Merit - simple poll on operational fundamentals

[DdmrDdmr]

Just wanted to know what people in the Beginners & Help board think happens when you Merit someone. Lately I’ve seen a few assertions (even from Legendary accounts) that are startling, so I just wanted to get the general knowledge pulse on this one.

Which of the assertions in the poll is correct?

[Coyster]

Isn't the answer that it neither increases nor decreases. When a user merits another user, there is no change on the meriters merit count. It's Smerits that decreases and as well increases, as for merit count, it can only increase, but cannot decrease.

[bitmover]

Sadly few people are participating the pool.
I think that the forum could be clearer about what happens when you merit someone. When I merited my first post I was really affraid to lose my hard earned merits.

Maybe instead of +Merit button it could be +sMerit?

(even from Legendary accounts)

When I joined this forum I was dealing with cryptocurrency for about 6 months. However, I invested my money in it and I studied a lot of bitcoin before investing my hard earned money into it. So I joined this forum with the basic technical knowledge.

I was impressed to see how many legendary accounts, with 3+ years dealing with cryptocurrency and spamming all over the forum, had no clue about what was bitcoin, what is a private key, how to secure a wallet... Recently I saw a legendary who didn't know what is a Seed.

Doesn't surprise me to see that legendary accounts doesn't even know what a merit is.

[LTU_btc]

Probably we won't get clear image from this poll. As said above, very few people participate in polls. And I'm almost sure that most people who voted here have high rank accounts.
I didn't got impression that many people misunderstand how merit system works. It's more like many of them are just ignorant about merit system, like it wouldn't even exist.

[Bitcoin_Arena]

I wish OP made this a self-moderated thread and stated a condition like " No one should post about what they selected or what they think is right"
We have a member who has already commented about what they think the right answer is and it definitely affects the purpose of the poll.

-snip-

That wasn't necessary bud.

[1miau]

For my impression we have quite a few users who don't know much about Merit in general but I've doubts that they'll visit Beginners and Help. Main groups are mostly:
- users from boards where Merit is very "unknown" like tech discussion, Marketplace, Bitcoin project developers or Altcoin devs etc.
- Shitposters with a similar lack of knowledge for Bitcoin like they don't know much about Merit; they are mostly visiting Altcoin Discussion.

The users who have a substantial amount of sMerits and are frequently visiting Beginners and Help should know already how to use Merit.

Maybe you could start another poll in Altcoin Discussion and wait for the outcome there. Beginners and Help seems to be a place spammers don't visit often because it's rather difficult to submit shitposts here without making them too obvious.
On the other hand I'm not sure if the attempt will work when we post it in Altcoin Discussion. Spammers tend to prefer topics about price / future speculation of different Altcoins and won't participate in the poll.

If there's a group willing to learn how to use Merit, we should try to reach users from boards where Merit and forum politics are very "unknown". Such users are willing to learn much more than shitposters but I'm not sure how we can reach them; they won't read in Beginners and Help. I'm still a friend of a "reminder-PM" to everyone about Merit in general.

Maybe instead of +Merit button it could be +sMerit?

Right now, it's described before people submit their sMerit and I feel it's difficult to misunderstand it:

You have received a total of 1648 merit. This is what determines your forum rank. You typically cannot lose this merit. You have 5 sendable merit (sMerit) which you can send to other people. There is no point in hoarding sMerit; keeping it yourself does not benefit you, and we reserve the right to decay unused sMerit in the future.

Finally, users with poor knowledge about the Merit system are often those who won't be able to earn a substantial amount of it and therefore don't need to care what happens after they spend Merit.
But since OP's topic is posted in Beginners and Help it might help Newbies to get a better understanding how to use Merit.  

[Natalim]

I am the only one who vote for "It decreases my Merit counter by 1 Merit".. am I wrong? because most of the votes is on "It neither increases nor decreases my Merit counter"

my answer here is only based on my experience, when I merit someone, my Merit points is deducted based on how many merits I gave.
can anyone explain why in the the poll "It neither increases nor decreases my Merit counter" has the highest votes.


Edit : sorry I misunderstood it.. merit counter means your total merit in your profile? if that's what it meant then my answer is it does not change.

[1miau]

Edit : sorry I misunderstood it.. merit counter means your total merit in your profile? if that's what it meant then my answer is it does not change.

Yes, you are right.



Your earned Merit (for you 543 Merit) will never decrease because it isn't affected when you are meriting another user's post. Sending Merit does only mean that you'll need 1 sMerit (sendable Merit) to do so, the amount of your sMerit is displayed directly after you click +Merit for a post you want to give Merit to.
You'll see this statement:

You have received a total of 1648 merit. This is what determines your forum rank. You typically cannot lose this merit. You have 5 sendable merit (sMerit) which you can send to other people. There is no point in hoarding sMerit; keeping it yourself does not benefit you, and we reserve the right to decay unused sMerit in the future.

[tbct_mt2]

I didn't got impression that many people misunderstand how merit system works. It's more like many of them are just ignorant about merit system, like it wouldn't even exist.

Nearly 2 years for the debut of the merit system, I don't think if one has been actively in the forum during that period, still have not known how merit system operates. In very a few days, less than one week after the merit system debuted, there are dozens of pages in the "Merits & new rank requirement" topic, and many topics discussed about that in Meta board, it is a bit strange if they did not know or see about merit system within that period.

There are only some types of reasons for lack of understandings on merit system's operational fundamentals till now.
- Inactive for too long, shortly before or after the time at which the merit system started to operate.
- They were satisfactory with their ranks and airdropped merits, but recently began to think of ranking up.
- Solely tried to make pseudo-questions to hunt for merits.

[pooya87]

When you Merit someone, what happens to your own Merit counter ?

shouldn't this be "count" instead of "counter"?
counter sounds like the device or the code that performs that counting not the result of the count.
sorry for nitpicking

[Negotiation]

The general poll on qualifications operational fundamentals does not reduce it can only increase in terms of merit. All the people who voted here are big and they have enough merit in voting Yes, you are right that many still do not know about the operational system They want to bounce and airdrop their ranks later In this case they face many problems They lack knowledge of merit Many people do not want to be able to sustain their existence if they want to rise above the ranks and gain rank without attaining their merit.

[Upgrade00]

Some users avoid boards like this one and Mera as well, and if they've not received or given any merits, I can see then not having a proper grasp of how it works. Also, they can make up assumptions for why they have not earned any merit point yet.
Is the purpose of this thread to understand why some users hoard merits?

[DdmrDdmr]

Ok, maybe I should have added in the OP that it would be better not to give the answer here on this thread until the poll was over … I’m not too keen on self-moderated threads myself, so I did not take it into consideration at the time.

What might be an interesting idea is to have (better) polls of a kind every now and then, bases on BTC (usage, security, etc.) and Forum topics, perhaps with different levels of difficulty based on the content. Ideally, these polls would belong to threads where you could not post in, at least until the poll was over. Additionally, it would be nice to get forum-wide attention, thus the place for them to be announced would be in the top quadrant, following the style used to announce the Art Contest.  Results could then be broken down by rank. Just an idea …

There are two common scenarios that can take place when somebody doesn’t know something: They really don’t know (and therefore might inquire at some stage to find out), or they do know, but have got the facts wrong (and therefore may take longer to change their assumptions). Perhaps the polls can be a fun way to approach this to some extent.

In this specific case, I wanted to get a sample (very small it turns out, and likely biased – as in answered by those that do know the answer) of how people understood Merit works, in a mechanism that has a correlated, yet less known and visible element: sMerit. In an ideal scenario, it would be an indicator to a possible reason for not sending merits (by some people), but we’re not going to get that answer here. 

I remember during my first weeks on the forum that a new thing was coming to town: Merits. I had no idea what it was, nor did I really bother to look into it until sometime after it had rolled-out. sMerits seemed like a misspelling or Merits, and at first I believed that many of the profiles I saw had a handsome amount, displayed in a counter, that indicated the amount of Merits they had to keep or hand out at will. It took a while to understand the system, and I presume that happens to both Newbie accounts, and woken-up accounts.

Note: Count (as in the to keep count idiom) and Counter (object) I believe can be used here indistinctly her. I used counter, as in visualizing the physical number on our profile, or on the left side of our posts, acting as a physical counter, rather much like the lap counter on a scalextric.

[Natalim]

Edit : sorry I misunderstood it.. merit counter means your total merit in your profile? if that's what it meant then my answer is it does not change.

Yes, you are right.



Your earned Merit (for you 543 Merit) will never decrease because it isn't affected when you are meriting another user's post. Sending Merit does only mean that you'll need 1 sMerit (sendable Merit) to do so, the amount of your sMerit is displayed directly after you click +Merit for a post you want to give Merit to.
You'll see this statement:

You have received a total of 1648 merit. This is what determines your forum rank. You typically cannot lose this merit. You have 5 sendable merit (sMerit) which you can send to other people. There is no point in hoarding sMerit; keeping it yourself does not benefit you, and we reserve the right to decay unused sMerit in the future.

Thanks for the clarification and with the specific example, I know some friends in this forum that are afraid of sending merit because they are afraid that their total merit in their profile will decrease, I would tell them about this thread, this will help them.

[GSpgh]

Maybe instead of +Merit button it could be +sMerit?

No, that would be even more confusing, like "what's a smerit? smelly merit?"

It shows "+" not "-" so I'm not sure where people would be getting the idea that it decreases anything. But it would be nice to have links to explanations of forum features next to those features. For example nice little question mark icon next to "+Merit" links to the the merit ANN thread in Meta. Similar icon next to the trust scores links to the explanation of trust system. It's bewildering how unfriendly this forum is to anyone who doesn't live in Meta.

[DdmrDdmr]

<…> Thanks for the clarification and with the specific example, I know some friends in this forum that are afraid of sending merit because they are afraid that their total merit in their profile will decrease <…>.

See, that’s what we know happens to some extent on the forum, and the objective here was to get a small idea of the extent or proportion, knowing full well that the poll numbers were likely not going to be representative.

The confusion is initially perhaps caused by the terminology we use ("+Merit" button, I’ve merited you, and so on), and although it is explained in the "Merit a post screen" (when you press the +Merit button), profiles such as those with few merits, or those recently woken-up, may not get to that screen. They may therefore believe, as I did at the beginning (until I became wiser), that the Merit counter is a unique input/output bag (it’s only an input bag).

[Lucius]

I personally never had a problem understanding the Merit system, as all I had to do was read carefully what the admin post about it. Of course, there are users who do not understand how the system works, but it is easy to conclude from a personal example that if you give merit to someone, your total merit amount shown in the profile will not decrease.

I am not sure how the local boards are covered with translations of some of the basic features of the forum, but it is possible that part of the problem lies in a misunderstanding of English.

[Heisenberg_Hunter]

Maybe you could start another poll in Altcoin Discussion and wait for the outcome there.

This.

As 1miau pointed out even the most knowledgeable posters/people who really know what merit system is meant for doesn't merit posts very often. Many feel like the post doesn't deserve their merit even though it does deserve at least a merit. We do know the people who are the top merit receivers make quite good posts rather than others who have less than 10-20 received merits right after the introduction of the merit system 2 years back. Some doesn't like to merit top merit receivers nor they can never find people who have received less than 20 merits. I was once an active poster in Altcoin Discussion helping out tech related queries but over the course of time, it was really difficult to find good topics out there in spam and it was like hunting for 'Heart of the Ocean' in the vast spread out Atlantic!

Either way, merit sources and only few of the posters really care about spending their merits and perhaps the rest of them are hoarding them. We need to know the functioning of merit from a shitposter point of view and not from the Beginners board I guess. We can change most of the low level shitposters to good by educating them about the forum and merits and probably they can turn into some of the most helpful users on the forum.. But the knowledgeable posters who are hoarding their smerit can never be changed upon and if we tend to, we might receive a backlash as well!

If there's a group willing to learn how to use Merit, we should try to reach users from boards where Merit and forum politics are very "unknown". Such users are willing to learn much more than shitposters but I'm not sure how we can reach them; they won't read in Beginners and Help.

Truly speaking many of us were shitposters in the earlier days of account registration and later changed to helpful members of the forum. When I was new to the forum and after the introduction of merit system, even I have received backlash/hate from Hero members for being somewhat helpful.  All I would say that, if people don't want to spend their smerits for good posts then they shouldn't instruct others to stop meriting.

[tranthidung]

As 1miau pointed out even the most knowledgeable posters/people who really know what merit system is meant for doesn't merit posts very often.
< ... >
Either way, merit sources and only few of the posters really care about spending their merits and perhaps the rest of them are hoarding them.

There are related statistics for your assumption. Please see: Stats on most actively users in merit activites.

[Heisenberg_Hunter]

There are related statistics for your assumption. Please see: Stats on most actively users in merit activites.

Thanks for the stats thanthidung. These are much needed data for this discussion to move on a higher and more serious note. In 'Users who received merits' we can exclude some of the older inactive accounts like Hal, satoshi, lazlo and so on and many of them would be newbies who don't have enough smerits to give to others. Another noteworthy point in 'Users who have both sent and received merits' is that there are users who don't merit regularly or who have only merited once in this 2 year period. They are the forum users whom we are speaking about in this topic as even though they do have enough merits they are not really willing to give them away for quality posts or merit might be of a lower priority to them?

If every one of the active poster give away their smerits at a regular earning rate, I am pretty much sure around 20-30 merit sources are enough to do the work of meriting quality posts. I would say that giving away smerits is equivalent to providing feedback either positive/negative. Both are a feature of the forum while the latter helps newbies and others in not getting scammed. Merit Sources give away their allocated source merits and DT provides feedback for successful traders, scammers and trustworthy individuals. Not everyone do use the trust feedback feature in bitcointalk even if they encounter a scammer and the same goes for merits.