To be honest, I see a lot of conflicting answers in this thread, and apparently some people don't understand the idea of rewarding members based on merit. This concept is based on encouraging users to publish quality posts. So that users have an incentive to reach the point where they will receive the maximum rate (this is why it is important to have several levels of rewards).
The peculiarity is that when a user crosses the mark of 3000 merits (mostly), he stops thinking about merits, so his posts are organic and such users are very interesting to managers. In addition, as soon as the user begins to position participation in the campaign as a hobby and not as an income, he immediately becomes desirable for any manager (believe me, this is very noticeable).
I kinda disagree here. For example, I post organically since the beginning and never actually did think about merits that much. If I wanted to grow my account, I would have spent my time in different boards/threads and not in Gambling and Croatian local boards.
Everybody from our Local can confirm how difficult it was to grow their accounts on Croatian boards, with only 1 merit source there that was banned for a long time and was not being replaced. Best posts used to receive 1 Merit, whereas on other local boards best posts earned 10 times that or more.
The situation now is 5x better on the Croatian board and if we had as many merit sources then, I'd be sitting on 3k+ merits easily.
If we (I will use 'we' here because I'm a CM too and I actually feel that this is an extremely important discussion) start using Merits as criteria, people will do just the opposite - they won't post as a hobby/organically, but will start chasing merits and we'll have merit circles appearing - which will hinder the natural progression of lower ranked members.
I want to add that no project will invest resources in marketing initiatives if there are no tangible results, and there will be none if the published posts are lost in mega threads (after all, the highest quality discussion fits on the first two pages of the thread).
This is also something that is debatable - depends on the thread I guess. Megathreads can be filled with spam, and then again you have BSFL with 190 pages already where I feel most of the participants read all the posts. It's the same with all paid pools (all threads with 50+ pages), and I read every post there.
I don't even open most of the newly opened threads because most of the time they are poorly written and serve only for the purpose of writing posts that will be accepted in sig campaigns.
@icopress very wisely explained!
unfortunately, in every discussion here in the forum, where it is about rewards, you always find people who begrudge the others nothing, but on the other hand do nothing for it to then achieve this goal to then perhaps come into the enjoyment.
with all users who have accumulated over 3k merits it was also a long and not an easy path
It isn't begrudging, after all merits are earned - and do
somewhat show that the user writes quality content for a long period of time.
It is an important topic though, and it's beneficial to the forum that some of us share our stories and show just how hard it was to grow the account in some places.
I ran Coinslotty campaign ad on German boards and I basically received merits for every constructive answer I gave. That is great - but it isn't how it usually is (was) on most of the boards where some of us wrote.
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To be clear - this is not a discussion about me, my merits and whatnot. What I'm trying to do here is to offer my viewpoints to sig campaigns and new rules in general, especially related to this:
he stops thinking about merits, so his posts are organic and such users are very interesting to managers
With the new set of rules (merit requirements, quality posts in megathreads not being accepted), I do feel campaign members will start to feel herded - and we'll lose the exact thing we CM's want to see - organic posts that were written because we wanted to write them and not because we're paid to do so.
Bottom line - I'd like that we can write anywhere, and that we're accepted or rejected based on our quality alone. It would then be up to the CM to decide whether we keep the spot or not based on our posting quality and style.
