98)/130*100
24.615385

. di (21671-20895)/20895*100
3.7138071

It is a big move!

There are 98 merit sources with a total merit generation of up to 21671 sMerit per 30 days

Time-series plot:

Updated data:

Code:

. list id day month2 year date meritsource smerit, abb(30)

     +-------------------------------------------------------------+
     | id   day   month2   year        date   meritsource   smerit |
     |-------------------------------------------------------------|
  1. |  1    24        1   2018   24jan2018            35     8125 |
  2. |  2    26        1   2018   26jan2018            49     9025 |
  3. |  3     1        3   2018   01mar2018            57    11975 |
  4. |  4    12        3   2018   12mar2018            77    17650 |
  5. |  5    22        3   2018   22mar2018            80    17800 |
     |-------------------------------------------------------------|
  6. |  6    18        5   2018   18may2018            80    18500 |
  7. |  7     6        7   2018   06jul2018            82    18900 |
  8. |  8    11        7   2018   11jul2018            83    19100 |
  9. |  9    17        9   2018   17sep2018           120    23045 |
 10. | 10    17       11   2018   17nov2018           119    22045 |
     |-------------------------------------------------------------|
 11. | 11    22       12   2018   22dec2018           120    22055 |
 12. | 12     5        1   2019   05jan2019           123    20735 |
 13. | 13     6        2   2019   06feb2019           122    20835 |
 14. | 14    15        3   2019   15mar2019           130    20605 |
 15. | 15    27        6   2019   27jun2019           131    21045 |
     |-------------------------------------------------------------|
 16. | 16    30       10   2019   30oct2019           130    20895 |
 17. | 17    14       11   2019   14nov2019            90    18821 |
 18. | 18    15       11   2019   15nov2019            98    21671 |
     +-------------------------------------------------------------+

Last time when theymos removed one or two merit sources, he added dozen of new merit sources (some months ago). I would go crazy if theymos adds 32 new merit sources in a row when merit system has been in very stable operational phase. Anyway, good luck for all merit source applicants.

For theoritical increase of 30-days sMerits for each source, let assume each source receive same sMerits before and after the latest changes.

Code:

. di 20895/130
160.73077

. di 21671/98
221.13265

. di (222-161)/161*100
37.888199

From the above calculation, each source was allocated 161 and 222 sMerits before and after the latest changes, respectively. So it means each source theoritically received around 61 more sMerits or 38-percent of increase for their 30-days allocated sMerits.

You wrote this

Mine was increased as well. The adjustment is based on the last 6 months of sMerit sent including both source merit and personal merit and the amount was multiplied by 175%.

So the assumption above is wrong, it is just for fun to give us a kind of estimation.

[hugeblack]

Fortunately, today, the forum has 98 merit sources in total (from the previous figure at 130) and the total sMerits allocation for each 30 days increase to 21671 (from the previous figure at 20895).

I think what happened is a modification of the algorithm for selecting Merit sources to be somewhat automated. @theymos calculated numbers based on spending during the last 6 months with the deletion of inactive sources and the distribution of sMerits to the rest of the sources.

However, if this would've caused you to have a source merit of less than 10, then you were removed as a merit source

In short, inactive sources were deleted and 8 new members added.

[logfiles]

I don't know which day it happened but yesterday (I did check the merit source stat page recent days), the forum has only 90 merit sources in total (from the previous figure at 130). 40 merit sources were removed. The last time we saw such very low total merit sources is at 11/7/2018 with 83 merit sources in total. Simultaneously, the total sMerits allocated to merit sources decreased to 18821

Wooow that was some huge number of removed merit sources. I think their inactivity explains why there was a very low supply of Merits in the past few months.

It also beats my understanding why someone who go through the trouble of applying to be a merit source, yet they very well know that they are not going to be active in the forum. It would be understandable if it was a handful of chaps but 40 inactive merit sources is a huge number.

Hopeful the double allocations to active merit sources will try to solve the problem

[Welsh]

Wooow that was some huge number of removed merit sources. I think their inactivity explains why there was a very low supply of Merits in the past few months.

It also beats my understanding why someone who go through the trouble of applying to be a merit source, yet they very well know that they are not going to be active in the forum. It would be understandable if it was a handful of chaps but 40 inactive merit sources is a huge number.

Hopeful the double allocations to active merit sources will try to solve the problem

Most of those merit sources were probably assigned the role at the start of the merit system. Not everyone had to apply to become a merit source. I'm not sure what the criteria was to become a merit source at the beginning, but it seems to me that theymos wants to keep around 20,000 merit each month in circulation, and will not add anymore merit sources until there are inactive users. That's just based on my observations the last few times merit sources have been added, and removed. 

[LoyceV]

Inactive Merit sources got removed, so there's no loss there for the amount of Merit being distributed by sources. The active sources got an increase (and some were added), so in total I expect the (lower number of) Merit sources to distribute a higher amount of Merit. We'll see in the coming weeks.

[tranthidung]

Long time and I don't update it. Here you go:

• Total merit sources: 97
• Total monthly merit generation: 21171

OP will be update later.

Source: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=merit;stats=sources

One merit source left his position in May 2020: I've quit my volunteer merit source status

I knew it because fillippone made that one One merit source has just been demoted? so thank you so much fil.

[tranthidung]

Here you go with an update

• Total merit sources: 111 (14 additional new merit sources from 97 previously)
• Total monthly merit generation: 34139 (from 21171 previously) that equals to 61.3% increase.
• Congratulations to new merit sources
• I hope that theymos did not increase sourced merits for merit source that is out for personal interest

[fillippone]

Here you go with an update

• Total merit sources: 111 (14 additional new merit sources from 97 previously)
• Total monthly merit generation: 34139 (from 21171 previously) that equals to 61.3% increase.
• Congratulations to new merit sources
• I hope that theymos did not increase sourced merits for merit source that is out for personal interest

Any hint on who the new merit sources are?
I saw one of them confessing on another thread. So at least 13 missings (assuming Theymos didn't demote anyone).

[tranthidung]

Any hint on who the new merit sources are?
I saw one of them confessing on another thread. So at least 13 missings (assuming Theymos didn't demote anyone).

I don't know and I guess we only know who are new merit sources in after 1 (at least) to 2 months.

• [TOP-200] The most generous users giving merits. You can detect them by that algorithm as well as suddenly increase of sent merits since early of July.
• [LIST]Open Merit Source Applications,waiting list. You can guess about some new merit sources from there. That list was last updated in November 2020.

[tranthidung]

1 year and I come back.

• Honestly, I did not check merit sources page in many months
• So I don't know when the latest change was made
• But the update is, currently "there are 110 merit sources with a total merit generation of up to 33989 sMerit per 30 days"
• It is minor change compares to 1 year ago, in July 2021. I guess 1 merit source was removed.

[fillippone]

1 year and I come back.

• Honestly, I did not check merit sources page in many months
• So I don't know when the latest change was made
• But the update is, currently "there are 110 merit sources with a total merit generation of up to 33989 sMerit per 30 days"
• It is minor change compares to 1 year ago, in July 2021. I guess 1 merit source was removed.

Nice find!
It has been almost one year since last merit source shuffle.
Wondering if we will have another adjustment on July 17th, the date of the first anniversary.

[Rikafip]

It has been almost one year since last merit source shuffle.
Wondering if we will have another adjustment on July 17th, the date of the first anniversary.

Looking at the sent merit per month, I don't think that theymos  will do the same thing he did year ago. I think that situation merit wise is pretty good and much better compared to year ago when theymos introduced new merit sources and removed the inactive ones. For example, last month 26,486 merits were shared which is a ~100% increase compared to year ago (June 2021) during which only 13,286 merits were shared.

[tranthidung]

It has been almost one year since last merit source shuffle.

The silence of merit shuffle is one of reasons I did not regularly visit merit source page as I often did before the latest reshuffle wave.

Wondering if we will have another adjustment on July 17th, the date of the first anniversary.

I guess not. If something happens, it would be very minor or small changes in current merit sources and / or adding very little new merit sources. As I recall, there are very little merit source applications recent months.

I think that situation merit wise is pretty good and much better compared to year ago when theymos introduced new merit sources and removed the inactive ones. For example, last month 26,486 merits were shared which is a ~100% increase compared to year ago (June 2021) during which only 13,286 merits were shared.

theymos has many criteria and total distributed merit per month by all merit sources to consider and make any changes for merit sources and monthly smerit allocations for them. Such as

• Distribution changes in local boards or local threads.
• Ratio of total merited posts/ total posts monthly
• Rate of merit per merited posts in general and over boards
• And more

After 5 years here, should I apply to be a merit source and join the gang 

[Halab]

• It is minor change compares to 1 year ago, in July 2021. I guess 1 merit source was removed.

You are right there is one less Merit Source. And in my opinion, from what I've seen in the last few weeks, it is the MS that had to ask not to be a MS anymore.

[fillippone]

• It is minor change compares to 1 year ago, in July 2021. I guess 1 merit source was removed.

You are right there is one less Merit Source. And in my opinion, from what I've seen in the last few weeks, it is the MS that had to ask not to be a MS anymore.

You obviously know something, but you cannot tell us much.
I have seen only a single merit source that has completely stopped sending merits since a couple of months.
I don’t know if we are talking about the same person.

[Halab]

You obviously know something, but you cannot tell us much.

Mods can see the MS list, so it was easy to make the deduction. But I don't really know the details, if the ex-MS wants to talk about it, he/she will.

I have seen only a single merit source that has completely stopped sending merits since a couple of months.
I don’t know if we are talking about the same person.

Completely ? Ha yes, now that you mention that, a big MS seems to be inactive for a few months.

[fillippone]

Completely ? Ha yes, now that you mention that, a big MS seems to be inactive for a few months.

Inactive is just part of the story: he has been writing quite regularly and got merits. He just stopped sending merits, both as MS and as regular user.
I think he might have good reasons for this.

[JayJuanGee]

Completely ? Ha yes, now that you mention that, a big MS seems to be inactive for a few months.

Inactive is just part of the story: he has been writing quite regularly and got merits. He just stopped sending merits, both as MS and as regular user.
I think he might have good reasons for this.

On Strike.

Against dee cornz.

don't like king daddy no more.


bumped his head and forgot the meaning of "my lil precious."


Got bitten by a skunk and mistakenly presumed that it was a honey badger.

Was earning 20% "yield" through various imitation bitcoin entities, and found out that NGU technologies no doesn't work on dee fake cornz.. and instead of losing 100% on the best asymmetric bet that man has seen to be designed to pump forever.. lost 10x more cornz than he had.. so bumbed out about not having no cornz.. and ONLY having negative cornz.. .... ..

Pro tip:  don't be gambling with dee cornz... it's already designed to pump forever.. why get greeeeeeeeeeeddy?

[fillippone]

Completely ? Ha yes, now that you mention that, a big MS seems to be inactive for a few months.

Inactive is just part of the story: he has been writing quite regularly and got merits. He just stopped sending merits, both as MS and as regular user.
I think he might have good reasons for this.

@Ratimov just confirmed not being a merit source anymore.
It is now up to him if he wants to disclose a little bit about the reasons that led him to this decision.

[Halab]

@Ratimov just confirmed not being a merit source anymore.
It is now up to him if he wants to disclose a little bit about the reasons that led him to this decision.

Weird. Because technically he is still merit source, I still see him in the MS list with a big merit allocation. But indeed, he doesn't give merits anymore.
He does what he wants after all.

[tranthidung]

@Ratimov just confirmed not being a merit source anymore.
It is now up to him if he wants to disclose a little bit about the reasons that led him to this decision.

First, congratulations for your big achievement, with 5 digits! Very impressive fil. I know you long enough and have some personal discussion with you but what you achieved, just insane!

Second, I knew of some drama with merit sources, and some of them revoked to be a source but it happened in 2018 or 2019. What happened with Ratimov? I actually did not know about it.

Maybe I barely visit Reputation board so I missed something there. Anyway, honestly and neutrally said, Ratimov is another great asset of the forum just like you.

[_BlackStar]

Second, I knew of some drama with merit sources, and some of them revoked to be a source but it happened in 2018 or 2019. What happened with Ratimov? I actually did not know about it.

Not much is known about what happened to him ^{[only he knows better about this than we do].} I just know that he hasn't spent much of his sMerit in the last few months but today 1 big transaction was issued along with the confirmed that he is no longer the merit source on the link referred by @filippone. Really, I also think that he is an asset on this forum whether one likes him or not, and to be honest there are probably a lot of users who really miss his contributions right now.

To our merit source @filippone, congratulations on reaching your new milestone today. That 10K merit is something special to have.

[Daniel91]

Completely ? Ha yes, now that you mention that, a big MS seems to be inactive for a few months.

Inactive is just part of the story: he has been writing quite regularly and got merits. He just stopped sending merits, both as MS and as regular user.
I think he might have good reasons for this.

@Ratimov just confirmed not being a merit source anymore.
It is now up to him if he wants to disclose a little bit about the reasons that led him to this decision.

I'm sorry about that, Ratimov is really a very prominent member of this forum and has helped many members in the past.
I guess it has become a burden for him to receive many requests for help with merits, which is understandable.
I used to get spam messages in my inbox from unknown new members begging me for merits and sometimes it really becomes a burden.
Ratimov is indeed a deserving member of this forum and should be thanked for everything he has done.
Filippone, 10 k merits, congratulation, a great achievement 

[fillippone]

I used to get spam messages in my inbox from unknown new members begging me for merits and sometimes it really becomes a burden.

Well, this is weird.
I rarely get this kind of messages.
Either or I am not particularly supportive of newbie, so they don’t even bother trying to message me, or on the contrary i always help voluntarily, so they don’t even bother to message me.
Who knows!!

[Little Mouse]

• It is minor change compares to 1 year ago, in July 2021. I guess 1 merit source was removed.

You are right there is one less Merit Source. And in my opinion, from what I've seen in the last few weeks, it is the MS that had to ask not to be a MS anymore.

There's one more MS at least I know who has been removed from MS list as per the request of the MS. MS requested theymos to remove him and theymos did. I was talking with him few weeks back, and incidentally, he shared that with me.

[fillippone]

<…>

Very sad to know.
I did noticed, doing my usual [META] analysis for the Italian board, that the Russian board had a few problems in terms of post and merits in the last months.
I guessed it has to do with the ongoing situation, and also thought the interaction between Russian speaking users, if I may, could become more difficult.

Sorry to hear the tone in the community caused you to leave.
I think it is a net loss for the forum.

[tranthidung]

Therefore, some Merit Sources do not always give away their 30-day quota in full for a simple reason: there is simply nowhere to distribute them, unless you increase the average value of the given merit per post.

Please don't increase merit per post according to their same quality.

It is not fair for people years ago have to struggle to rank up and nowadays simply posting some merit-fishing initiatives and receive a lot of merit. I don't call them as shit posters, their post quality is good enough but let's keep their rank-up as natural as it should be. Don't distort your rules of meriting only because you feel you must keep your source-merit bag as emptiest as possible.

[Rikafip]

It is not fair for people years ago have to struggle to rank up and nowadays simply posting some merit-fishing initiatives and receive a lot of merit. I don't call them as shit posters, their post quality is good enough but let's keep their rank-up as natural as it should be. Don't distort your rules of meriting only because you feel you must keep your source-merit bag as emptiest as possible.

Isn't it better that people nowadays can rank up easier than years ago? From my understanding, point of merit system is to prevent shitposters and spammer from ranking up and not to make it a struggle for decent members to rank up like it was at the beginning (at least that's what you said).

[BlackHatCoiner]

It is not fair for people years ago

This is the same as saying "It's not fair to rise the price of coffee, because it costed less a year ago" or "It's not fair to pay 100,000 sats for a product, because some people four years ago paid 0.01 BTC for it". In both cases, it's not the merchant's fault; it's just the nature of inflation/deflation.

Merit sources are more than they were few years ago. sMerits have increased. It's natural, therefore, to reward more generously.

[tranthidung]

Isn't it better that people nowadays can rank up easier than years ago? From my understanding, point of merit system is to prevent shitposters and spammer from ranking up and not to make it a struggle for decent members to rank up like it was at the beginning (at least that's what you said).

Misunderstood perhaps.

I meant good posters deserve to rank up. Fast or slow, it depends on their contributions but if they don't actually make excellent contents, merit they received should be equal to their contribution quality.

It is like you make a charity to build up your reputation but if you shows it publicly, your reputation will increase faster but it does not actually make your reputation is better than others who do charity silently. In short term, make noise will increase it a bit but in long term, it is the same.

You never can verify what they actually do from their initiative announcement but you can verify their post quality.

Merit sources are more than they were few years ago. sMerits have increased. It's natural, therefore, to reward more generously.

It is part of the merit system issue. theymos watches it carefully and rarely to make significant changes in merit source number and merit source allocation. Over inflation of merit source and merit source allocation can create a new generation of pseudo-quality members who will turn to likely spammers after ranking up.

[_BlackStar]

I meant good posters deserve to rank up. Fast or slow, it depends on their contributions but if they don't actually make excellent contents, merit they received should be equal to their contribution quality.

Mate, I understand what you're trying to say, but actually I don't expect your suggestion to be the basis for lowering the percentage of sMerit distributed monthly to deserving users. I mean don't make people wait any longer to rank up if they have a good initiative to improve the quality of their posts. But of course the quality will determine the amount of merit they will get, it should be fair to see.

I don't understand why some of us think that the good initiative of low ranking users to get merit on their posts is a reason to call it merit-fishing initiative. I don't know what the problem is, it's a viewpoint that is now starting to be heard more often when there are some low-ranking users trying to rank up and get merit in their posts. Good initiative should be rewarded rather than them forever being spammers, but it should be worth the effort. I would not say that they are merit-fishing because even if it is true, then we are only encouraging them to improve themselves and post quality.

[BlackHatCoiner]

Over inflation of merit source and merit source allocation can create a new generation of pseudo-quality members who will turn to likely spammers after ranking up.

It still requires to somewhat prove you're a quality writer, with or without merit inflation. You can't just reach 100, 250 or 500 merits, whether we have 111 or a thousand merit sources. That's why most bounty hunters remain with less than 100.

The recent merit inflation did more good with the entrance of new, merit-worthy users than bad for these few merit whores. 

[JayJuanGee]

I used to get spam messages in my inbox from unknown new members begging me for merits and sometimes it really becomes a burden.

Well, this is weird.
I rarely get this kind of messages.
Either or I am not particularly supportive of newbie, so they don’t even bother trying to message me, or on the contrary i always help voluntarily, so they don’t even bother to message me.
Who knows!!

In regards to the random newbies in my mailbox, a few times a year for me too... .. frequently I had run into them in another thread.. and sure it could be annoying, and maybe some peeps calculate that a few times a year is overly burdensome.. I don't welcome it.. and either I ignore, report or maybe once in a while I will review posts, depending on context.. I had a few over the years that just repeated over and over.. and sure that is a bit annoying.. and even a couple of times could end up causing me to just report.. because some levels of begging should just be obviously outside of acceptability..

sometimes there can be some dilemmas participating on a forum, and especially if there is any kinds of attempts to account for the situations of others, yet of course, some members may well not know that there is likely to be a decent amount of skepticism in terms of interacting with members until running across some of their public posts and if they are involved in forum threads that are of mutual interests, then it might even be more difficult to getting to know such members.

Of course, there are some forum members who invite PMs, and personally, I tend to NOT be very excited or receptive to PMs absent some rationale that makes sense.. and even then, frequently there might not be a need for the PM interactions, from my point of view...

oh by the way, don't get me wrong.. some things might be too personal or potentially explosive to get into publicly.. and even sometimes, there might be some desire not to back off a position that was taken in public, but maybe to explain the position to the member via private message.. so yeah.. sometimes there are decently good reasons to get into private messages, so even though I am not necessarily going to list what I would consider acceptable, some of us do have a sufficient level of common sense regarding the boundaries, and there might even be some abilities to go a wee bit beyond boundaries without really becoming annoying or "burdensome"..  on reflection.. some of the interactions via PM as compared to public interactions can be a wee bit funny, strange and/or ironic over the years.. and might even inform a bit about another member but not necessarily be repeated in public (except maybe just in the abstract like I am attempting to do here)..  (whether good, bad, ugly, burdensome or otherwise.. hahahahaha)...

<…>

Very sad to know.
I did noticed, doing my usual [META] analysis for the Italian board, that the Russian board had a few problems in terms of post and merits in the last months.
I guessed it has to do with the ongoing situation, and also thought the interaction between Russian speaking users, if I may, could become more difficult.

Sorry to hear the tone in the community caused you to leave.
I think it is a net loss for the forum.

For sure, I don't always agree with Ratimov..  and for sure, there is value to differing perspectives and there are also value to being able to figure out some kind of a pace that is workable.. and gosh, it may well be difficult to understand how some aspects of the forum might start to feel too toxic and/or intolerable.. but for me war is one thing.. so getting involved in politics can be problematic.. and surely my issues with shitcoins could cause me to not want to participate.. .oh and god damned meta issues can sometimes be irritating.. even though sometimes any of us could get sucked into them.. . so for me, some of my preferences to focus on bitcoin has helped some of my sanity and ability to sustain posting and participating in the forum in ways that I feel to be beneficial for my own knowledge and psychology. ... but yeah, if the participation becomes too burdensome, then I can surely relate to that...

Otherwise, I agree with you fillippone that the loss of a previously proactive and thoughtful merit source (even if we might not agree with everything) does seem to be a loss for the forum.. and of course, theymos  does not seem to assign too many new merit source members.. and there are likely a decent number of merit source members.. maybe double the number of merit source members?  

I feel kind of privileged to have a decent amount of time that I can spend on forum activities, yet I can surely understand how some members could either become burned out or even begin to consider the giving out of merits to be a wee bit too burdensome and not fitting in their own ways that they would prefer to spend their time.  Sometimes it can be difficult to read some posts and to figure out if they are "merit worthy" from our own perspective (no I am not even suggesting that there is necessarily an objective standard exactly.. even though there may well be some overlapping of ideas in regards to what is "merit worthy"..). and several of us know that sometimes we might even perceive our own systems for sending out smerits to be inadequate or to be making mistakes or maybe even sucking us into parts of the forum (or threads or even reading some posts more than once to figure out if we want to send it an smerit) that are not pleasurable for us on a personal preference basis.. and even some members may well not like the way that we send out smerits.. and even find various angles of our personality to be not very likable.. and I don't even claim to like myself sometimes.. except during the times that I do.. -that's meant to be kind of a joke.. hahahaha..

Any of us can be irritating and irritable (whether a merit source or not).. and sure there are some members who are always likable too.. and I am not even sure if that is a good thing.. .. so in that sense, there seems to be some value in mixing up the types of merit source members.. or if there is a system and if there might be burn out and if there might be needs to remove some merit sources (maybe even yours truly) if it seems that they might have left the reservation.. if there is such a thing as being on the reservation within the meaning of the expression?.. .I know that there is some attempts at creating a kind of sustainable system here.. kind of like open source.. and decentralized.. but then each of us are humans (at least in theory).. so then in that regard, we have our various central points of failure in a variety of possible ways.. not only meat or mental-wagon related. even though those two are likely the bigger of the categories.. .

I did noticed, doing my usual [META] analysis for the Italian board, that the Russian board had a few problems in terms of post and merits in the last months.

As you correctly noted, the Russian locale has some problems in terms of posts, but it cannot be said that there are problems with merit. In the Russian locale, there are still 3 active Merit Sources, with a total of 2 000 Merit available for distribution every month. This is a lot, given that posting in this place has been greatly reduced. Therefore, some Merit Sources do not always give away their 30-day quota in full for a simple reason: there is simply nowhere to distribute them, unless you increase the average value of the given merit per post. In the Russian locale, there has always been the most merit sources and the most distributed merit, among all locales.

I saw this and therefore redirected some of my resources to locales where the situation is somewhat worse, for example, to Turkish or Indonesian locales, where, in my opinion, one more merit source was missing.

I must be living in fantasyland.

I thought that most of the smerits were distributed on the WO thread.  One thread hogging all (most) of the smerit distribution....

Surely, it is good for any merit source to go beyond their usual stomping grounds, but sometimes merit sources do not want to go outside of their usual areas.. and I can see why those members might start to feel somewhat stuck.. .. So what is the solution?  I would imagine that theymos has some ideas about threshold considerations. and maybe some ideas about source merit adjustments that could be made.. even though the last time that he made an adjustment about a year ago (and did it not take more than 1.5 years between that adjustment and the previous adjustment?) seemed to have just been a kind of blanket increase for a lot of the merit source members, even though I cannot either remember details or even remember if I ever knew many of the details (even at that time) regarding how that last adjustment played out.

I meant good posters deserve to rank up. Fast or slow, it depends on their contributions but if they don't actually make excellent contents, merit they received should be equal to their contribution quality.

Mate, I understand what you're trying to say, but actually I don't expect your suggestion to be the basis for lowering the percentage of sMerit distributed monthly to deserving users. I mean don't make people wait any longer to rank up if they have a good initiative to improve the quality of their posts. But of course the quality will determine the amount of merit they will get, it should be fair to see.

I don't understand why some of us think that the good initiative of low ranking users to get merit on their posts is a reason to call it merit-fishing initiative. I don't know what the problem is, it's a viewpoint that is now starting to be heard more often when there are some low-ranking users trying to rank up and get merit in their posts. Good initiative should be rewarded rather than them forever being spammers, but it should be worth the effort. I would not say that they are merit-fishing because even if it is true, then we are only encouraging them to improve themselves and post quality.

Actually it is true that some members will get better in their post quality with the passage of time, and surely some members might well be trying to earn merits, and I can see why you may well consider the term "fishing for merit" to be derogatory, and maybe even presuming way more bad intentions upon the newbie (or the lower ranking member) than such member deserves.  So yeah, sometimes merit sources may well expect members to have to jump through way too many hoops  before sending any smerits.

It seems to be good that there are a variety of standards that merit source members have in terms of quality of posts that they expect; however, it does seem to be the case that merit source members will end up getting eliminated and/or reduced if their smerit sending policy ends up resulting in not using their 30-day supply on a regular basis.. absent some reasonable explanation for such..

Surely the infrequencies of global adjustments to the smerit system including quantity of merit source members and quantity of smerits within the hands of merit source members could cause some reasonable inference speculation that theymos practices a decent amount of hands off in the whole matter.. even though I would imagine that he has some decent tools to look into some of the specifics to the extent that might be needed.. and maybe some kinds of adjustments that might be needed might not really be in the bailiwick of other members to report either, because sometimes it can be difficult for other members to recognize some smerit spending/sending patterns that might exist.. and whether theymos might consider those smerit sending patterns to be problematic in terms of how smerits might be sent out and whether some members might be overly stingy or overly generous.... and from my own speculation on the matter, absent perhaps some reports of abuse (if they can be identified) it seems that theymos may well end up acting more in response to evidence of overly stingy rather than evidence of overly generous.

[The Sceptical Chymist]

Please don't increase merit per post according to their same quality.
<snip>
Don't distort your rules of meriting only because you feel you must keep your source-merit bag as emptiest as possible.

I hear what you're saying, but I'd suggest Ratimov should feel free to do whatever he likes--there are a lot of merit sources, and each of them is different with respect to their standards, how many merits they give out on average, and other variables as well.  Plus, I've noticed that it might be just a wee bit harder for members to rank up than it needs to be.  I've seen some really good posters who've been stuck at Sr. Member/Hero for well over a year, and in cases like that bumping up the number of merits sent per post makes sense.  I would also say that posts that just barely qualify for some merits shouldn't be granted any additional ones, because the award for mediocrity should never be increased.

You can't just reach 100, 250 or 500 merits, whether we have 111 or a thousand merit sources. That's why most bounty hunters remain with less than 100.

No, you can't.  I'd say an average member can move up from Jr. Member pretty quickly if they're a decent writer or contribute stuff that's significant, but once a member reaches Full Member rank, it starts taking a much longer time to reach the next rank (assuming their posts aren't prolific and well above average).  Bumping up the number of merits sent per post even by 2 probably wouldn't have much of an effect if a handful of merit sources did it, which they probably won't.

[indah rezqi]

No, you can't.  I'd say an average member can move up from Jr. Member pretty quickly if they're a decent writer or contribute stuff that's significant, but once a member reaches Full Member rank, it starts taking a much longer time to reach the next rank (assuming their posts aren't prolific and well above average).  Bumping up the number of merits sent per post even by 2 probably wouldn't have much of an effect if a handful of merit sources did it, which they probably won't.

You're right, I experienced it even though I actually got full member rank when the merit system was introduced. What I understand is that everyone has their own standard of spending the sMerit they have each month, and since each user has different abilities and skills when posting then the amount of merits they will get should vary depending on the quality. This implies that the merit system is working as it should and each user doesn't have to spend years climbing up the rankings if they are really quality posters.

Of course that a user like me would have a harder time earning more merit because I probably haven't met many of the standards most merit sources expect. I'm waiting and I'm trying, but I can't get everyone interested in submitting merits because maybe the quality of my posts isn't what they expected. I'm just sure that sooner or later I too can become a Sr member, but I don't think I have to complain about why I had to wait so long to get one.

[Daniel91]

I used to get spam messages in my inbox from unknown new members begging me for merits and sometimes it really becomes a burden.

Well, this is weird.
I rarely get this kind of messages.
Either or I am not particularly supportive of newbie, so they don’t even bother trying to message me, or on the contrary i always help voluntarily, so they don’t even bother to message me.
Who knows!!

In fact, it all started when I started a topic for newbie members without merit in the Beginners & Help section of the forum, and offered them to report their quality posts and get the first merit.
Unfortunately, most of the reported posts were of poor quality and I could not give them merit.
After that I started getting unwanted private messages in my inbox from newbie members begging me to give them merits.
Then I just gave up and closed the topic.
Everything had simply gone too far.

[indah rezqi]

In fact, it all started when I started a topic for newbie members without merit in the Beginners & Help section of the forum, and offered them to report their quality posts and get the first merit.
Unfortunately, most of the reported posts were of poor quality and I could not give them merit.
After that I started getting unwanted private messages in my inbox from newbie members begging me to give them merits.
Then I just gave up and closed the topic.
Everything had simply gone too far.

I think that's why theymos didn't publicly introduce merit sources even though many of us now know who is on the 111 sources list. Few merit source and most people feel uncomfortable receiving pm from users especially if they ask for merit, it is considered begging which is very unwelcome. But I'm sure there are some merit sources willing to help in different ways regardless of whether it's by making a request or reporting some post links in the threads they provide (Ratimov and LoyceV do this). These are all attitudes that are expected to help users gain merit and rankings and as far as the merit system goes, we've seen a lot of users get their help in a decent way.

[skarais]

Few merit source and most people feel uncomfortable receiving pm from users especially if they ask for merit, it is considered begging which is very unwelcome.

Actually I also had an unpleasant experience about how a newbie sent me a PM and asked me to help him rank up. I really don't think it's wrong because on the positive side I can still advise him to learn useful things and improve the quality of his posts. But if they directly ask me to send merit, that's a problem even though I'm not a merit source.

But I'm sure there are some merit sources willing to help in different ways regardless of whether it's by making a request or reporting some post links in the threads they provide (Ratimov and LoyceV do this).

I also have a help thread on the local board, so I thought it would help local users too although I'm not really a merit source. You may be eligible to apply there especially if you have 10 local Indonesian posts to review, so don't be shy to do so if you want.

[HELP]Bantuan untuk menaikkan Rank (Newbie s.d Hero) V.2 [UPDATE]

[_BlackStar]

Actually it is true that some members will get better in their post quality with the passage of time, and surely some members might well be trying to earn merits, and I can see why you may well consider the term "fishing for merit" to be derogatory, and maybe even presuming way more bad intentions upon the newbie (or the lower ranking member) than such member deserves.  So yeah, sometimes merit sources may well expect members to have to jump through way too many hoops  before sending any smerits.

It's fine if they want to see people have to go through some hoops to get merit, but it's a bit scary if most people follow this trend. It's hard to come up with a good idea for a topic because actually most of the ideas have been discussed previously by many other users. So this is the real reason why newbie or low ranking users try to get other ideas but unfortunately some of those initiatives can be judged as merit fishing.

It might be good to be a little stingy with high ranking members who could logically do better on this forum based on their contributions and the quality of their posts. The merit system has to be sharp in two directions, it doesn't have to be sharper for high rank while we have to be a bit blunt to low rank ^{[that's really unfair, IMO].} But at the end of the day, the merit system is not moderated and each source has their own way of going about how they spend their monthly sMerit supply. I'm not against it, but I want to share my opinion.

[Benkbeny]

I see no Reason why you must beg for something you have been assured to get when in line with the rules. Before I do worry thinking no one is reading reply because I have posted and don't have any merit but Today I am glad I have which show that I am on the right Track.
Just Take your time to develop your thinking, Reading and writing skills.... Merit will surely flows in to your profile as award to the good work you put into to your posting skill.
Make research to know what every topic is about before replying to any post.
 

[Z-tight]

I see no Reason why you must beg for something you have been assured to get when in line with the rules.

Benkbeny, the rules have not assured any member merits, if it was to be like that the administrator would have made it an automatic process on their own criteria to merits posts when they are good, but that is not how it works, member's have to give you merits, and they are not assured to give them to you, if you create good post, you stand a chance of them giving some to you, but there is no assurance of that.

Before I do worry thinking no one is reading reply because I have posted and don't have any merit but Today I am glad I have which show that I am on the right Track.

Why did you have to worry, people may have been reading your posts, but they didn't believe it deserved their merits, you do not have to worry because of that, attracting merits on a post does not mean people suddenly read your posts after not reading it for long, it means the meriter thought the posts deseved their merits and gave you some for it.

[Benkbeny]

I see no Reason why you must beg for something you have been assured to get when in line with the rules.

Benkbeny, the rules have not assured any member merits, if it was to be like that the administrator would have made it an automatic process on their own criteria to merits posts when they are good, but that is not how it works, member's have to give you merits, and they are not assured to give them to you, if you create good post, you stand a chance of them giving some to you, but there is no assurance of that.

Before I do worry thinking no one is reading reply because I have posted and don't have any merit but Today I am glad I have which show that I am on the right Track.

Why did you have to worry, people may have been reading your posts, but they didn't believe it deserved their merits, you do not have to worry because of that, attracting merits on a post does not mean people suddenly read your posts after not reading it for long, it means the meriter thought the posts deseved their merits and gave you some for it.

OK I get that now. But is it possible to have multiple merit on one particular post?

[Z-tight]

OK I get that now. But is it possible to have multiple merit on one particular post?

Yes Benkbeny, you can receive as many merits as possible on a particular post, look for yourself how many merits was received in this post (1), and in this one (2).
The only limitation in sending merits is a member can't send merits to themselves, lol, a member can't also send more than 50 merits to a particular member within 30 days and a member can't send merits in a section that they have ignored.

[tranthidung]

I think I should write something about the objectives of this thread and the current discussion

• Objectives: mainly to observe merit source in terms of statistics -- total merit sources, total smerit allocation each month, their changes over time. That's it
• Discussion can be on merit sources and their merit distribution activities but please don't go too far with it. It will derail the topic and its main objectives.
• For discussion or suggestion to improve merit system, difficulty for newbies to rank up, please discuss in Merit & new rank requirements

[JayJuanGee]

Actually it is true that some members will get better in their post quality with the passage of time, and surely some members might well be trying to earn merits, and I can see why you may well consider the term "fishing for merit" to be derogatory, and maybe even presuming way more bad intentions upon the newbie (or the lower ranking member) than such member deserves.  So yeah, sometimes merit sources may well expect members to have to jump through way too many hoops  before sending any smerits.

It's fine if they want to see people have to go through some hoops to get merit, but it's a bit scary if most people follow this trend. It's hard to come up with a good idea for a topic because actually most of the ideas have been discussed previously by many other users. So this is the real reason why newbie or low ranking users try to get other ideas but unfortunately some of those initiatives can be judged as merit fishing.

There may be a bit of "I know it when I see it" coming from merit source members in regards to judging if too much merit fishing might be happening, and you can't necessarily blame them...

In your example, you can see how some of this can end up going badly.  Some members start threads over any dumb little thing, and surely even though I am not much of a thread starter myself, there can be some value in starting threads.. but Jesus fuck..   when the OP of the thread barely has any bones, there can be a lot of questioning regarding why a new thread needed to be started rather than finding some thread that already exists that is already in the ballpark.

Sure, interacting with other members (presumptively more senior) can surely be helpful but also be seen as lacking in substance (in the merit fishing kind of way), and sometimes some merit source members might be too quick to judge.. admittedly so.

It might be good to be a little stingy with high ranking members who could logically do better on this forum based on their contributions and the quality of their posts.

And also there might be a need to hold some members to higher (or even lower) standards depending on posting history too..   I surely don't know the line exactly because sometimes even my own thinking on the topic can vary depending on what else I have going on ..  sometimes I will formulate mental pictures of other members in my head, and they are likely not even always very accurate, because sometimes if I run across a post, or even some other member points something out and then I review some posting history.. my mental picture could radically change in one direction or another.. and sometimes that translates into merits  or regrets about having had sent merits.. but we know that is not reversible.

The merit system has to be sharp in two directions, it doesn't have to be sharper for high rank while we have to be a bit blunt to low rank ^{[that's really unfair, IMO].}

Getting back to the idea of members having a posting history.. sometimes merit sources might judge someone more harshly when there is little to no posting history, and then after a while, they see several posts from the member and then end up lightening up on their harshness... Some times bad impressions are created too.. and I have had some more longer term members tell me that I was being too mean to some new members, and surely sometimes, there is context and disagreement, and maybe sometimes they are right.. I may or may not decide to change my behavior.. and I might take one stance but not really disclose what the stance that I am taking.. and sometimes I just end up forgetting about it or even being inadvertent about it.. mistakes can be made sometimes, too.

There are some members who I have liked them a lot if they post about certain kinds of content (topics).. but if they post about other kinds of content (topics).. it can sometimes bother me in regards to their opinion or their approach to the topic... so those kinds of posts can influence, and then those kinds of mental images can sometimes get stuck about a member. rightly or wrongly..

But at the end of the day, the merit system is not moderated and each source has their own way of going about how they spend their monthly sMerit supply. I'm not against it, but I want to share my opinion.

Yep.. fair enough.. Theymos does seem to leave quite a bit of latitude..at least so far... and perhaps part of the rationale is that it is a voluntary position (I am pretty sure the very first set of assignments of merit sources, were just members who theymos picked for his own reasons.. so several of them did not ask (including yours truly) but at the same time, some of the earliest members who he chose to be sources were either stingy or just did not have time for sending smerits), and it could be that theymos can get enough of an idea about if he might conclude that some aspects is not working.. whether it is the report button.. or maybe looking at some of the ways that merit source members are spending their source merits....

I must be living in fantasyland.
I thought that most of the smerits were distributed on the WO thread.  One thread hogging all (most) of the smerit distribution....

It was about all locales, not about the entire forum. In the Russian locale (among all locales) the most merit has always been distributed. As for the WO thread... this thread has long existed according to its own customs, and there the merit distribution has long since moved away from how theymos imagined it. There, a post in which there is not a word about cryptocurrency, but just a few pictures from life, can collect several hundred merits.

Ok.. I will take your word for the smerit distribution comparisons for the various locale sections of the forum...

If you use the word crypto or cryptocurrency in the WO thread without explaining ur lil selfie.. then you would not likely to get any smerit from me.. .You might even get me to hold a grudge for a while and to lecture you on the topic...   My point is that the WO thread is about bitcoin and bitcoin related topics and gosh maybe almost anything else except for shitcoins (unless they are clearly referred to as shitcoins and put in a proper context.. maybe even deference to king daddy    )...

If you send a funny cat video in the WO thread, on the other hand, that seems to capture some kind of moment or something that seems relevant to anything other than shitcoins, you may well get me to send an smerit or even more than one.  Personally, I do not tend to send a lot of smerits on any specific posts.. .. usually it would need to be bitcoin-related and maybe have some explanations and fleshing out of matters related to bitcoin or some other topic that I believe had been well-explained (or some other reason to strike me as merit worthy) before I start to increase the quantity of smerits sent to any specific post.. but I recall sending some higher quantity of smerits on a few occasions for just somewhat spur of the moment considerations.. so sure.. maybe some of those kinds of emotional outbursts (from an admitted bot) is not very healthy to the whole merit system.. .

and I am not even sure if the WO thread is going outside of theymos's vision too much.. because that thread has kind of built a place in the forum.. so yeah, probably you are correct that theymos did not originally consider it to be any kind of theymos or forum cultural phenomena.. but when he shut it down in early 2017-ish? he seemed to rethink the place of the WO thread.. so whether such thread is too far gone or not, I doubt that the evidence really supports that it is too far gone otherwise something about it would end up getting modified. .and it even seems to have had gotten better after Infofront took it over as the new owner.. It's working, so don't fix it.. right? Maybe some folks disagree?

I won't even hold grudges against shitcoiners if they end up come around or at least largely refrain from their shitcoining in bitcoin threads.. .. but the most likely way to get me to hold a grudge is to either engage in shitcoining or to wantingly engage in loose language that attempts to describe bitcoin as if it were equivalent to various shitcoins.. hence the stupid-ass term crypto (cryptocurrency) that annoys me so much, and maybe even more if some members try to defend their usage of such vague and frequently misleading term... although if the thread is in the ann section or within some thread that is already vaguely-framed - I will usually (not always) just stay out of those threads completely and let the shitcoiners talk however they like in their abilities to sort matters out amongst themselves.. in regards of confusion about the topic they discuss.. and maybe sometimes smart things still might be said, even when it starts out with a weird framework that fails/refuses to distinguish bitcoin from shitcoins.

[Razmirraz]

In fact, it all started when I started a topic for newbie members without merit in the Beginners & Help section of the forum, and offered them to report their quality posts and get the first merit.
Unfortunately, most of the reported posts were of poor quality and I could not give them merit.
After that I started getting unwanted private messages in my inbox from newbie members begging me to give them merits.
Then I just gave up and closed the topic.
Everything had simply gone too far.

Giving up is not a good solution in my opinion, when you create the topic it is certainly accompanied by good intentions, wanting to help low-ranking users to rank up, I really appreciate your good intentions. The way you do is almost the same as the thread we have on the Indonesian local Board [HELP]Bantuan untuk menaikkan Rank (Newbie s.d Hero) V.2 [UPDATE], There, local users who have quality posts in Indonesian can submit post links that may have been overlooked by Merit Sources or Contributors for review.

Not only you, anyone will be annoyed with PM spam from Newbie begging for Merit. You can exclude unwanted PM from Newbie on the button attached to the image, After that you can sleep well.

[The Sceptical Chymist]

There may be a bit of "I know it when I see it" coming from merit source members in regards to judging if too much merit fishing might be happening, and you can't necessarily blame them...

It's too late in the day and I'm too lazy, but I recall not too long ago I posted a response to a lower-ranked member who'd started a thread that I knew was straight-up merit fishing after reading the first few sentences.  I made a comment that it was obvious he was mistaking post length for post quality and that what he'd written was bloated beyond belief.  So yeah, in cases like those you know it when you see it.

Other times it's not obvious if someone is just posting because they're hoping to earn merits--and frankly I don't necessarily see that as wrong in and of itself.  You can write a post that's witty or one that's clear there was some work and thought put into it, and as long as it's interesting, who cares what the motivation was behind it?  I only care when it's blatant merit fishing, and I've noticed that those cases tend to be when a lower-ranked member creates a new thread and not when they're posting within one that already exists.

But at the end of the day, the merit system is not moderated and each source has their own way of going about how they spend their monthly sMerit supply. I'm not against it, but I want to share my opinion.

Yep.. fair enough.. Theymos does seem to leave quite a bit of latitude..at least so far... and perhaps part of the rationale is that it is a voluntary position (I am pretty sure the very first set of assignments of merit sources, were just members who theymos picked for his own reasons.. so several of them did not ask (including yours truly)

I'm also one of those merit sources who didn't apply to be one.  I figure if the boss man taps you for a job you didn't ask for, he's not going to be riding your ass the whole time.  We probably got the position at the same time, and I don't know about you, but I haven't heard a peep from Theymos about anything merit-related since then. 

Not sure how many merit sources there currently are, but it's a diverse bunch.  That's an advantage, since most (if not all) of the boards are covered, and each source has their own standards with respect to what's a merit-worthy post.  If there wasn't this kind of leeway and discussions like the one we're having, I don't think the system would work as well as it has.

[fillippone]

Ok.. I will take your word for the smerit distribution comparisons for the various locale sections of the forum...

There are a few good threads that analyse the importance of local boards to the merit system.
The best I think is this global overview from @Rikafip:
[CHARTS] Brief monthly overview of the local boards activity

or threads focusing on particular boards like this one:
[Meta] Andamento sezione italiana

[tranthidung]

I made a comment that it was obvious he was mistaking post length for post quality and that what he'd written was bloated beyond belief.  So yeah, in cases like those you know it when you see it.

Neatly, it is in welcome message from theymos. Let me quote it again!

If you want to maximize your rank, then you need to increase two statistics which are listed on your profile:

• Merit, which is gained by making good posts.

If you make ten thousand posts in a week, your activity will be capped and you will still be a Newbie. If you make ten thousand useless posts over any period of time, you will gain zero merit and you will still be a Newbie. You can rank up only by making good posts consistently. It's quality over quantity.

When trying to write quality posts, a lot of people act as though they're writing a book report for school: putting facts that we already know into their own words. Nobody wants to read that, and you will not get merit for it. Moreover, the length of your post and the quality of your English are only minor factors. In trying to write a quality post worthy of merit, you should offer new ideas, personal experiences, or perspectives that other forum users will actually find new and interesting.

They try to write too long posts that have side effects on readers. Sometimes, readers don't read all the post. Sometimes, they won't understand what is message behind the post.

Other times it's not obvious if someone is just posting because they're hoping to earn merits--and frankly I don't necessarily see that as wrong in and of itself.  You can write a post that's witty or one that's clear there was some work and thought put into it, and as long as it's interesting, who cares what the motivation was behind it?  I only care when it's blatant merit fishing, and I've noticed that those cases tend to be when a lower-ranked member creates a new thread and not when they're posting within one that already exists.

Indeed, it is better than spamming because writer actually work and spend some effort. However, it is still bad in terms of writing. They must improve how they write in order to express their opinion better. I repeatedly told newbies that writing is the art that is hard to achieve Writing Proficiency.

Honestly, when I was young, I hated and can not absorb advises from my tutors about my writing. Sometimes I thought they are too rude or any thing similar. Then, with experience I understand they are right and their advise helps me a lot.

[Cookdata]

........

Hello Ratimov! My concern is out of context of your argument but I will appreciate if you respond.
The Merit that you sent out over the last 2/3 months has reduced drastically when compared to Q1 and late last year, your activity on some boards has also reduced especially the beginner & help board, and some of the threads you frequently updated to help out newbies are no longer active, like the Encyclopedia. I have been wondering if you have been removed from the Merit source because from my observations, it was the week you announced that you will be active in the forum I noticed these changes. You motivate me in many of your threads during my newbie days and I have mange to be a Sr.Member, I really hope you are fine.

Congrats on your 8K merit journey.

[Welsh]

I do get the animosity towards those that appear to be merit fishing, Although, their motivation is there, their application isn't necessarily so. I think getting the pitch fork out, is probably a bad idea, since these types of users can easily adjust, and become valuable users of the forum. There's been many of times where a user has annoyed me a little at first with their posting habits, but years down the line have actually become some of the more prominent users of the forum.

So, while merit fishing should probably be pointed out, I don't think it's a death sentence for a user. They just need to change their thinking a little bit. At the end of the day, if they're posting simply to earn merit, as long as the information is useful, and isn't regurgitated, then I haven't got a problem with their motivations that led to the post, as long as it's of good quality.

[Daniel91]

I do get the animosity towards those that appear to be merit fishing, Although, their motivation is there, their application isn't necessarily so. I think getting the pitch fork out, is probably a bad idea, since these types of users can easily adjust, and become valuable users of the forum. There's been many of times where a user has annoyed me a little at first with their posting habits, but years down the line have actually become some of the more prominent users of the forum.

So, while merit fishing should probably be pointed out, I don't think it's a death sentence for a user. They just need to change their thinking a little bit. At the end of the day, if they're posting simply to earn merit, as long as the information is useful, and isn't regurgitated, then I haven't got a problem with their motivations that led to the post, as long as it's of good quality.

I totally agree with you.
None of us (or at least the vast majority) were big experts at the beginning of our crypto journey and as new members on this forum we wrote posts of lower quality, and that's normal.
It's important that the new member feels accepted and welcome on this forum, and that we give him the opportunity to gain some knowledge and experience.
Of course, many new members, as soon as they understand the value of rank and merit on the forum, will do their best to gain merits as soon as possible and advance on the forum.
Some members will earn merits more easily, while other members will have a harder time, but as long as they don't spam the forum, they should be supported and not criticized too much.

[fillippone]

None of us (or at least the vast majority) were big experts at the beginning of our crypto journey and as new members on this forum we wrote posts of lower quality, and that's normal.

True.
I dare you to read my first posts here, and many of them are of an embarrassingly low quality (even if I still think the third post is still valid!)

The important thing is the journey on the forum!

[_BlackStar]

No, I'm not deleted, I just stopped distributing merit on my own initiative. At the moment my status is active:

I hope you are still willing to do it again soon, your contribution is needed even though at the moment you seem to be taking the initiative not to spend it.

None of us (or at least the vast majority) were big experts at the beginning of our crypto journey and as new members on this forum we wrote posts of lower quality, and that's normal.

You really remind me of my first post again on this forum. At that time I was using android to do activities in forums and even I didn't understand much about electrum and it took me months to learn how to sign messages on PC once I had it.

Many of the merit source here may not be in a hurry to distribute more merit at a time when we are still newbie. We have to prove that we are really newbie who want to gain a lot of knowledge by learning new things on the forum, especially about bitcoin. They want to see the process and for sure if we do it in the best way then I'm sure it will be hard for them to ignore our post. Those are some things that might be normal for merit source in my opinion.

[aysg76]

True.
I dare you to read my first posts here, and many of them are of an embarrassingly low quality (even if I still think the third post is still valid!)

The important thing is the journey on the forum!

Your third post is quite good and also have merits as well depending on the newbie rank and next post also states that what if newbies made quality posts ? That's surely merit worthing.

The same case is for most of us that when we joined the forum we don't have knowledge and same could be judged from our post quality but after that we started learning lot of things and exchange knowledge on the forum growing with time and now see you have managed to earn 10k merits in just few years time span so looking back at time surely boost our confidence that how far we have came.

But there are some newbies on the forum who are just new to the forum but have adequate technical knowledge about bitcoin and merits are being delivered to them at much faster pace.So we all have different way of growing on forum but going ahead is necessary.

[fillippone]

Your third post is quite good and also have merits as well depending on the newbie rank and next post also states that what if newbies made quality posts ? That's surely merit worthing.

That post s where it all began. That was my first merit here on the forum. @Pursuer started my incredible journey here on the forum.

[aylabadia05]

Actually it is true that some members will get better in their post quality with the passage of time, and surely some members might well be trying to earn merits, and I can see why you may well consider the term "fishing for merit" to be derogatory, and maybe even presuming way more bad intentions upon the newbie (or the lower ranking member) than such member deserves.  So yeah, sometimes merit sources may well expect members to have to jump through way too many hoops  before sending any smerits.

It's fine if they want to see people have to go through some hoops to get merit, but it's a bit scary if most people follow this trend. It's hard to come up with a good idea for a topic because actually most of the ideas have been discussed previously by many other users. So this is the real reason why newbie or low ranking users try to get other ideas but unfortunately some of those initiatives can be judged as merit fishing.

It might be good to be a little stingy with high ranking members who could logically do better on this forum based on their contributions and the quality of their posts. The merit system has to be sharp in two directions, it doesn't have to be sharper for high rank while we have to be a bit blunt to low rank ^{[that's really unfair, IMO].} But at the end of the day, the merit system is not moderated and each source has their own way of going about how they spend their monthly sMerit supply. I'm not against it, but I want to share my opinion.

A logical opinion because accounts with higher rankings are already at the stage of "enjoying the results" of what has been done previously with the current merit system and those with higher ranks also deserve merit from other users of the same rank as us, because one and some things that can benefit our progress.

[Daniel91]

None of us (or at least the vast majority) were big experts at the beginning of our crypto journey and as new members on this forum we wrote posts of lower quality, and that's normal.

True.
I dare you to read my first posts here, and many of them are of an embarrassingly low quality (even if I still think the third post is still valid!)

The important thing is the journey on the forum!

I looked at your first 3 posts on the forum, as well as my first 3 
I would rather forget my first 3 posts, but your third post was still quite interesting and good.
I really didn't know anything about crypto in the beginning but I learned from others on this forum and over time I started writing more meaningful posts and sharing my experience with others.
I believe that many other members on this forum started in a similar way, and that is completely normal.
No one is an expert at the beginning, but it is important that we are ready to learn and progress, and with time will come the recognition of others and reputation, merits and progress on the forum. 

[Pmalek]

No, I'm not deleted, I just stopped distributing merit on my own initiative. At the moment my status is active:

Is it because of a lack of activity and time or what led you to the decision to stop meriting other posts? It seems quite easy to do it in the discussions you participate in without having to go on a merit hunt elsewhere. Are you planning to get back to doing the things you did so far or are you considering leaving the forum?

[Z-tight]

No, I'm not deleted, I just stopped distributing merit on my own initiative. At the moment my status is active:

Is it because of a lack of activity and time or what led you to the decision to stop meriting other posts? It seems quite easy to do it in the discussions you participate in without having to go on a merit hunt elsewhere. Are you planning to get back to doing the things you did so far or are you considering leaving the forum?

What happens if a merit source stops meriting posts? Are they booted out? Because i feel as a merit source it is a duty to you to merit posts, if you are a member that is not a merit source then that is different, you might not give out any merits and it would not be a problem, only that members may not merit you too as you are not involved in the system, but as a merit source deciding to stop meriting posts sounds like 'quiting your job'.

[tranthidung]

What happens if a merit source stops meriting posts? Are they booted out?

Only if that merit source sends a request to be blacklist by theymos (blacklist ~ no longer want to be a merit source) or if theymos reshuffles merit sources that he barely does.

Because i feel as a merit source it is a duty to you to merit posts, if you are a member that is not a merit source then that is different, you might not give out any merits and it would not be a problem, only that members may not merit you too as you are not involved in the system, but as a merit source deciding to stop meriting posts sounds like 'quiting your job'.

Personally, it is not a duty or a job!

Merit sources are doing free meriting jobs but they have to spend their time to do it. So there is no pressure from theymos I think. A merit source is granted if theymos considers that member is a quality member and has ability to clarify bad and good posts, trusted enough to not sell sourced merits to get money etc.

[Z-tight]

Personally, it is not a duty or a job!
Merit sources are doing free meriting jobs but they have to spend their time to do it. So there is no pressure from theymos I think. A merit source is granted if theymos considers that member is a quality member and has ability to clarify bad and good posts, trusted enough to not sell sourced merits to get money etc.

Tranthidung i know all of that, merit sources are doing a free job, i know they are not paid or anything, and i never called it a job in the sense you have taken it, maybe you took that part out of context, if you look closely, i put that part in single quotes. My idea is that as a merit source you have a personal duty to keep merits flowing in the forum, that is why the forum generates free merits for you every thirty days to give it out to members. If a merit source isn't active, then they may not have the time that you are talking about, but they do not have to spend their time to do anything if they are active, they can send merits in the threads they participate in.

This is the most stupid thing that Merit Source or any other participant can do, not give out Merit simply because someone else does not give it out either. The merit system is not barter on the basis of you to me, I to you.

I did not say the merit system is similar to a barter trade, but we would want to encourage more people to be involved in the flow, there is no need to hoard it, so i would prefer to send merits to members that are involved in the system, not members that hoard their smerits that is of no use to them, i have also seen merit sources say the same thing.

If every member hoarded merits and expect to receive from others, then who is going to rank up, everyone will be stuck somewhere, users would not celebrate their milestone merit achievements, members will not get to 10k merits, etc.

[Shamm]

No, I'm not deleted, I just stopped distributing merit on my own initiative. At the moment my status is active:

Is it because of a lack of activity and time or what led you to the decision to stop meriting other posts? It seems quite easy to do it in the discussions you participate in without having to go on a merit hunt elsewhere. Are you planning to get back to doing the things you did so far or are you considering leaving the forum?

Maybe there's a valid reason why he doing this because we all know that he is a good merit source  many user here in forum who experience his kindness . But not just merit he he gave to us but the threads he made are very useful and one of the most useful thread in B&H which the encyclopedia many newbie learn a lot.

No, I'm not deleted, I just stopped distributing merit on my own initiative. At the moment my status is active:

Is it because of a lack of activity and time or what led you to the decision to stop meriting other posts? It seems quite easy to do it in the discussions you participate in without having to go on a merit hunt elsewhere. Are you planning to get back to doing the things you did so far or are you considering leaving the forum?

What happens if a merit source stops meriting posts? Are they booted out? Because i feel as a merit source it is a duty to you to merit posts, if you are a member that is not a merit source then that is different, you might not give out any merits and it would not be a problem, only that members may not merit you too as you are not involved in the system, but as a merit source deciding to stop meriting posts sounds like 'quiting your job'.

I don't think so  Because there are merit source who did not just active everytime by sending their sMerit but still they are merit source.

[Pmalek]

What happens if a merit source stops meriting posts? Are they booted out? Because i feel as a merit source it is a duty to you to merit posts, if you are a member that is not a merit source then that is different, you might not give out any merits and it would not be a problem, only that members may not merit you too as you are not involved in the system, but as a merit source deciding to stop meriting posts sounds like 'quiting your job'.

It's not a job. We are not paid for it nor do we receive any special treatment. It's a service that people offer for free. For some it's time consuming, for others not so much.

only that members may not merit you too as you are not involved in the system, but as a merit source decision to stop meriting posts sounds like 'quiting your job'.

This is the most stupid thing that Merit Source or any other participant can do, not give out Merit simply because someone else does not give it out either. The merit system is not barter on the basis of you to me, I to you.

I have to partially agree with Z-tight here. I refuse to merit people who have received plenty of merits but never given any to other Bitcointalk members. I know that many don't agree with that way of doing things, but that's my decision. You are right that merits is not about giving it back to the people who gave them to you. But I always check if the post I am about to merit belongs to someone who is part of the group that merits other posts (regardless of the receiver). If I see something like 200 received merits and 1 sent merits, rest assured that I am not going to throw my merits in that pit. Merits are supposed to circulate between accounts. There are people who refuse to be part of that system and that's fine. But if you don't want to play, don't get angry with me for not passing you the ball. I would rather pass it to someone with more team spirit. The only exception are new users who have just begun receiving merits and people who absolutely don't care about them and have merit-worthy posts.

[Pmalek]

Tell about this to those who send merit to the posts of Satoshi, Lauda, ​​Hal, etc. Their accounts have not been active for a long time and they do not distribute anything to anyone, but this does not prevent users from sending merit to their posts.

Satoshi and Hal were not here when the system got introduced. They don't know or care about it. But that does not diminish the value of their posts and their contribution to Bitcoin overall. Lauda was here and he/she was part of the system. He/she received and sent merits to others. I have no problem meriting an old post of Lauda, but since that user is no longer with us, that won't happen that often simply because I won't come across them anymore. Except when browsing through some old threads.  

I usually call such merit sources merit abusers. Nothing personal.

No offense taken.

[Z-tight]

We will discuss this when it happens, and not at the level of crazy theories that will never materialize in reality.

I don't know what your definition of 'crazy theory' is, it will never materialize like you said only because many people are involved in the merit flow and system, and that is the way it should be, that is why member's are encouraged to be involved in the system, if they do not, then it will materialize, perfect theory.

I usually call such merit sources merit abusers. Nothing personal.

It is your own opinion anyway, but merit abuse for merit sources is selling your merits, if you give them to members that are involved in the system and are nice posters, you are in no way an abuser of the system, but someone that wants the flow to continue and that is great. Another theory is that, for members that are not merit sources to be involved in the system of giving merits they have to be good posters, because it is merits that generate smerits, so if you give to those member you are definitely sending your smerits to nice posters.

[FatFork]

I would rather pass it to someone with more team spirit.

I usually call such merit sources merit abusers. Nothing personal.

I disagree. How is that merit abusing? Everyone, including merit sources, has the right to decide on their own where their merits should go. I also prefer to award merit-worthy posts from members who pass them along rather than hoarding them. I am not saying that this is an exclusive rule, but if I have time, I will check their merit summary.

[Pmalek]

Because such an approach devalues ​​posting as such. The assessment of the post itself fades into the background, and things that are not related to the merit, such as the user's activity, to whom how much he gave what, to whom he is friends, and so on, come to the fore.

I think we are blowing things out of portion here. I am not looking for who is friends with whom and stuff like that. I am only doing the most basic of checks. If the poster receives merits I want to see a history of sending. That's where the check ends. Amounts and to whom aren't important.

And here we get the following situation, a person can write satoshi-level posts, but users (merit sources) don’t give him merit, because he doesn’t distribute it to anyone. Who are we looking for here, posters or distributors?

I touched briefly upon this subject as well in a previous post when I said:

The only exception are new users who have just begun receiving merits and people who absolutely don't care about them and have merit-worthy posts.

That also goes for satoshi-level posting and excellent members who bring quality to the forum. But not everyone fits in that category.

[JayJuanGee]

No, I'm not deleted, I just stopped distributing merit on my own initiative. At the moment my status is active:

Is it because of a lack of activity and time or what led you to the decision to stop meriting other posts? It seems quite easy to do it in the discussions you participate in without having to go on a merit hunt elsewhere. Are you planning to get back to doing the things you did so far or are you considering leaving the forum?

What happens if a merit source stops meriting posts? Are they booted out? Because i feel as a merit source it is a duty to you to merit posts, if you are a member that is not a merit source then that is different, you might not give out any merits and it would not be a problem, only that members may not merit you too as you are not involved in the system, but as a merit source deciding to stop meriting posts sounds like 'quiting your job'.

hahahahaha

That is a decently fair way of framing the matter, and sure you have a right to quit your job and even perhaps to be a bit lacking in your job, but it is still up to the boss (the delegator) to decide whether such withholding of labor (spreading of the merits) rises to the level of derelict of duties that might either cause a firing  or maybe a reduction of the quantity of allocated source merits.

Merit sources are doing free meriting jobs but they have to spend their time to do it. So there is no pressure from theymos I think. A merit source is granted if theymos considers that member is a quality member and has ability to clarify bad and good posts, trusted enough to not sell sourced merits to get money etc.

You are partially correct, but you also seem to be partially incorrect.

Sure being a merit source is voluntary, and some of us did not ask to be a merit source, but there is also a kind of consent that takes place by actually doing it.

Sure there is a bit of an informal structure, and theymos seems to have had retained complete discretion over who the merit source members are - even though maybe he might get some backlash if members believe that theymos is being abusive of his discretion in some ways.. . .. but in any event, ultimately he can take away or reduce merit source duties for any reason or no reason at all... even though he may well get some backlash if members believe that he is being too arbitrary in his treatment of merit source members.. or his ways of overseeing whether some changes to the merit source members or even to the merit source system might be warranted to be made.

This is the most stupid thing that Merit Source or any other participant can do, not give out Merit simply because someone else does not give it out either. The merit system is not barter on the basis of you to me, I to you.

I did not say the merit system is similar to a barter trade, but we would want to encourage more people to be involved in the flow, there is no need to hoard it, so i would prefer to send merits to members that are involved in the system, not members that hoard their smerits that is of no use to them, i have also seen merit sources say the same thing.

If every member hoarded merits and expect to receive from others, then who is going to rank up, everyone will be stuck somewhere, users would not celebrate their milestone merit achievements, members will not get to 10k merits, etc.

For sure historically, there have been members who stated that they hoard merits and other members who have stated that they do not want to send smerits to members who hoard merits.. so if someone realizes that a certain member is a merit hoarder, then there may be some reluctance to send any smerits to that member.  

Of course there can be a considerable amount of subjectivity in sending smerits, so some members are not going to have concerns about whether the member appears to be a merit hoarder or not.

No, I'm not deleted, I just stopped distributing merit on my own initiative. At the moment my status is active:

Is it because of a lack of activity and time or what led you to the decision to stop meriting other posts? It seems quite easy to do it in the discussions you participate in without having to go on a merit hunt elsewhere. Are you planning to get back to doing the things you did so far or are you considering leaving the forum?

What happens if a merit source stops meriting posts? Are they booted out? Because i feel as a merit source it is a duty to you to merit posts, if you are a member that is not a merit source then that is different, you might not give out any merits and it would not be a problem, only that members may not merit you too as you are not involved in the system, but as a merit source deciding to stop meriting posts sounds like 'quiting your job'.

I don't think so  Because there are merit source who did not just active everytime by sending their sMerit but still they are merit source.

Theymos can still remove them as a merit source or reduce their allocation - especially if they don't really seem to have any kind of valid reason for going "on strike" or on "slow down" (which largely might be a similar thing as going "on strike").

I would rather pass it to someone with more team spirit.

I usually call such merit sources merit abusers. Nothing personal.

Does not sound like merit abuse to me.  Sounds like reasonable discretion in which not everyone is going to necessarily agree about how to exercise such discretion.  In other words, there is a range of reasonableness that is acceptable, and each of us will likely have different balances in what we consider to be reasonable.. I doubt very many folks would consider that withholding merits in those circumstances to be abusive - even though you have reached that conclusion.. which might even put your reasonableness in to question that you would label some kind of practice like that which seems to be reasonable discretion to be abusive..

[Pmalek]

Does not sound like merit abuse to me.  Sounds like reasonable discretion in which not everyone is going to necessarily agree about how to exercise such discretion.  In other words, there is a range of reasonableness that is acceptable, and each of us will likely have different balances in what we consider to be reasonable.. I doubt very many folks would consider that withholding merits in those circumstances to be abusive - even though you have reached that conclusion.. which might even put your reasonableness in to question that you would label some kind of practice like that which seems to be reasonable discretion to be abusive.

For the merit system to work entirely, those who are part of it should help in distributing those merits, not just receive them and hoard them forever. That's how I see it. Everyone decides for themselves. Are you in or are you out? I have no problem with user X not meriting other people. We can still talk, joke, be serious, even trade with each other or run a business. None of that requires me to reward you with a unit that you don't care about.     

If the majority of merit receivers only hoarded their merits, it would be a failed experiment, and the only way to receive merits would be from merit sources. Right now you can get merited from both merit sources and regular members who aren't and I would like to keep it that way by rewarding those who understand that. The merit economy works because people make it work. If everyone stopped caring then we can just forget about it.

[JayJuanGee]

Does not sound like merit abuse to me.  Sounds like reasonable discretion in which not everyone is going to necessarily agree about how to exercise such discretion.  In other words, there is a range of reasonableness that is acceptable, and each of us will likely have different balances in what we consider to be reasonable.. I doubt very many folks would consider that withholding merits in those circumstances to be abusive - even though you have reached that conclusion.. which might even put your reasonableness in to question that you would label some kind of practice like that which seems to be reasonable discretion to be abusive.

For the merit system to work entirely, those who are part of it should help in distributing those merits, not just receive them and hoard them forever. That's how I see it. Everyone decides for themselves. Are you in or are you out? I have no problem with user X not meriting other people. We can still talk, joke, be serious, even trade with each other or run a business. None of that requires me to reward you with a unit that you don't care about.    

If the majority of merit receivers only hoarded their merits, it would be a failed experiment, and the only way to receive merits would be from merit sources. Right now you can get merited from both merit sources and regular members who aren't and I would like to keep it that way by rewarding those who understand that. The merit economy works because people make it work. If everyone stopped caring then we can just forget about it.

I don't disagree with you, but in the whole scheme of things, there are not very many merit hoarders.. so in that sense, it probably does not matter that much if you send merits to ONLY the hoarders because there are plenty of folks who still give out smerits.. Furthermore, the opposite is true in regards to you having a strict policy that you will ONLY give smerits to those who have previously sent out smerits (the non-hoarders), and I know that even you are not taking that extreme of a smerit distribution position, but even if you did take that extreme of a position in either direction, to me it it would not seem to rise to the level of "abusive" for you to have strict standards on that point.. even more strict than your current stated views.

To me, it just seems like the wrong word to suggest that your having and practicing strict policies regarding not sending smerits to hoarders would be "abusive" absent some kind of further evidence that you had some bad motives or that you were targeting a certain kind of member for some other bad reason... your targeting hoarders does not seem abusive.. even if you are actually doing it to the extreme including if you refuse to give merits to no longer active members because of your strict rule recognizing that they would not be sending smerits out.

Absent some additional evidence the targeting and discriminating against merit hoarders or even the targeting of non-hoarders (to take the opposite extreme) does not seem to rise to the level of my idea of what would be "abusive," even if it were to be more extreme than your actual policy/practice in either direction.... but I could see that the targeting of non-hoarders might have a better chance of rising to the level of abusive rather than the targeting of hoarders for the reasons that you stated about facilitating the merit system as it currently exists.. (sorry I might have made my position even more confusing when I am trying to suggest that there is a wide range of reasonableness that merit source members have in exercising their discretion by taking extremes on various issues including something so extreme as to either merit or to not merit those members that they perceive to be merit hoarders).  

[Pmalek]

I don't disagree with you, but in the whole scheme of things, there are not very many merit hoarders.. so in that sense, it probably does not matter that much if you send merits to ONLY the hoarders because there are plenty of folks who still give out smerits.

That's true, and I am glad that's the case. Those merit checks that I mentioned earlier have become quite rare because with enough time spent on these boards, you get familiar with the users. There is no need to check the same people twice. I do a basic check only if I see a username I can't remember from before.

[DdmrDdmr]

I keep a monthly track of those that are the most generous and the meanest in terms of usage of their sMerits for my local board, with the obvious limitations related to data for airdropped sMerits and Merit Source sMerits, but if gives me a rough idea of what we wanted to see over there.The associated Google Sheet includes a second tab where I include the data for all merited profiles forum wide, and with a bit of patience, once can place filters and play around with the data.

If, for example, we set a filter for "MeritsEarned" > 50 and "%sMeritsSent" <= 25% (over earned) I get a range of 452 accounts, of which only 185 are Active/Semi-active (have at least logged-in over the past 30/90 days respectively). With this set criteria, there are two profiles that posts every now and then on my local board, and which I merit. I know that they are sMerit mean buggers, but above this lateral game, I appreciate their technical knowledge that they tend to display when helping out stray members on my local board. Other than that, I’m not really aware of other people’s meriting habits, even though I could easily check on the said list. I’ve got more merits than I tend to hand out, despite my sprees, so I’d probably only consider their meriting habits if I had very few sMerits to handout, and even then, in the big picture, it doesn’t seem like much of an issue.

[Ahli38]

I did not say the merit system is similar to a barter trade, but we would want to encourage more people to be involved in the flow, there is no need to hoard it, so i would prefer to send merits to members that are involved in the system, not members that hoard their smerits that is of no use to them, i have also seen merit sources say the same thing.

If every member hoarded merits and expect to receive from others, then who is going to rank up, everyone will be stuck somewhere, users would not celebrate their milestone merit achievements, members will not get to 10k merits, etc.

I like your way of thinking, that is your words which I have underlined.

related to your saying that you prefer to send merit to people who are not merit hoarders. it reminds me of the way I thought when I first joined this forum. and it's nice.

But this time I have a different thought, that is, this time I make things easier for me and don't want to complicate things that are actually easy. and don't want to make a broad thing seem narrow.
 I now want to make things simple. i.e. I will send smerit to anyone who makes a quality and commendable post. regardless of whether he is a merit hoarder or not. because this is a matter of who deserves to be appreciated for their efforts in making useful things in this forum through their posts. maybe everyone on this forum has found a post that is very useful (quality) and after reading it we can't help but give it smerit.

so related to merit this is a flexible thing.
everyone has different reasons. And of course we can't make everyone think the same. the important thing is that we don't do what this forum forbids regarding the merit system.

But of course several things need to be done to build a positive current in this merit system circle and encourage people to be interested in participating in running the merit system like the merit sources did and other examples like @DdmrDdmr did in his post most generous and the meanest.

and I am quite satisfied with the performance of the Merit sources. because every time I find a quality post, the source of merit is always there by giving a sign of its presence through the Merit given to the post.

in fact I've recently been looking for a post that's of decent quality that hasn't got any merit in it or that merit sources have missed. I intend to collect it in a special post to be considered for merit sources to read it, who may have missed it. But it turned out to be difficult. because the source of merit is always present in each of these quality posts.
and it's proof that this merit system is doing fine and the merit source is doing the volunteer work really well. my appreciation to all.

[tranthidung]

If a merit source isn't active, then they may not have the time that you are talking about, but they do not have to spend their time to do anything if they are active, they can send merits in the threads they participate in.

You never knows what happen with a merit source.

• If you see them inactive for a few months, this case is clear. They simply don't have time in the forum
• If you see them active (that can be just a short log in and leave), you will never knows how many time (hours) they spend on the forum. This case, you just see a vague signal about their activity

It is about activity status, other things will be whether they have time to glance around to find good posts and meriting them. To simplify merit source jobs, there are a few topics to help them.

• Report unmerited good posts to Merit Source
• Bitcointalk Ranking-up pipeline- Those close to their next rank (lacking Merits)
• [Merit] Help newbies and those who have a little left to the next rank

Because such an approach devalues ​​posting as such. The assessment of the post itself fades into the background, and things that are not related to the merit, such as the user's activity, to whom how much he gave what, to whom he is friends, and so on, come to the fore. This is all rubbish and should be discarded if we are talking about posting evaluation.

This is a point why we can not verify quality of two posters simply by total merit they earned. Where are they come from? Are sources of their earned merit really decentralized and come from different merit sender population or cohort. If they exchange their merit back and forth with friends, local users that can be a serious factor to decrease their quality.

In addition, merit sources will have a kind of advantage to receive more merit from forum members. Because lower rank members hope they will receive more merit from sources. Anyway, it is human nature, not serious.

Total earned merit is like a skin of your account but it does not exactly reflect your account quality in general as well as in a specific narrower area (Tech, Trading, Security, etc.)

[_BlackStar]

You never knows what happen with a merit source.

• If you see them inactive for a few months, this case is clear. They simply don't have time in the forum
• If you see them active (that can be just a short log in and leave), you will never knows how many time (hours) they spend on the forum. This case, you just see a vague signal about their activity

It is about activity status, other things will be whether they have time to glance around to find good posts and meriting them. To simplify merit source jobs, there are a few topics to help them.

• Report unmerited good posts to Merit Source
• Bitcointalk Ranking-up pipeline- Those close to their next rank (lacking Merits)
• [Merit] Help newbies and those who have a little left to the next rank

Looks like we've got a good list for monitoring the activity of the previously most generous merit sources on this forum. Some of them are no longer send merit for whatever reason, and this is an important thing to note. Even though the merit circulation is not disturbed much, I think some of them may have been disabled or have been replaced by the admin, we just don't know who.

Some of the thread you refer to are also great for time-saving merit sources to distribute their merit on worthy posts, but since this thread is about monitoring merit sources their activity will be noticed and possibly questioned as well. Indeed we never know what happened to them, and that's what made us ask.

[tranthidung]

Looks like we've got a good list for monitoring the activity of the previously most generous merit sources on this forum. Some of them are no longer send merit for whatever reason, and this is an important thing to note. Even though the merit circulation is not disturbed much, I think some of them may have been disabled or have been replaced by the admin, we just don't know who.

If you have time, you can read more in [TOP-200] The most generous users giving merits. I just don't have time to look at it, honestly.

In addition, it is not necessary to find out who are merit sources. theymos simply does not want to announce the merit source list publicly. Reasons are mentioned there

I will not be posting a definitive list of merit sources (so that people don't bug them too much), though you'll soon figure out who they are if you pay attention.

-snip-

Do not beg for merit excessively.

[Razmirraz]

I don't disagree with you, but in the whole scheme of things, there are not very many merit hoarders.. so in that sense, it probably does not matter that much if you send merits to ONLY the hoarders because there are plenty of folks who still give out smerits.

True, so far I have found that there are so many merit sources or merit contributors who have the LOYALTY to issue sMerit to users who deserve it. Merit hoarders are only done by people who are stingy or can't appreciate the education of other users, but this case is very rare.

Merit sources that are chosen are really the right people and contribute a lot to the forum, they will always check the posts that are worth throwing sMerit. So I'm not too worried about sMerit hoarding users, because the forum still has contributors who can appreciate constructive, informative, and quality posts.

[indah rezqi]

True, so far I have found that there are so many merit sources or merit contributors who have the LOYALTY to issue sMerit to users who deserve it. Merit hoarders are only done by people who are stingy or can't appreciate the education of other users, but this case is very rare.

No, I don't think there is a specific consensus on how we rate them, which means you have the right to spend sMerit/ no spend and that's up to you. Some people are known to not care about the merit system and some may not be interested, and again that's up to them.

Pmalek had discussed this matter before, he made a topic and revealed some reasons.

Top 200 Active Members who have earned most Merits but have sent 0 sMerits

I can think of a couple of reasons:
1. They dont care about receiving/sending Merits at all and dont want to be part of it.
2. They dont understand how the Merit system works, thinking every time they send a merit, their count will decrease by one.
3. They cant find/dont think there is anything worth meriting.
4. They are afraid of sending Merits since there are many abuses and dont want to get on someone's radar.  

But I can think of another reason that might be the 5th reason and that. Forum contributors who left the forum before the merit system was introduced such as satoshi will no longer be active just to spend their sMerit.

[The Sceptical Chymist]

Looks like we've got a good list for monitoring the activity of the previously most generous merit sources on this forum.

Ah, yes!!!!  Dude, thank you for linking to that, because it's a page I used to have bookmarked a long time ago (probably from whenever it was created) but somehow lost track of because of various hard drive changes and forgetting how to locate it.  Sweet, now I'm going to bookmark it again.

You'd think that for as long as I've been here, I'd know how to find my way around the forum, but....I don't.  I'd like to think it's a forum design problem, but the reality is it's more likely a my-brain-is-turning-to-hamburger issue.  I'm going to blame it on smartphones and social media, the easiest scapegoats I can think of.

And by the way, guys, keep in mind that some merit sources didn't apply for the position and I think those are the ones least likely to dedicate a good amount of time giving away merits.  Theymos tapped a bunch of members to be sources back in 2019 (IIRC), and damned if I know when the last time he accepted an application or created a new merit source.  It'd be awesome if he dumped a ton of statistics about the merit system and in particular the merit sources past and present, but I know that's not going to happen if their identities are kept confidential.  Oh well.

[philipma1957]

A lot depends on how busy you may be with real life shit.

I have about 1000 unreleased merits

I have also given about 4600 merits to people.

Since Last july the merits I have not given away are gaining..

Ie I had about 400 merits Last july 2021.

my bro-in-law developed dementia We found out on August 1 2021.

He lives 90 miles from me. A long drive as most is driving in NYC.

Say 2 ½ to 3 hours each way.

So his sister and I drive back and forth. A lot that is six hours lost to bitcointalk each time.

I say six hours because going online at his house while we are there does not happen So If I leave at 6am arrive at 9am do what is needed at his home leave at 8pm and get home at 11 pm I spent 17 hours off bitcointalk but I likely would have spent 6.  Multiply by 50 trips is a loss of 300 hours the last year on bitcointalk. 

So I built up my merits and smerits from 400 to 1000.

the next year god willing I will be able to do more here and lower my merits again.

I cant be the only merit source that got busy last year and gave less then the normal amount.

So I am just saying maybe its not much of an issue when people do this.

[JayJuanGee]

I don't disagree with you, but in the whole scheme of things, there are not very many merit hoarders.. so in that sense, it probably does not matter that much if you send merits to ONLY the hoarders because there are plenty of folks who still give out smerits.

True, so far I have found that there are so many merit sources or merit contributors who have the LOYALTY to issue sMerit to users who deserve it. Merit hoarders are only done by people who are stingy or can't appreciate the education of other users, but this case is very rare.

Merit sources that are chosen are really the right people and contribute a lot to the forum, they will always check the posts that are worth throwing sMerit. So I'm not too worried about sMerit hoarding users, because the forum still has contributors who can appreciate constructive, informative, and quality posts.

As many of us know, there is no rule against merit hoarding... but theymos said that he would keep an eye on the potential that it could become an issue.

And, merit hoarding for regular members is surely less of an issue than for merit sources, and I am pretty sure that in the first round of merit source member assignments, some of those members who were assigned as merit sources, were really stingy regarding their sending out merits, and some of them even publicly stated such.

Theymos would not even need to have had to see their posts in which they made such anti-smerit sending philosophies to be able to see whether or not they were using their smerit monthly allocations... so it did take theymos a year or maybe even two years before he really did end up reducing the smerit allocations of those merit sources and/or removing them from being merit sources...

So I do believe that it would be a BIGGER problem if merit source members were merit hoarders as compared with non-merit source members.. and the context of my above quote was attempting to focus on the dynamic of regular members acting like smerit hoarders rather than merit source members.

Otherwise I agree with your overall assessment Razmirraz that it appears that current merit source members are way more inclined to liberally send smerits as compared to either the first batch of merit source members and perhaps even the second batch.. so it may well have taken a bit more than a couple of years to get each of the incremental improvements in achieving more liberal sending of smerits from merit source members.

I surely don't feel like I have enough information to know whether some improvement could be made in terms of either rotating merit source members a bit more or if there might be some improvements if theymos might increase the number of merit source members.. because there does seem to be a bit of work in making those kinds of assessments, and surely sometimes there are likely some issues with how some of the merit source members (and not even excluding myself from the potential problem areas) are sending smerits and/or unfairly benefiting from their being assigned as a merit source member... .but likely theymos does also recognize that even if some of us might be sloppy and neglectful and maybe even deliberately bad from time to time in how we are either sending smerits or refraining from sending smerits, he likely also recognizes and appreciates that there is quite a bit of work that may well go into merit source members figuring out their own approach to the matter and then actually employing it on a daily/weekly and even monthly basis (as Philip mentioned the very issue that he has had with building up of smerits and some dilemmas regarding how to spend them in a way that is comfortable for the merit source member as well as other real life issues that s/he may well have happening)..

For example, there might be some reports that theymos and/or various admins/mods receive - and some of those reports might end up leading to something in which immediate action might need to be taken by theymos.. but then other times, it may well be that he is just making notes and accumulating a file.. to "get to" later, whether it is 1 year later, 2 years later or maybe some longer period of time so long as the accumulated notes are not really causing him a sufficient amount of discomfort in regards to just letting the whole matter just continue to run "as is" until a certain threshold of discomfort is crossed... like the breaking bellow the 200-week moving average as  BTC's price support.. and when it happens.. he says to himself "oh shit, I better do something"..... I.e... buy more BTC.. or globally tweak the forum's smerit system..

[Razmirraz]

Snip.

No, I don't think there is a specific consensus on how we rate them, which means you have the right to spend sMerit/ no spend and that's up to you. Some people are known to not care about the merit system and some may not be interested, and again that's up to them.

Pmalek had discussed this matter before, he made a topic and revealed some reasons.

Top 200 Active Members who have earned most Merits but have sent 0 sMerits

I can think of a couple of reasons:
1. They dont care about receiving/sending Merits at all and dont want to be part of it.
2. They dont understand how the Merit system works, thinking every time they send a merit, their count will decrease by one.
3. They cant find/dont think there is anything worth meriting.
4. They are afraid of sending Merits since there are many abuses and dont want to get on someone's radar.  

But I can think of another reason that might be the 5th reason and that. Forum contributors who left the forum before the merit system was introduced such as satoshi will no longer be active just to spend their sMerit.

What Pmalek discusses in this topic is only a small number of the top active users who have earned the most Merit but have sent 0 sMerits to other users, some of whom have left the forum. Without them there are still many other users with a high concern for spending sMerit where it deserves.
Those who leave the forum with the number of sMerits they have will not reduce the number of sMerit, the circulation of merits continues even without them.

[Jatiluhung]

so far since i joined this forum i found a really extraordinary level of activeness in this forum. I didn't know they were a source of merit at that time. because I didn't know there was a profession as a source of merit. But once I know that the person is a Source of merit then all I can say is that they are the right person to hold that mandate as a Source of merit. for considering their extraordinary activity. because I saw other accounts of ordinary people. hence most of them are only active about 4 hours per day. even less than that.

but the question mark for me is how can they always be active in this forum? do they not have much activity in the real world? Or are they really good at managing time?

[Pmalek]

but the question mark for me is how can they always be active in this forum? do they not have much activity in the real world? Or are they really good at managing time?

It could be any of the things you mentioned or a combination of several factors. You have to understand that not everyone works your standard 8-10 hours a day job, so they have more time during the day than the average person. Depending on where you are in the world and what your financial situation looks like, being active on this forum is a huge deal to some financially. We might have some crypto millionaires among us who no longer have to work at all and their hobby is writing on Bitcointalk. You have freelancers who only work occasionally. You have people who work in sales in certain stores that don't see much activity and they have much time to kill in between serving their customers. 

[philipma1957]

but the question mark for me is how can they always be active in this forum? do they not have much activity in the real world? Or are they really good at managing time?

It could be any of the things you mentioned or a combination of several factors. You have to understand that not everyone works your standard 8-10 hours a day job, so they have more time during the day than the average person. Depending on where you are in the world and what your financial situation looks like, being active on this forum is a huge deal to some financially. We might have some crypto millionaires among us who no longer have to work at all and their hobby is writing on Bitcointalk. You have freelancers who only work occasionally. You have people who work in sales in certain stores that don't see much activity and they have much time to kill in between serving their customers. 

Yeah my work is this forum, Ebay and hunting on a dozen sales sites online.

Plus I blog on two other sites evga.com and macrumors

So I spend 4-10 hours a day online. Along with regular visits to maintain the farm gear.

I am not the only one thats earns online on this website.

[Jatiluhung]

but the question mark for me is how can they always be active in this forum? do they not have much activity in the real world? Or are they really good at managing time?

It could be any of the things you mentioned or a combination of several factors. You have to understand that not everyone works your standard 8-10 hours a day job, so they have more time during the day than the average person. Depending on where you are in the world and what your financial situation looks like, being active on this forum is a huge deal to some financially. We might have some crypto millionaires among us who no longer have to work at all and their hobby is writing on Bitcointalk. You have freelancers who only work occasionally. You have people who work in sales in certain stores that don't see much activity and they have much time to kill in between serving their customers. 

I forgot about that. yesterday i just saw from my perspective that i have very little time outside my working hours.
I forgot that many people also work online. and also many people who have become rich and no longer work. and they do activities in this forum as a fun activity as a hobby. or to fill spare time and share information and insights with fellow forum members. conduct small discussions that sometimes relieve boredom and add experience and insight.

[Razmirraz]

And, merit hoarding for regular members is surely less of an issue than for merit sources, and I am pretty sure that in the first round of merit source member assignments, some of those members who were assigned as merit sources, were really stingy regarding their sending out merits, and some of them even publicly stated such.

Merit Sources shouldn't need to do merit hoarding, because when they make a Vision and Mission when applying to become a Merit Source, they often attach a history of their achievement statistics. Speaking of the first batch of Merit Source assignments, there are still many things that need to be addressed, maybe they are stingy because they have difficulty finding worthy users in their post history reviews to be appreciated or have other activities outside the forum that cannot be abandoned, in the end, many monthly sMerit allocations are piled up.

Theymos would not even need to have had to see their posts in which they made such anti-smerit sending philosophies to be able to see whether or not they were using their smerit monthly allocations... so it did take theymos a year or maybe even two years before he really did end up reducing the smerit allocations of those merit sources and/or removing them from being merit sources...

To reduce cases of merit hoarding on Merit Sources, Theymos should choose Merit Sources that really have high Loyalty on the forum. So far, I have found several Merit Sources (no need to mention their names here) that do their job well, some of them need to be rotated with other users or provide opportunities for non-merit source members.

So I do believe that it would be a BIGGER problem if merit source members were merit hoarders as compared with non-merit source members.. and the context of my above quote was attempting to focus on the dynamic of regular members acting like smerit hoarders rather than merit source members.

Obviously there will be BIG PROBLEMS if the Merit Source chosen by the Administrator is more stingy than the non-merit source members.
In the context of your quote above, I really understand the intent and purpose, those who hoard services are only a small number of stingy users who cannot appreciate contributions from other users.

Otherwise I agree with your overall assessment Razmirraz that it appears that current merit source members are way more inclined to liberally send smerits as compared to either the first batch of merit source members and perhaps even the second batch.. so it may well have taken a bit more than a couple of years to get each of the incremental improvements in achieving more liberal sending of smerits from merit source members.

As I explained above, there are still many shortcomings in the FIRST PRODUCT. So far what I have seen in the field, Merit Source is already on track, both globally and on the Local Board.

I surely don't feel like I have enough information to know whether some improvement could be made in terms of either rotating merit source members a bit more or if there might be some improvements if theymos might increase the number of merit source members.. because there does seem to be a bit of work in making those kinds of assessments, and surely sometimes there are likely some issues with how some of the merit source members (and not even excluding myself from the potential problem areas) are sending smerits and/or unfairly benefiting from their being assigned as a merit source member... .but likely theymos does also recognize that even if some of us might be sloppy and neglectful and maybe even deliberately bad from time to time in how we are either sending smerits or refraining from sending smerits, he likely also recognizes and appreciates that there is quite a bit of work that may well go into merit source members figuring out their own approach to the matter and then actually employing it on a daily/weekly and even monthly basis (as Philip mentioned the very issue that he has had with building up of smerits and some dilemmas regarding how to spend them in a way that is comfortable for the merit source member as well as other real life issues that s/he may well have happening)..

We never know if haven't tried it, the opportunity needs to be given to non-merit source users who are very active in distributing sMerit to other forum members. I also found some Merit Source Applications that have not been accepted, I thought Theymos should give it a try as some local councils also need Merit Source.

Changes need to be made on a rotating basis to reduce potential problems, Theymos should be more active in overseeing stingy Merit Sources and immediately rotate with new Source. I think if done like this, Merit Source will be even more active in distributing monthly sMerit allocations to deserving users (please correct if I'm wrong).

[skarais]

Merit Sources shouldn't need to do merit hoarding, because when they make a Vision and Mission when applying to become a Merit Source, they often attach a history of their achievement statistics. Speaking of the first batch of Merit Source assignments, there are still many things that need to be addressed, maybe they are stingy because they have difficulty finding worthy users in their post history reviews to be appreciated or have other activities outside the forum that cannot be abandoned, in the end, many monthly sMerit allocations are piled up.

Most merit source are handpicked by theymos and send them pm to inquire about availability, and as far as I know there are only a few of that apply to be merit source which are then selectively added to the source.

I would not say that the merit source is stingy especially since it is free work for them. In the past I've complained about the consistently high post quality requirement that multiple merit source maintain on both local or global board, but this assumption was eventually debunked when I studied how the system worked. You should know that you cannot expect all merit source to have the same methods and criteria, currently 111 merit source have different criteria and this will add to the uniqueness of the system. If 1-5 source are stingy, it doesn't mean that the other 106-110 source are also stingy.

We never know if haven't tried it, the opportunity needs to be given to non-merit source users who are very active in distributing sMerit to other forum members. I also found some Merit Source Applications that have not been accepted, I thought Theymos should give it a try as some local councils also need Merit Source.

Changes need to be made on a rotating basis to reduce potential problems, Theymos should be more active in overseeing stingy Merit Sources and immediately rotate with new Source. I think if done like this, Merit Source will be even more active in distributing monthly sMerit allocations to deserving users (please correct if I'm wrong).

I know that adding some merit source or replacing inactive ones can improve distribution across multiple board. As one of the users who have submitted merit source applications, I have never forced the admin to accept me because I think some people are still willing to help on the local board or maybe merited some of my posts which I then distribute to the local board. But of course my contribution won't be much improvement, but at least it will continue as long as I have sMerit. Unfortunately while now it has to stop because of 0 sMerit.

[JayJuanGee]

And, merit hoarding for regular members is surely less of an issue than for merit sources, and I am pretty sure that in the first round of merit source member assignments, some of those members who were assigned as merit sources, were really stingy regarding their sending out merits, and some of them even publicly stated such.

Merit Sources shouldn't need to do merit hoarding, because when they make a Vision and Mission when applying to become a Merit Source, they often attach a history of their achievement statistics. Speaking of the first batch of Merit Source assignments, there are still many things that need to be addressed, maybe they are stingy because they have difficulty finding worthy users in their post history reviews to be appreciated or have other activities outside the forum that cannot be abandoned, in the end, many monthly sMerit allocations are piled up.

Probably it is worth repeating that the very first batch of merit source members were selected by theymos based on whatever he thought might make a good merit source.. perhaps based on their past contributions to the forum.. but a decent number of the initial selection ended up being merit hoarders... .. also the system was new, so it likely took a little bit of time to get used to the idea of sending smerits and also for theymos to see how it played out in those first couple of years.. 

I surely don't feel like I have enough information to know whether some improvement could be made in terms of either rotating merit source members a bit more or if there might be some improvements if theymos might increase the number of merit source members.. because there does seem to be a bit of work in making those kinds of assessments, and surely sometimes there are likely some issues with how some of the merit source members (and not even excluding myself from the potential problem areas) are sending smerits and/or unfairly benefiting from their being assigned as a merit source member... .but likely theymos does also recognize that even if some of us might be sloppy and neglectful and maybe even deliberately bad from time to time in how we are either sending smerits or refraining from sending smerits, he likely also recognizes and appreciates that there is quite a bit of work that may well go into merit source members figuring out their own approach to the matter and then actually employing it on a daily/weekly and even monthly basis (as Philip mentioned the very issue that he has had with building up of smerits and some dilemmas regarding how to spend them in a way that is comfortable for the merit source member as well as other real life issues that s/he may well have happening)..

We never know if haven't tried it, the opportunity needs to be given to non-merit source users who are very active in distributing sMerit to other forum members.

Personally, I am very much in favor of the idea of increasing the number of merit source members or even rotating some of the merit source members.. I do speculate that theymos has some reservations in regards to being too rash in terms of making changes.. and a rotating system might cause a lot of work for him and a lot of frustration from merit source members.. and might even cause resentment from non-merit source members to be making changes very frequently.. so there might be downsides in terms of attempting to be very creative in the process.. but the injection of 20 to 50 new merit source members might be a good idea.. but maybe even that might not have as many upsides as it seems to have on the face of the matter.

Another possibility could be that theymos could try to delegate some of his responsibilities in regards to the whole merit source system and appoint a merit source czar that would oversee the whole system.. but that might well bring on some of its own issues.. even if theymos feels some burdens in carrying out those duties himself, too.

I recall at one point there seemed to have had been some thoughts that the merit system might be able to replace the trust system.. and then there are goals of having systems that might play out in more decentralized kinds of ways.. but then at the same time, there seems to be no real escaping some of the allegiances and alliances that form, and also sometimes the injustices that play out with some of the drama, too... even seemingly really good forum members might end up going through melt-downs of sorts.. there would likely be a lot of pissed off members if there were a discovery that the merit system would replace the trust system..


.....,and for sure, even when the merit system went into place, there were some of us who were assigned as merit source members (including yours truly) who had little to no clue that such a system was going to be going into effect, and it can seem like a kind of April fools joke to sign in and to try to figure out "what the fuck is this?" and to find out that you have been assigned as a merit source, and don't even really know what it is, yet... so knowledge does evolve on the topic and we get used to it. and sometimes the transition can be confusing, including if theymos were to proclaim that the merit system was going to be taken away.. that would likely cause disgruntled folks, too.

I also found some Merit Source Applications that have not been accepted, I thought Theymos should give it a try as some local councils also need Merit Source.

Yes.. some of those merit source applications seem to sit for a long time (years perhaps?) without any assignment of any new merit source member for certain areas of the forum.

Changes need to be made on a rotating basis to reduce potential problems, Theymos should be more active in overseeing stingy Merit Sources and immediately rotate with new Source.

Personally, it seems difficult to conclude that something "needs to be done" - if not knowing enough information regarding what problem might "need to be" solved... I am not going to proclaim to know if I do not see reports or investigations into reports... .. and, sure there might be some parts of the forum that seem to have some leaders or even more contributory members. and how might we know, or not know, if there might be some concerns about certain kinds of activities or if there might be some thoughts about various members who might be appointed as merit source members and if that might be helpful or maybe it would not necessarily be helpful to the situation in that local.. I would not really be able to globally know without having some specifics in regards to posting activities and reports at minimum.. and even some of the moderators might have some of their own views on the topic about which theymos is attempting to account for, too.

I think if done like this, Merit Source will be even more active in distributing monthly sMerit allocations to deserving users (please correct if I'm wrong).

You may well know about some areas of the forum in which I have hardly any clue about the dynamics.. so sure you could be correct about the need for one or two more merit sources being needed in a certain area of the forum.. but I doubt that we can conclude that theymos is not doing enough merely based on an assertion that there might exist a seemingly obvious solution that might include increasing merit source members (or rotating merit source members or removing a merit source member) in one or more areas of the forum.

[fillippone]

I recall at one point there seemed to have had been some thoughts that the merit system might be able to replace the trust system.. and then there are goals of having systems that might play out in more decentralized kinds of ways.. but then at the same time, there seems to be no real escaping some of the allegiances and alliances that form, and also sometimes the injustices that play out with some of the drama, too... even seemingly really good forum members might end up going through melt-downs of sorts.. there would likely be a lot of pissed off members if there were a discovery that the merit system would replace the trust system..

I think that, with current rules, merit and trust systems assolve very different functions on the forum. While merit system attains the effort put on the forum, the trust system attain “judgment” on the “trust” each one of us can put on a certain users.
As also recent event have demonstrated, the two aspects are often correlated, but can be also take opposite directions.
And the damage in the second scenario greatly overcome the benefit of a single system.

[Welsh]

And, merit hoarding for regular members is surely less of an issue than for merit sources, and I am pretty sure that in the first round of merit source member assignments, some of those members who were assigned as merit sources, were really stingy regarding their sending out merits, and some of them even publicly stated such.

Right, I'd probably agree with that. If a merit source isn't spending the majority of their spending allocation, it's probably a good time to reconsider them as a merit source, but only really if you think someone else would be able to replace the amount they're sending, and in a somewhat useful way.

I think if we look at it at implementation, users didn't really understand the importance of merit, and there was a lot of experimenting so large amounts were thrown around initially. However, as the standards set by the community sort of came into play, so did the stinginess you talk about. Basically, merit is like bloody gold these days, and you'll find even some very good posts only receiving one merit at a time. theymos did counteract that by increasing merit source allocation though. So, the answer doesn't always have to be new merit sources, but increasing the allocation of the current merit sources. Although, currently I think we're at the sweet spot, since most merit sources are probably only just about spending their allocation every month, and any more would likely be wasted.

Otherwise I agree with your overall assessment Razmirraz that it appears that current merit source members are way more inclined to liberally send smerits as compared to either the first batch of merit source members and perhaps even the second batch.. so it may well have taken a bit more than a couple of years to get each of the incremental improvements in achieving more liberal sending of smerits from merit source members.

There's also the issue of attrition over time a certain duty might become a little less exciting to certain users, or they might feel they aren't making as big of an impact as they once were. Some will get bored of only sending merit to the same users, time over time, and get frustrated that newer users aren't popping up as often as before. I guess what I'm trying to say is natural variation will take course, and therefore habits will change over time. That either means we need to do something about getting more eyes on the forum, getting new merit sources or increasing the allocations of the current merit sources.

[fillippone]

1 year and I come back.

• Honestly, I did not check merit sources page in many months
• So I don't know when the latest change was made
• But the update is, currently "there are 110 merit sources with a total merit generation of up to 33989 sMerit per 30 days"
• It is minor change compares to 1 year ago, in July 2021. I guess 1 merit source was removed.

I checked the page today, as someone told me there were MS removals.

it says:

Merit sources

There are 110 merit sources with a total merit generation of up to 33989 sMerit per 30 days

so no change since @Thranthidung last checked.


Am I daydreaming or there was a graph for this?

[Jet Cash]

The stupid covid panicdemic forced me to change quite a few things. I used to spend a lot of time drinking coffee in McDonalds and using the computer. I don't go into snack bars any more, and I'm spending more time in the van next to the  sea or in the woods. It's a great life. I feel a bit guilty, as I'm still a merit source with lots to spend.. I bought a couple of classic Volvo cars amongst other things, so I'm spending a lot less time on line.

I feel a bit guilty, as I'm still a Bitcoin maximalist and hodler, and I suspect Bitcoin Talk is still the best pace to discuss Bitcoin. I've had a look round today, and I don't recognise any of the currently active posters. Hopefully I'll be able to spend a bit more time here, and I hope to start using the lightning network to spend and replenish small amounts of Bitcoin.

[fillippone]

I feel a bit guilty, as I'm still a Bitcoin maximalist and hodler, and I suspect Bitcoin Talk is still the best pace to discuss Bitcoin. I've had a look round today, and I don't recognise any of the currently active posters. Hopefully I'll be able to spend a bit more time here, and I hope to start using the lightning network to spend and replenish small amounts of Bitcoin.

You don't have to feel even a bit guilty about this. The important things is stay bitcoiner at hearth, spending your precious satoshi where you think it is worth.
Regarding your merit source role, Theymos will eventually take action , if he is dissatisfied of what you are doing. No need to worry or to judge you.

Regarding you not recognising anyone, I don't know hat to say. Communities evolve, often in a way we didn't foresee. But rest assured bitcointalk.opg IS the best place where to discuss bitcoin.

Apart form that: ^{Did you start mining in your van?}

[The Sceptical Chymist]

Hopefully I'll be able to spend a bit more time here, and I hope to start using the lightning network to spend and replenish small amounts of Bitcoin.

Great to see you back, Jet Cash!  Of course I always say that whenever you reappear--though truthfully if you were posting in sections like B&H I wouldn't know if you'd taken a vacation or not.  I've been meaning to learn more about using the lightning network, but I've just been too mentally lazy.

You obviously haven't been active as a merit source in the past 120 days (no criticism, just observation), and that makes me wonder how active some of the lesser-known, or completely unknown, sources are and whether Theymos is keeping an eye on things.  I'd think if a merit source isn't distributing many merits, he might want to think about either adding new ones or replacing sources that aren't active.  I don't know if 33989 merits in 30 days is good or not, though I imagine the community would make some noise if it wasn't. 

On the other hand, aside from the typical threads in Meta about how to earn merits there haven't been any real complaints that it's impossible to rank up in quite some time.  It could be that lower-ranked members have resigned themselves to staying at Jr. Member or thereabouts.  I honestly don't know what to think.

[dzungmobile]

Merit bell

Not sure when it happened but today I saw.
1 merit source removed.
Total source merit drops from 33989 to 33940.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=merit;stats=sources

• But the update is, currently "there are 110 merit sources with a total merit generation of up to 33989 sMerit per 30 days"

[tranthidung]

Merit bell

The total merit sources number is still 109 but total sourced merit drops a lot from 33940 to 33140. There is less 800 sourced merit each 30 days than the last merit bell.

There are 109 merit sources with a total merit generation of up to 33140 sMerit per 30 days

Source: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=merit;stats=sources

[Halab]

There is less 800 sourced merit each 30 days than the last merit bell.

Indeed, it's a -1000 (there's no great mystery behind the disappearance of this MS) and a +200 (it's more a correction of an "anomaly" for this new MS).

[tranthidung]

Indeed, it's a -1000 (there's no great mystery behind the disappearance of this MS) and a +200 (it's more a correction of an "anomaly" for this new MS).

I knew there are some changes because total merit sources number is the same but total sourced merit drops significantly.

It's a long time I did not check that page and even when all stats are the same, there are possibly something changes internally too like increase and decrease of sourced merits among current merit sources.

Thank you for your information Halab.

[hg_away]

There is less 800 sourced merit each 30 days than the last merit bell.

Indeed, it's a -1000 (there's no great mystery behind the disappearance of this MS) and a +200 (it's more a correction of an "anomaly" for this new MS).

Can you find out who was deleted? Most 200 Merit sources are for local boards only.

[dzungmobile]

Can you find out who was deleted?

You can make your guess and it is very likely right. Symmetrick.

Can a merit source re-start Ratimov merit threads.

Today I am leaving the [banned mixer] campaign, thank you for the opportunity to represent this service.

Symmetrick wants to take a break or leave the forum so it makes sense if he sent a request to be removed as a merit source.

Most 200 Merit sources are for local boards only.

I am not sure about it.

New merit source can be reported in [TOP-200] The most generous users giving merits with next updates in that thread.

[digaran]

I have ordered 2 stripers and 4 bottles of champaign, lets see who is this lucky new source! They haven't publicly announced it yet themselves? Why, too shy? 😉

[fillippone]

Wondering if someone guessed who this new merit source is.
Also, I think the forum lost another heavyweight merit source.
Theymos needs to replace him as well, I am afraid.

[Aanuoluwatofunmi]

Wondering if someone guessed who this new merit source is.
Also, I think the forum lost another heavyweight merit source.
Theymos needs to replace him as well, I am afraid.

It will be our utmost desire to see that Theymos give consideration to some of the merit source applications and review them, we are truly going down gradually with the numbers of merits sources available of recent while some have for a long time been inactive on the forum, we also have to commend of the present and active merits sources for a well done job, you guyz are doing well in covering up the lapses while ensuring evenly distribution of merits.

[logfiles]

Wondering if someone guessed who this new merit source is.
Also, I think the forum lost another heavyweight merit source.
Theymos needs to replace him as well, I am afraid.

I don't know if there is any recent update data about merit distribution among members, especially from the merit sources, but I think it's about time Theymos did something and added new merit sources

With a few notable members leaving the forum or becoming inactive. There is definitely a void that needs to be filled up.

[Coyster]

With a few notable members leaving the forum or becoming inactive. There is definitely a void that needs to be filled up.

Its been quite a long time since Theymos added new MS's, but within that time source merits have decreased quite a lot, some MS's became somewhat inactive, and some others completely left the forum. I think right now Theymos would really be considering adding new MS's, it has been a long time coming, but this period seems like the perfect time; there is no dearth of MS applications, there are so many reputable members waiting in the pipeline, and this makes Theymos' job pretty easy, he just has to pick a few out of those waiting.

[KingsDen]

With a few notable members leaving the forum or becoming inactive. There is definitely a void that needs to be filled up.

Its been quite a long time since Theymos added new MS's, but within that time source merits have decreased quite a lot, some MS's became somewhat inactive, and some others completely left the forum. I think right now Theymos would really be considering adding new MS's, it has been a long time coming, but this period seems like the perfect time; there is no dearth of MS applications, there are so many reputable members waiting in the pipeline, and this makes Theymos' job pretty easy, he just has to pick a few out of those waiting.

I was just wondering why theymos has been somewhat reluctant to add more merit sources. I couldn't actually get resounding answer, but I believe that theymos doesn't want merit to lose it value. He does so  by practically keeping it as scarce as possible. Adding more merit sources will make merit more abundant and who knows it could lose its value. But knowing that most merit source do not distribute merits and some are no longer active, it is nice to introduce few more hands and watch, if the result is counter productive, he can still reduce the number of merit sources thereafter.

Wondering if someone guessed who this new merit source is.
Also, I think the forum lost another heavyweight merit source.
Theymos needs to replace him as well, I am afraid.

One thing is having a merit source, another is having someone as generous as Leo in merit distribution. In terms of capacity, there is supposed to be two people replacing Leo

[LoyceV]

I was just wondering why theymos has been somewhat reluctant to add more merit sources. I couldn't actually get resounding answer, but I believe that theymos doesn't want merit to lose it value. He does so  by practically keeping it as scarce as possible

The total Merit circulation is much higher than it was in the first year after it's introduction, while the number of posts went down a lot. Merit isn't scarce, good posts are.

[Rikafip]

But knowing that most merit source do not distribute merits and some are no longer active, it is nice to introduce few more hands and watch, if the result is counter productive, he can still reduce the number of merit sources thereafter.

The chart belows tells different story. As seen, the amount of merit shared hasnt really dropped since the last time theymos did merit readjustment which was ~2 and a half years ago (July 2021) and chances are he won't do it again until merit number drops down significantly. Add on that the fact that since then number of posts went down 40-50%, no wonder that theymos is not in a hurry to introduce new merit sources.

As loyce said, there's lack of good posts, not merit. At least not generally speaking, some parts of the forum are indeed undemerited



Source https://public.tableau.com/views/BitcointalkMeritDashboard/MeritSendersReceivers?:language=en-US&:display_count=n&:origin=viz_share_link

[tranthidung]

Merit bell

Again, I am not sure when the change happened but today, by checking I see small changes than a last merit bell.

There are 108 merit sources with a total merit generation of up to 32890 sMerit per 30 days

There are 109 merit sources with a total merit generation of up to 33140 sMerit per 30 days

[JayJuanGee]

Merit bell

Again, I am not sure when the change happened but today, by checking I see small changes than a last merit bell.

There are 108 merit sources with a total merit generation of up to 32890 sMerit per 30 days

There are 109 merit sources with a total merit generation of up to 33140 sMerit per 30 days

Oh.. so there was potentially another removal, after the removal of Symmetrick (Ratimov).

From the forum news, I can tell that one user who had a significantly large monthly sMerit allocation of 849 was removed from the list of merit sources about two months ago. As a result, the total number of active merit sources has decreased from 110 to 109, and the current total merit generation is now 33140 sMerit per 30 days. I don't know who this user is.

Since, in recent times, there has been so much drama around Symmetrick (Ratimov), it may well could have been him, since it appears that you still have him listed as a merit source, and I am in the last week or so, he has been banned from the forum.

[dzungmobile]

Oh.. so there was potentially another removal, after the removal of Symmetrick (Ratimov).

Who did leave the forum after Ratimov?

We have a big name, true legendary member who left us last month or two months ago and it makes sense to remove him as a merit source.

Farewell

[Agbe]

Oh.. so there was potentially another removal, after the removal of Symmetrick (Ratimov).

Who did leave the forum after Ratimov?

We have a big name, true legendary member who left us last month or two months ago and it makes sense to remove him as a merit source.

Farewell

We needs merit sources in the forum both in the general boards and in the local boards. Symmetrick popularly and formally known as Ratimov was a generous merit source and if theymos is bringing anyone in it should be a generous one and not the person that have a very long list of ignore Users. o_e_l_e_o was also generous but he was mostly active in the wallet.and technical board and he gave merits in those boards more than other general boards.

If the total number of merit sources were 109 and the removal of Symmetrick as Ratimov led to the reduction of the total number to 108 then the removal of o_e_l_e_o should reduce it to 107. And let the admin should bring the new ones like four general merit sources. And This days I was even thinking if there are merit sources in the forum because because merit is not flowing like before again.

[JayJuanGee]

Oh.. so there was potentially another removal, after the removal of Symmetrick (Ratimov).

Who did leave the forum after Ratimov?

We have a big name, true legendary member who left us last month or two months ago and it makes sense to remove him as a merit source.
Farewell

Oh yeah.. whoops, of course.  I participated in that thread as well as the flaming thread that was related to it.

[teamsherry]

I was just wondering why theymos has been somewhat reluctant to add more merit sources. I couldn't actually get resounding answer, but I believe that theymos doesn't want merit to lose it value. He does so  by practically keeping it as scarce as possible

The total Merit circulation is much higher than it was in the first year after it's introduction, while the number of posts went down a lot. Merit isn't scarce, good posts are.

You might be right about lack of good post but I still bet that they are so many good posts that have died in the forum that weren't merited and not because they wasn't merit to go by but no one saw them, maybe cause the so called merit sources don't spend much time on the forum anymore.

Yeah with lots of shitpost it's easy to hide the good ones, but what's more disappointing to users is when they try hard to give a good post, no merit, it actually reduces the moral of good posting since good post aren't appreciated.

Now another thign is a mert source idea of good post, you can't expect a new user less than a year in bitcoin and this forum make as much quality post like you that has been in this forum for so long or have so much knowledge maybe following up even since the introduction of this forum, so yeah standard can be reduced a bit not to encourage shot post but gor those that that at least doing good or trying that woudl actually promote good post on the forum. And yeah I believe its not your first time hearing an opinion like this,  so it might not do any good 

[The Sceptical Chymist]

Yeah with lots of shitpost it's easy to hide the good ones, but what's more disappointing to users is when they try hard to give a good post, no merit, it actually reduces the moral of good posting since good post aren't appreciated.

So....do you think some of your posts are among those that have escaped the attention of merit sources and all of the other members with merits to give out?  I'm really hoping the answer is no, because the quality of your writing is typical of what I see in most threads, i.e., abysmal.  And yes I'm singling you out since you acknowledged the abundance of shitposts but argued that good posts go un-merited despite the argument that LoyceV made.

Now another thign is a mert source

See?  You're not even trying.  Or worse, this is your best writing.

Speaking of merit sources and their activity, I've been incredibly lazy for at least a month but intend to fire off the merit cannon shortly.  I'm still contemplating how to handle my offer of post history reviews in light of some feedback I've gotten and the high probability that I'm helping alt accounts that meet the bare minimum standards for merits rank up--something that I do not want to do.  But that's for another thread.

[LoyceV]

I still bet that they are so many good posts that have died in the forum that weren't merited

Why don't you put your money where your mouth is, follow the link you quoted, and share maybe 200 or so good posts that haven't been merited yet? I'll make you a deal: if I agree they're good (and I should be able to read them), I'll Merit them. If it's 200 good posts, I'll happily share 800 Merit with them. Good luck.

Now another thign is a mert source

See?  You're not even trying.  Or worse, this is your best writing.

Shitposters complaining about Merit. All it proves is the system works as intended

[The Sceptical Chymist]

Why don't you put your money where your mouth is, follow the link you quoted, and share maybe 200 or so good posts that haven't been merited yet? I'll make you a deal: if I agree they're good (and I should be able to read them), I'll Merit them. If it's 200 good posts, I'll happily share 800 Merit with them. Good luck.

I'll even up the ante here.  If teamsherry follows up and does point out posts you find meritworthy, I'll check all the ones you've merited and if I concur, I'll give them an additional 1 merit.

Shitposters complaining about Merit. All it proves is the system works as intended

They've been complaining about merit ever since that morning in January 2018 when I woke up (with the flu) and saw Meta had exploded and suddenly contained innumerable threads dealing with this new phenomenon Theymos had seemingly cooked up in secret.  And yup, the system has been kicking shitposters' asses ever since.  But hey, at least there aren't nearly as many merit-bitching or merit-begging threads these days.  For those of you who haven't been here a few years, those were a massive annoyance for a long, long time.

Edit:

By the way, "teamsherry" doesn't happen to look like this does it?

[examplens]

Why don't you put your money where your mouth is, follow the link you quoted, and share maybe 200 or so good posts that haven't been merited yet? I'll make you a deal: if I agree they're good (and I should be able to read them), I'll Merit them. If it's 200 good posts, I'll happily share 800 Merit with them. Good luck.

I'll even up the ante here.  If teamsherry follows up and does point out posts you find meritworthy, I'll check all the ones you've merited and if I concur, I'll give them an additional 1 merit.

The problem is that many have the wrong idea of which posts are of good quality and deserve merit. I follow this topic, and from time to time I push someone to raise their rank with the idea of motivating them.
Maybe it's wrong because they are so convinced that they are writing valuable posts, and then we have complaints like this because similar posts have gone "unnoticed" or "died". Obviously not recognizing the difference between motivational merit and deserved.

[logfiles]

Again, I am not sure when the change happened but today, by checking I see small changes than a last merit bell.

There are 108 merit sources with a total merit generation of up to 32890 sMerit per 30 days

Looks like those figures are not regularly updated or probably a coincidence?
Three weeks later and it still looks the same.

Another merit source seems to have been banned. I think it will take a while before they remove him from the list.

That being said, at least there's some flow of merits lately, according to my observation.

[JayJuanGee]

Again, I am not sure when the change happened but today, by checking I see small changes than a last merit bell.

There are 108 merit sources with a total merit generation of up to 32890 sMerit per 30 days

Looks like those figures are not regularly updated or probably a coincidence?
Three weeks later and it still looks the same.
Another merit source seems to have been banned. I think it will take a while before they remove him from the list.

That being said, at least there's some flow of merits lately, according to my observation.

Browsing through recent posts of tyz, I cannot see a reason for the ban.. or at least for me, nothing stands out as a possible reason.

[DdmrDdmr]

<...>

The account was possibly banned after certain practices were highlighted here and here. I figure more posts were either reported or inspected in order to determine the final outcome (plagiarism is easy to prove, use of AI will likely take a bit more research in order to be able to conclude with enough confidence of not crossing a false positive).

[FatFork]

<...>

The account was possibly banned after certain practices were highlighted here and here. I figure more posts were either reported or inspected in order to determine the final outcome (plagiarism is easy to prove, use of AI will likely take a bit more research in order to be able to conclude with enough confidence of not crossing a false positive).

I think his case might have something to do with him being banned for plagiarism before. He got a second chance after his ban appeal in 2019. It is possible that the moderators have records or check the logs of such cases so they issued the permaban without much hesitation.

[Tungbulu]

<...>

The account was possibly banned after certain practices were highlighted here and here. I figure more posts were either reported or inspected in order to determine the final outcome (plagiarism is easy to prove, use of AI will likely take a bit more research in order to be able to conclude with enough confidence of not crossing a false positive).

I think his case might have something to do with him being banned for plagiarism before. He got a second chance after his ban appeal in 2019. It is possible that the moderators have records or check the logs of such cases so they issued the permaban without much hesitation.

How about accounts that were issued the permaban for using AI content generator or plagiarism, without first issuing a warning and without any record  of previous ban cases. I mean we have such cases too. Can we consider such cases to be unjust especially maybe if/when the culprit claims to be ignorant of the offence.

[LoyceV]

How about accounts that were issued the permaban for using AI content generator or plagiarism, without first issuing a warning and without any record  of previous ban cases. I mean we have such cases too. Can we consider such cases to be unjust especially maybe if/when the culprit claims to be ignorant of the offence.

"I didn't know stealing is wrong"?

[Tungbulu]

How about accounts that were issued the permaban for using AI content generator or plagiarism, without first issuing a warning and without any record  of previous ban cases. I mean we have such cases too. Can we consider such cases to be unjust especially maybe if/when the culprit claims to be ignorant of the offence.

"I didn't know stealing is wrong"?

Well, what's wrong here could be right somewhere else.
What's considered stealing something in one place/race could also be the right means to legally obtaining something in another.  

[Upgrade00]

Well, what's wrong here could be right somewhere else.

Precisely, and you adjust to the rules of the forum you're in and hoping to get some bucks from.

And in general passing off content as yours is unethical and frowned upon.

[Tungbulu]

Well, what's wrong here could be right somewhere else.

Precisely, and you adjust to the rules of the forum you're in and hoping to get some bucks from.

And in general passing off content as yours is unethical and frowned upon.

Someone set the rules.
So others can follow the rules And others needs to know the rules to follow the rules.
People don't just come to a community and know the rules. Although it's ethical/logical that the first thing you should do is inquire about the rules when you find yourself in a new place/community but then again, what if the person only got access to few of the rules and not all of it. Is he still guilty of breaking a rule he never got to know about?

Indeed, in the eyes of the law, ignorance should be an excuse for defaulters but then again, what's the law if it can achieve it's true cause, that's to punish actual offenders.

And in general passing off content as yours is unethical and frowned upon.

Some who don't know this would consider it to be just a harmless way of sharing of useful information they don't really have access to while being ignorant of the implications of their actions. Cmon, that's somehow understandable.
I'm not justifying an offence though, I'm just trying to state a fact.

[Sandra_hakeem]

But hey, at least there aren't nearly as many merit-bitching or merit-begging threads these days.  For those of you who haven't been here a few years, those were a massive annoyance for a long, long time.

well, lemme get this straight; Was there any rules that athwarted that behavior before the merit system? Uhmm, I think no so I can safely say they all polluted the system with these subnormalities. I think that's it
My heart bleeds and pulsates unconsciously every time I visit his profile; how on earth do we keep losing assets like him ? Death is really a horrible face of afterlife

Shitposters complaining about Merit. All it proves is the system works as intended

For the first time, I'll agree with you in his case. Yes!

[tranthidung]

Another merit source seems to have been banned. I think it will take a while before they remove him from the list.

The user can be considered as a forum OG and I guessed he is one of very early merit sources in the forum since January 2018. I read accusation on tyz for using AI and it's bad if he actually uses it systematically to make his posts.

5 days since his ban, he was not active with his account.

Today, stats are as follows

There are 108 merit sources with a total merit generation of up to 32890 sMerit per 30 days

It means no change from theymos.

[tranthidung]

Update the stats list for merit source and smerit numbers as well as two charts.

Note

• Dates and stats presented here are on dates I randomly check and see changes. Actual changes probably happen on other days.

Code:

     +-------------------------------+
     |      date   merits~e   smerit |
     |-------------------------------|
  1. | 24jan2018         35     8125 |
  2. | 26jan2018         49     9025 |
  3. | 01mar2018         57    11975 |
  4. | 12mar2018         77    17650 |
  5. | 22mar2018         80    17800 |
     |-------------------------------|
  6. | 18may2018         80    18500 |
  7. | 06jul2018         82    18900 |
  8. | 11jul2018         83    19100 |
  9. | 17sep2018        120    23045 |
 10. | 17nov2018        119    22045 |
     |-------------------------------|
 11. | 22dec2018        120    22055 |
 12. | 05jan2019        123    20735 |
 13. | 06feb2019        122    20835 |
 14. | 15mar2019        130    20605 |
 15. | 27jun2019        131    21045 |
     |-------------------------------|
 16. | 30oct2019        130    20895 |
 17. | 14nov2019         90    18821 |
 18. | 15nov2019         98    21671 |
 19. | 28jun2020         97    21171 |
 20. | 06jul2021        111    34139 |
     |-------------------------------|
 21. | 11jul2022        110    33989 |
 22. | 31jul2023        109    33940 |
 23. | 28nov2023        109    33140 |
 24. | 22mar2024        108    32890 |
     +-------------------------------+