{LIST}of the Merit Sources asking for more smerit. New Round.

[fillippone]

I believe only the most active merit sources will be able to spend this increased amount per month, judging by their previous allocations, therefore we should see an increased amount given per post instead.

This is a proper challenge.
I managed to find a rhythm to deplete my merit source allowance + earned smerits. Now I guess I will need to work more, as I can't see me just giving double the merits to the same posts just because theymos has doubled my merit bag. I know I have full discretionality in doing this, but I feel it a little bit like "cheating".

[1714785357]

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[1714785357]

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[1714785357]

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[Quickseller]

I didn't receive any increase in my source sMerit allocation, and I almost always am out of or nearly out of sMerit to give away.

[Welsh]

This is a proper challenge.
I managed to find a rhythm to deplete my merit source allowance + earned smerits. Now I guess I will need to work more, as I can't see me just giving double the merits to the same posts just because theymos has doubled my merit bag. I know I have full discretionality in doing this, but I feel it a little bit like "cheating".

Hard to say. I think this would depend on the user. If you've had your merit allocation increased, but you wasn't depleting your merit allocation in the first place, this might be an indication that theymos would like to see more merit given per post or there may well have been a lot of merit sources depleting their merit source allocation, and therefore a increase was warranted. Its hard to say, without theymos stating so explicitly or gathering a data set of the merit sources themselves.

I personally believe from my point of view, its not cheating, and I believe some posts absolutely do deserve more than the average amount they are given. There needs to be balance, it shouldn't be so incredibly difficult to rank up, that only the elite among the users do, and it shouldn't be as easy as it was prior to the merit system being implemented. I'll likely be rewarding very good posts with much higher amounts than I was before, while only increasing my allocation per post on average slightly.

Gathering from the constant adjustments that theymos is making, I'm sure he would let us know if there was any issues with the amount of merit given per post. Besides, we all have different ideas of how much should be rewarded, and that's essential for a diverse allocation among users.  

[Rikafip]

As expected, June was the new all time low, with only 13289 merits shared during that period, which is pretty big drop (~15%) compared to May with 15802 merits shared. So yeah, hopefully there will be some merit adjustment soon.

That sucks, but guess what?  Theymos just airdropped me 1000 sMerits!  I thanked him via PM, but I'd like to also thank him publicly as well.  I appreciate it, and I'm going to do my best to perhaps make July a better month for merit distribution.  One person can only do so much, but now I've got sMerits aplenty and plan on spreading them around.

Congrats to you, all the other merit sources who got their monthly allocation increased, and those 14 new merit sources. I would say that timing was perfect as everyone could see where all this was going, with so many merit sources being inactive/less active.

Hopefully this ~60% monthly merit generation increase results with more quality posts and new members.

[tranthidung]

Congrats to you, all the other merit sources who got their monthly allocation increased, and those 14 new merit sources

Changes are from 97 to 111 merit sources and 14 new merit sources is the assumption, from raw statistics we observe.

It can be exactly 14 new sources or more than 14 if one or a few old merit sources were removed and replaced by new ones.

[JayJuanGee]

Congrats to you, all the other merit sources who got their monthly allocation increased, and those 14 new merit sources

Changes are from 97 to 111 merit sources and 14 new merit sources is the assumption, from raw statistics we observe.

It can be exactly 14 new sources or more than 14 if one or a few old merit sources were removed and replaced by new ones.

I am going to make a humble estimation that there were probably more than 14 new merit sources - perhaps even double that number.  So perhaps around 28 new merit sources.. perhaps?  Perhaps?

Fun to speculate sometimes - unless anyone can show a statement from theymos or some kinds of facts that undermine my speculative inferences.  Go on.  I challenge you (not referring to you specifically tranthidung, or any other specific member) to show some evidence or make some logical inferences that are more convincing than the ones that I am attempting (and not even claiming that mine are that great.. but I am giving it a shot (see below)).

I am going to speculate that theymos removed any prior merit source who was not spending more than a certain quantity of their source merits per month (let's say less than 10 smerits per month or maybe less than 10% of their source merits on a regular basis.. whichever is causing theymos to conclude that the merit source is not sufficiently active in distributing smerits).  

I understand that many of us would like to conclude that theymos would have either removed merit sources who were abusing their ways of spending their smerit, or alternatively he could reduce their number of smerits per month or just keep it the same depending on what kinds of meaningful and reliable inferences that he could reach from looking at their smerit sending practices and any reports of abuse that he may have received over the years in respect to certain merit sources.

Probably not always easy for him to conclude exactly whether some smerits might have been sent for either bad motives or just derelict of duties type reasons - even though a lot of discretion is left with merit sources regarding how to send smerits, how many to send and what might trigger sending versus not sending and how much of a duty any merit source might have to expand his/her going outside of his/her usual circles (threads)..

Even though I have not seen any place that theymos has recently described his process, I would imagine from some of his previous disclosures in that direction, that he had at least taken the opportunity to perform at least some cursory overview of the past practices of each of the existing merit sources and any of the members that he had considered to add to smerit source status.  Of course, the conclusions that he reached may have come out different from the conclusions that others had made, and sure after a few months of putting these new smerit allocations into practice, we may be able to see some kinds of patterns above and beyond the admissions of forum members regarding which members have been added as merit sources and which ones had been removed - and some of that data will be assisted by some of the group sourcing kind of work and analysis of some of our fellow data crunching forum members to help some of us more technologically-challenged (perhaps dumber? including yours truly) ones to figure out some of the merit source changes from yesterday that have been made to the merit source members.

Another thing, since I have not seen any post in which theymos had announced and/or described the specifics of the changes to the smerit source matter, would be that theymos could perhaps have some follow up tweaks that he might want to make to the smerit source matter in the next month or two.. but you never know and we may well end up with whatever fairly significant changes that were made yesterday to get us by for the next year or two.. remember the significant changes to merit sources had gone around 20 months between changes from this one yesterday on July 7 since the most recent major and significant one that had taken place in around mid-November 2019.  I cannot really disagree with any conclusion regarding "if it ain't broke, don't fix it," even if some members may have tweaked in some different ways to attempt to address issues that they perceive to be in need of fixing.. but they have evidence that may well be different from the evidence that theymos looks at (which I would speculate that member reports or even just being able to see which member sources are spending their smerits and also how many smerits they are spending on a monthly basis might be more accessible to theymos - even though some of us could look at some of that data too if we are able to perform some calculations or just look at the data produced by some of our data crunching forum members).

[icopress]

I'll likely be rewarding very good posts with much higher amounts than I was before, while only increasing my allocation per post on average slightly [...] Besides, we all have different ideas of how much should be rewarded, and that's essential for a diverse allocation among users.  

Well noticed ... the increased allocation per post is really the best solution, the solution to which, as I see it, has long been resorted to by SM, Fill or Loyce. I also tend to think that merit sources shouldn't spend more energy evaluating posts than they did before, (due to their habits or capabilities). Either way, some m'sources forget that the gradual increase in the average merit per post will ultimately make their job easier, (since formally, 4 sent merit will be re-sent to two more users).

I am leading to the fact that 100 people, even under favorable circumstances, cannot cover all quality posts, so all "different views" should be reduced only to the fact that on a regular basis there was the largest possible coverage area, (as already stated, an increase in average merit per post turns 111 m'sources into 194).

[Halab]

I am going to make a humble estimation that there were probably more than 14 new merit sources - perhaps even double that number.  So perhaps around 28 new merit sources.. perhaps?  Perhaps?

In a month or 2, you will know who is a new MS and who is no more MS. Patience.
I'm not in Theymos head, but I understand this latest change as "You want sMerits ? Here are some sMerits!! Now stop bothering me with it for at least 2 years"

[nutildah]

In a month or 2, you will know who is a new MS and who is no more MS. Patience.
I'm not in Theymos head, but I understand this latest change as "You want sMerits ? Here are some sMerits!! Now stop bothering me with it for at least 2 years"

Hah... I never thought about it like that but it makes a lot of sense.

I was like WTF am I supposed to do with this.

But then I answered my own question and opened back up my Merit Scholarship thread.

I gotta tell you though, our founder, Mr. Lebowski, is considerably hard to please these days.

In any case, thanks theymos


And I noticed a quirk, keep getting this message:

An Error Has Occurred!
You can only send 50 merit to a given user per 30 days. You have already sent 50 merit to that user.

even though its been more than 30 days for some users... hmm.

[The Sceptical Chymist]

I'm not in Theymos head, but I understand this latest change as "You want sMerits ? Here are some sMerits!! Now stop bothering me with it for at least 2 years"

Shoot, that's fine by me as long as I got me some fresh sMerits to distribute as I see fit--which I did.  The airdrop of 1000 of them was a nice surprise, even if Theymos hasn't said a word.

I am going to make a humble estimation that there were probably more than 14 new merit sources - perhaps even double that number.  So perhaps around 28 new merit sources.. perhaps?  Perhaps?

That's another nice surprise, although I'm pretty sure at least a few of those new merit sources didn't apply to be one, and I hope they take the volunteer position seriously.  We've already had some merit sources become inactive and there are probably some that aren't as generous with merits as others.  The thing with the merit sources that actually applied for the position is that they're likely going to be the ones giving out the most merits (though I could certainly be wrong about that).

In any case, whether it's 14 or 28 new sources, they're very much needed. 

[hugeblack]

Does anyone know what is the maximum amount of the increase? Or the maximum number you can get from the merit source? Is 1000 sMerit the highest or are there members who get more than that?

I don't think that the new members got many merit points, the old members got almost 1000 merit points, and with an average of 34139/111 = 307.56, the new members got much less than 307.


Any way I will edit my user script to [4,6,10,15,20]  my sMerits have increased a lot so sending one to three would be a waste of time.

[fillippone]

Does anyone know what is the maximum amount of the increase? Or the maximum number you can get from the merit source? Is 1000 sMerit the highest or are there members who get more than that?

I don't think that the new members got many merit points, the old members got almost 1000 merit points, and with an average of 34139/111 = 307.56, the new members got much less than 307.


Any way I will edit my user script to [4,6,10,15,20]  my sMerits have increased a lot so sending one to three would be a waste of time.

As far as I know, 1000 sMerits is the maximum I heard from a few MS. I also know of a MS who apparently had no increase.  I guess it would be interesting to hear from ms with >500 merits before where they landed now, if they care to discose. Or we will just wait and see from numbers. Provided that they will be able to spend such a gargantuan amount of sMerits.

Anyway, which script are you referring to?

[Halab]

[...]

[...]

Without giving precise numbers, before the change the number of sMerits went from 10 to 1000 or more. Now it always goes from 10 to, technically, more than 1000 .
Those who have 1000 smerits now, have had an increase ranging from ~ *2 to *5.

Anyway, which script are you referring to?

This one I suppose.

[Quickseller]

Congrats to you, all the other merit sources who got their monthly allocation increased, and those 14 new merit sources

Changes are from 97 to 111 merit sources and 14 new merit sources is the assumption, from raw statistics we observe.

It can be exactly 14 new sources or more than 14 if one or a few old merit sources were removed and replaced by new ones.

I think it is probably fair to say that inactive merit sources were removed. There really isn't any point in keeping an inactive user as a merit source, as they are not giving out any merit, and there is always the risk that an account will get hacked or sold.

[Igebotz]

I think it is probably fair to say that inactive merit sources were removed. There really isn't any point in keeping an inactive user as a merit source, as they are not giving out any merit, and there is always the risk that an account will get hacked or sold.

Fair enough, what's the need of keeping a merit source who's always inactive? Were the 13 others handpicked by theymos? If Yes, then it a welcome development because I know of someone who didn't apply but automatically became a merit source  I only saw NotAtether merit source application

[fillippone]

I think it is probably fair to say that inactive merit sources were removed. There really isn't any point in keeping an inactive user as a merit source, as they are not giving out any merit, and there is always the risk that an account will get hacked or sold.

Fair enough, what's the need of keeping a merit source who's always inactive? Were the 13 others handpicked by theymos? If Yes, then it a welcome development because I know of someone who didn't apply but automatically became a merit source  I only saw NotAtether merit source application

I have seen at least one MS who didn’t ask to be promoted.
I have seen at least one MS who didn’t have any allowance increase
I have seen at least one MS applicant who didn’t have his application being accepted.

So, I guess a lot of manual handpicking from Theymos.

[Igebotz]

I have seen at least one MS who didn’t ask to be promoted.
I have seen at least one MS who didn’t have any allowance increase
I have seen at least one MS applicant who didn’t have his application being accepted.

So, I guess a lot of manual handpicking from Theymos.

Everyone wants followers and to get followers you need power and to gain power you need position and to gain the position you need connection, it's good that theymos is creating a plain ground for everybody with the hope that anybody can be picked someday to handle some part of the forum responsibility.

[skarais]

Because recently the number of merit source and source bank has increased, I really hope that local board Indonesia increase the amount of merit distributed among quality posts or some merit source there have to change their smerit giving habit so that this next month won't again at 62 or under 70. Based on the data I got from the merit dashboard @DdmrDdmr, I can say that the merit distribution on Indonesian local boards is no longer past 300 every month for 2021 because the amount of merit seem to have decreased drastically so far.

Anyone can see that in the thread I update regularly after this. [CHART] Tampilan Bulanan Aktivitas Lokal Board Bahasa Indonesia

[Quickseller]

I think it is probably fair to say that inactive merit sources were removed. There really isn't any point in keeping an inactive user as a merit source, as they are not giving out any merit, and there is always the risk that an account will get hacked or sold.

Fair enough, what's the need of keeping a merit source who's always inactive? Were the 13 others handpicked by theymos? If Yes, then it a welcome development because I know of someone who didn't apply but automatically became a merit source  I only saw NotAtether merit source application

I have seen at least one MS who didn’t ask to be promoted.
I have seen at least one MS who didn’t have any allowance increase
I have seen at least one MS applicant who didn’t have his application being accepted.

So, I guess a lot of manual handpicking from Theymos.

Yes, Theymos hand picks the merit sources, likely with input from the community. I applied to be a merit source and was accepted once Vod was removed from being a source (IIRC, a few others were appointed as a merit source at the same time). I was initially given an allocation of 50 sMerit per month, but this was increased to 100 when Theymos recalculated source sMerit based on how much merit each source had recently sent.

My source sMerit is often empty but I am not active as much as I was in the past, so sometimes my source sMerit will refill and it might be some number of days before I can find posts to spend it on.

[El duderino_]

We have been heard

Thx