How do you like the idea?

[stadus]

I stumbled upon a thread by Jet Cash, and it appears to be like a professor interacting with his students, rewarding them with merits for their answers. Honestly, I'm quite impressed with what he has done as it encourages posters to provide more valuable posts, especially those who want to receive merits. As we alll know, not all good posts are merited since some boards do not have as many merits as others.

This brings me to a suggestion for our merit sources out there. Maybe you can create a thread on an important topic for discussion and reward those who share their valuable insights. This way, it would be easier to determine if a thread contains valuable information, as it is initiated by the merit source itself. I hope you understand what I'm trying to emphasize.

I'm not suggesting that it should be compulsory for merit sources, but I wanted to share what I have observed. It's up to you guys to decide how you perceive it.


You can see the thread here ; [Merits again] Discuss the velocity of Bitcoin 

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[rat03gopoh]

OgNasty did it here https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5275043
And also on my local board, hosted by joniboini https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3315373.0

Actually, it wasn't just encouraging users to make good posts, but a request to learn the basic knowledge that aspiring bitcoiners should have. Overall, it's good.

[digaran]

Lol, in my short lived duration of being a source a few years ago, I asked people to provide information, or teach me something new and asked for other tasks, but then I realized I'm using merit for personal gain.
IMHO, it shouldn't be given out when a source is satisfied with a comment, it should be based on the effort and the weight of the content, sometimes a sentence could teach you what you could learn in 10 years of a life time, but mostly the posts are the same old repetitions just revised more carefully to pass the merit source criteria.🤣

Btw, where is this cash jet guy thread you mentioned he seems like a good target guy? I need to go fishing some merits, my merit-blood is low for some time. Lol.

[mk4]

What Jet Cash and others did was great, but isn't really that necessary. Merit sources can simply scout threads for users who deserve merits; it doesn't necessarily need to be them to create the thread as it only makes little difference.

[LoyceV]

This brings me to a suggestion for our merit sources out there. Maybe you can create a thread on an important topic for discussion and reward those who share their valuable insights.

Let's not do that. Merit isn't a school project, and it isn't supposed to be a form of payment for doing as I say. Merit is meant for posts that are worth reading, and if someone can do that on his own, Merit will find him.

Given this year's hype, I expect your suggestion to lead to many shitposts created by chatbots.

[Upgrade00]

You highlighted the problem of sources not being active on every board and even having some on ignore.
A practical solution would be to increase the number of sources and make it so that a good post regardless of where it is posted would be found out.

Users, whether they are sources or not, can choose to make threads to offer merit, that's their own perspective of how the view merit giving, it doesn't apply to everyone. What matters is they are exhausting their source merit and being liberal when sharing it.

[BenCodie]

This brings me to a suggestion for our merit sources out there. Maybe you can create a thread on an important topic for discussion and reward those who share their valuable insights. This way, it would be easier to determine if a thread contains valuable information, as it is initiated by the merit source itself. I hope you understand what I'm trying to emphasize.

Is this not something that should be done by default anyway? Being, that people (merit sources or not) should be creating high quality topics that create good conversation, and those who are sharing valuable insights should be getting rewarded by merit sources who view the thread.

I always thought that's how it worked. I suppose that there's no harm on intentionally setting out to do this, but I do feel that it should come about naturally.

[Aanuoluwatofunmi]

This brings me to a suggestion for our merit sources out there. Maybe you can create a thread on an important topic for discussion and reward those who share their valuable insights.

This would have been a good suggestion to adopt but we should also consider the possibility for the abuse, quite alright we have some threads created by merits sources that allows then to review quality posts and merits, a good example is the one created by LoyceV on reputation to report any unmerited quality post on his thread, there's one for Ratimov and so also Fillippone all on beginners and help, not all merit source will be able to adopt the same pattern, some do visit threads randomly across different boards to merit their quality posters and so on.

[Adbitco]

This brings me to a suggestion for our merit sources out there. Maybe you can create a thread on an important topic for discussion and reward those who share their valuable insights.

Let's not do that. Merit isn't a school project, and it isn't supposed to be a form of payment for doing as I say. Merit is meant for posts that are worth reading, and if someone can do that on his own, Merit will find him.

Given this year's hype, I expect your suggestion to lead to many shitposts created by chatbots.

Absolutely true sir.
That is just the fact behind this, and for avoiding that we need to stop creating what would make people involving themselves in a taskable post as to avoid chatbots, especially to the merits hunters called newbies.

[aysg76]

Let's not do that. Merit isn't a school project, and it isn't supposed to be a form of payment for doing as I say. Merit is meant for posts that are worth reading, and if someone can do that on his own, Merit will find him.

Given this year's hype, I expect your suggestion to lead to many shitposts created by chatbots.

Those who deserves them get it and there are lot of threads also to help them out where they can submit post they find quality one without merits so it should be that way only but yes if you are creating a task that will help them to gain knowledge like puzzles or quiz then it's different part and motivate them to learn and gain merits in that manner.

People are more hyping up the AI usage ignoring they will come up answers they find suitable and forum is place to have discussion between members not these Chatbots like the one giving answers on Satoshi's behalf.

[LTU_btc]

I'm not against your idea, but IMO, it's not needed. I prefer when merit is rewarded in natural way - when merit source or just random member see good post and simply reward it with merit. Most of these merit giveaway threads tend to ass licking and posts made just to try getting merit. Also, as mentioned above, with AI being hottest thing in 2023 many members can try writting posts with it when they try to get merit.
Sorry if my comparison may be not appropriate for some members, but merit giveway threads reminds me giving treats for dogs whn they have donesomething good. I'm not saying that these threads is bad thing, it's simply not something what I prefer.

[Coyster]

Honestly, I'm quite impressed with what he has done as it encourages posters to provide more valuable posts, especially those who want to receive merits. As we alll know, not all good posts are merited since some boards do not have as many merits as others.

The merit system is enough to encourage users to create high quality posts. If any user decides to create a thread and reward people that participate well in it with merits, that's their own way and nothing wrong with that, overall everybody has their own style. But what's wrong is if it becomes something we see too often, in which the only way to receive merits is if you join in threads created by a user who is giving them out. It is going to be counterproductive, and would lead people to post in threads they have no interest in, or plagiarising just to post in them.

[hugeblack]

This brings me to a suggestion for our merit sources out there. Maybe you can create a thread on an important topic for discussion and reward those who share their valuable insights. This way, it would be easier to determine if a thread contains valuable information, as it is initiated by the merit source itself. I hope you understand what I'm trying to emphasize.

I don't like a lot of the practices that happen with merit, so adding more permissions to merit sources is not meaningful. A person should try to create high-quality posts and not worry about that. After a while, if he doesn't get enough merits, he can ask her, but don't make your focus on getting merits more than improving the quality of your posts.

[rby]

I will support any idea that will make merit sources spend their merits on quality posts. I know that it is very difficult to earn merits in this forum. Merit looks like something that is recycling within some group of people. It is not that only those people make merit worthy posts. It is because they enjoy reading one another's post, it is only when you have read my posts that you will drop merits for me.
This is why newbies who wants to rank up keep creating new topics even when it's not needed in order to expose their accounts for merits.
Conversations are buried easily, but opened thread can be bumped at any time.
The solution to this problem is that when a merit source stumbles on one quality post from a user, they should try to look into the profile of that user to drop more merits if they see quality posts. This should be done for users below 1000 merits. Another solution is what The Sceptical Chymist do as post review.

[Daniel91]

OP, I like your idea, but I did something similar 5 years ago on my Croatian local board, you can check here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4265795.0
At that time, we had a lot of young members who, due to their poor knowledge of the English language or weak knowledge of crypto topics, could not write in the main part of the forum and thus receive merits for their quality posts.
I started this thread with the desire to help local members have a place to report their quality posts and get merits for them.
All these years, the thread served its purpose and helped many young local members to progress on the forum, but lately this thread has died because there are not many new and active members on our local board anymore, and the old members have almost all become legendary in the meantime and give daily their great contribution to this forum.

[OcTradism]

I stumbled upon a thread by Jet Cash, and it appears to be like a professor interacting with his students, rewarding them with merits for their answers.

It is good but it is not organic.

Discussions should be organic and not about merit award. To have organic discussions, a poster will have to spend more time to look around topics and find topics that are appropriate with his knowledge to join the discussions organically. Finding appropriate topics will require more time and it shows you are actually not a spammer. If I am a spammer, I can easy pick any topic to reply.

Opening those merit award threads will save time for spammers and merit hunters.

[stadus]

Thank you for taking the time to reply to my suggestion. I appreciate the honest responses, and all of you have valid points. I also believe it's a great idea to promote "organic discussions" in this forum. Instead of focusing on quantity, we should prioritize quality. By doing so, the forum moderators' job of deleting spam threads and posts will be reduced. 

[Sandra_hakeem]

Stadus, where have you been all this whole time?? Cus I cannot believe that you're always active in the forum then you missed the times when several merit sources did alot of aiding to members that actually deserved them?? How's that even possible...I'm curious!!
To start with, OG Nasty ran a "sign a massage and get merited" thread, then Chymist also picked an interest and begun after few months of HODLing Smerits... Then finally, fillipone also deemed that as a perfect means to help prominent rookies rank up,...
Uhhmmm, I understand that it might not be enough since we've got alot of rookies lately; but, you seee... If it gets in excess, then there are chances of those birdbrains ranking up too... That would only cause more chaos than we thought it would..

Sandra 🧑‍🦰

[indah rezqi]

Thank you for taking the time to reply to my suggestion. I appreciate the honest responses, and all of you have valid points. I also believe it's a great idea to promote "organic discussions" in this forum. Instead of focusing on quantity, we should prioritize quality. By doing so, the forum moderators' job of deleting spam threads and posts will be reduced. 

There are hundreds to thousands of spam reported and deleted by moderators every month, but an idea like that would surely be great for anyone with a good knowledge of bitcoin. That thread was created on November 16th, 2019, but looking at the stats after a few years, I gathered everyone who participated in the topic as in this list.

There are only 26 users involved in the topic, JayJuanGee is the most active.

Code:

1. JayJuanGee [10]
2. Jet Cash [4]
3. Sexylizzy2813 [4]
4. ChiBitCTy [3]
5. Danydee [3]
6. acdc [2]
7. dkbit98 [2]
8. poptok1 [2]
9. BIT-BENDER [1]
10. Bekuciwu9 [1]
11. Bushdark [1]
12. Cnut237 [1]
13. Coin_trader [1]
14. Forever101 [1]
15. GSpgh [1]
16. Lida93 [1]
17. MCDev [1]
18. Mashfiqun [1]
19. Pity Token [1]
20. QueenVera [1]
21. Saheedu [1]
22. Who is John Galt? [1]
23. hd49728 [1]
24. odolvlobo [1]
25. qwk [1]
26. realknow [1]

[LoyceV]

I also believe it's a great idea to promote "organic discussions" in this forum.

That's impossible
Let's start with a definition:

Organic conversations are discussions that start happening naturally in a community.

Even though they give suggestions of how to accomplish this, I'd argue it's not organic if someone has to promote it. An organic discussion either happens on it's own, or it doesn't. There can't be a middle ground.