Ranking up/down

[apogio]

My observation leads me to conclude that we have an extreme pareto principle here, 5-10% of participants are good posters and everyone else is trash. They seem to try to create as many posts as possible with the least amount of effort -- which leads to very generic and bland posts.

I can't argue against this one. I'm seeing it too. I just know that some managers are doing much better work in selecting quality posters than others.

This was not my intention. People who are spamming and shitposting are not worthwhile, people like d5000 and stwenhao are worthwhile. Perhaps my choice of wording was not the best, but you get my point. We need more of the latter and fewer of the former. It is hard to get more of such users when most threads are filled with generic junk. They would have to know where to look and which threads to avoid in order to find good content that would interest them to stay here.

No worries, I understand your point. Although you're kinda biased for these two users because you share common thoughts. I mean I like users with different opinions, if they're not dogmatic. But I understand that you're referring to bullshit posting and not to well-explained posting of different opinions.

[Satofan44]

I can't argue against this one. I'm seeing it too. I just know that some managers are doing much better work in selecting quality posters than others.

Sure, but the problem (relating to campaigns) lies in the campaign design which seems similar across all managers. It does not do much to incentivize quality posting -- neither does it usually make a differentiation between d5000 and any other equally ranked member that just barely meets the threshold. I don't know how it was before, I've just read some comments in passing but surely something could be done to improve it. The issue of spam is how it is currently because no side that could do something about it is actually doing anything. If the current things don't work well, a few experimental tweaks won't cause a catastrophe.

Anyway, if the campaign design is such that it requires a lot of users and the situation with the number of quality users is already critical then this issue just circulates back and forth and makes things worse at each step. When you think about incentives you must realize that there are many different types of actors here. Let's focus on those whose only goal is to earn money. If there is no incentive at all for them to even try to be better, they won't. While this group is generally undesirable, it can be manipulated through incentives.

Somebody may claim that the merit system already has these incentives, but they are weak and unrelated to campaign design. Most users are easily able to pass the merit requirements that campaigns have. You can earn merit through contests, reports, and from local board merit farmers. At no point does this directly incentivize you to write better posts all the time; that would be the case if the merit system was exclusively rewarding high quality posts (with an increasing average quality threshold for the whole forum) which is not the case here.

No worries, I understand your point. Although you're kinda biased for these two users because you share common thoughts. I mean I like users with different opinions, if they're not dogmatic. But I understand that you're referring to bullshit posting and not to well-explained posting of different opinions.

The reason I bring those two up is because I come across them frequently, not because we agree on everything (but yes, of course I am biased in my choice of example -- everyone is). Furthermore, they are a good pair to use as an example because one participates in a signature campaign and the other does not. We need both of these types of users, but on a level of quality that goes in that direction (which is the point that I wanted to make). How to best incentivize such users to join and to improve their retention is the question, but clearly doing nothing is the wrong answer in any case.  
Further, you can see that any excuses relating to "a chance for improvement or education" are just bullshit designed to keep the status quo. If you take a good note, you may only occasionally find an user that has shown significant improvements in their quality over time. It simply does not happen often because most users are just spamming whatever, content that is extremely generic but somehow relevant to the topic, with the least amount of effort. I'm certain that it is not impossible to design incentives (for each relevant system) that will start changing this for the better. It should be noted that no incentive system can fix this in a short period of time as the issue here is systemic.

[Pmalek]

Almost nobody worthwhile is going to come to a place where 95-99% of the posts are generic junk. Chicken and egg, you got the order of things reversed. If the quality was better, there may be a chance for attracting valuable users. At the current state of things, however, there is no chance.

Social media is mostly junk, advertising, and shilling, and the people who don't want to hang out on forums still spend time there. That's what the kids do nowadays, even if it's mostly garbage and very forgettable. There are very few sections of this forum that I feel are worth protecting and preserving. They aren't as good as they were a few years ago, but they don't have the amount of spam we see elsewhere. I would rather keep them as they are and not have spammers go there in search of a lifeline. I think a de-meriting system would make them do that.

If mods and admins feel like it, then they can apply stricter moderation on spammers and start deleting more junk posts. If campaign managers want more quality in the campaigns they manage, they can restrict access to fewer participants.

[apogio]

If mods and admins feel like it, then they can apply stricter moderation on spammers and start deleting more junk posts. If campaign managers want more quality in the campaigns they manage, they can restrict access to fewer participants.

And this, in my opinion is the best summary of the actions we can take, in order to ameliorate the forum:
a. better moderation
b. stricter campaigns

[PowerGlove]

Bumping this. Did you ever get any feedback or try to get feedback from theymos? It doesn't have to be this particular proposal, but it is clear that something must be changed.

I sent theymos a PM about (a differently named and more elaborate version of) this idea about a year ago. I don't recall getting a response. In fact, most of the reason I created this topic is because I thought, "I'm getting ready to move on, and I think that this idea is good enough to preserve, so I better make a post about it."

I had a recent exchange with him about this thread, and I think he'll leave some thoughts here when he finds the time.


I think I've said everything I can usefully say about this idea with the four posts that I've already made in this topic, here, here, here, and here). Honestly, I don't see how someone could read those four posts and still be confused about what's being proposed, but, communication is hard and I know that I'm not the easiest person to understand, so I'll try to wrap this whole thing up into one last attempt to explain this idea...

Firstly, I've seen some persistent confusion around whether or not this system might de-rank people or mess with their merit balance while they're away from the forum. It won't. If they're not making posts, then it can't do anything to their account.

Secondly, I've seen some confusion around people thinking that they'll somehow be penalized if they don't receive merit within ten posts. That's not how it works:

In effect, you'll need to earn at least 1 merit for every 10 posts you write (on average) if you wish to prevent your account from slowly drifting toward a lower rank.

When I wrote the above (in the OP), I picked the words carefully, and things like in effect, on average, and slowly drifting are important cues that, in the general case, nothing bad is going to happen if you write ten posts without receiving any merit (I say in the general case because there will be situations, at least according to what's described in the OP, where you happen to have exactly the amount of merit needed for your jr-member-or-higher rank, and you then happen to make exactly ten posts at a cost of 0.1 merit per post without receiving any merit back for either those posts or any of your previous posts, which will mean that your "carry" balance has then reached the precise point of causing you to drop down one level in rank).

So, the system as proposed already handles the above two points of concern. That is:

(1) You can post 50 times a day, or twice a year, or once a decade, it's fine: You're not expected (or even encouraged) to try to post according to any specific schedule.

(2) You can earn merit either regularly or irregularly, in small amounts or in large amounts, for new posts or for old posts, it's fine: You're not expected (or even encouraged) to try to earn merit according to any specific schedule.

What you are expected to do (and only if you care about maintaining or growing your rank) is to aim for a long-term merit:post ratio of at least 1:10 (and by that I mean a true merit:post ratio of at least 1:10, not a cheeseball ratio accomplished by deleting your posts, which, BTW, will not confuse the system that I'm proposing).

I also feel like it's important to understand the "framework" that's being proposed. The main idea contained in the OP (and refined in later posts) is the idea that merit could be "spendable" (ordinary merit, I mean, not sMerit, obviously). And when I say "spendable", I mean spendable in a partially non-destructive way, as in, in a way that doesn't make it simply disappear once it's been spent (after all, merit is hard-won for many people, including myself). So, when you "spend" (some amount of) your merit, the idea is that it gets converted into a different form called "carry". Once merit has been converted into carry, it loses its utility and can't be spent again. For a really silly example, and one that's actually come up before as an April Fools idea, imagine that Bitcointalk had a cool little "shop" where you could buy cosmetic items for your profile. You've got, let's say, 2000 merit, and you see something special in the shop that you have to have, like maybe a specific song that will play when people look at your profile. The song costs 100 merit. You buy it. Now you have 1900 merit left to spend and 100 carry (aka spent merit). Then you see something else you want, like maybe a feature that allows you to have an animated avatar. The animated avatar feature costs 500 merit. You buy it. Now you have 1400 merit left to spend and 600 carry. And so on. Notice that what's going on here is that you have two balances, one that represents your unspent merit, and one that represents your spent merit. If you add your unspent balance to your spent balance then you'll have your total merit (in the preceding example, the sum is, at every point, 2000).

Now, if you understand the above paragraph then you have everything you need to understand this whole idea. If $merit represents the sum over the ledger-like table that records merit transactions (a database table that already exists), and $carry represents the sum over the ledger-like table that records carry transactions (a database table that I'm proposing), then your unspent merit balance is $merit - floor($carry), and your spent merit balance is floor($carry) (and your total merit balance is just $merit). Let's call your unspent merit balance your UMB, your spent merit balance your SMB, and your total merit balance your TMB. What I'm saying in the OP is that I think it would generally raise the quality of people's posts if their rank depended on their UMB instead of their TMB and if there was a small-but-not-inconsequential payment required to post (unless, as I explained later in the thread, that person has no merit left to spend, in which case they'll effectively be allowed to post "for free").

The questions that need to be answered within this framework (for now) are:

(1) How much merit should it cost to make a post?

(2) How should this UMB vs. SMB vs. TMB stuff be displayed?

My current answer to (1) is: I think 0.1 merit is a reasonable starting point (though, if you read my other posts, you'll see that I also think it's perhaps wise to make things easier for accounts that haven't yet reached "Full Member"). The specific amount of merit that you routinely "pay" to make a post has the effect of establishing the long-term merit:post ratio that, if you care about maintaining or growing your rank, you should aim to reach or exceed. I can't think of any active users that have a merit:post ratio of less than 1:10 (as in, their merit balance divided by their post count is less than 0.1) that I also think can't improve and that I also think would be generally missed if they got frustrated by this system and left Bitcointalk. My concern with setting this value to something very low/forgiving is that this system would then end up making very little difference to the problem that it's attempting to "move the needle" on (which is, basically, mindless/low-effort posting).

My current answer to (2) is: I think the TMB should be displayed next to posts/PMs (that is, like it is currently, so, change nothing in terms of how your merit balance is displayed away from your profile page). I think this will have the effect of making people feel like the merit that they've earned (or been airdropped) still exists in its original form and that they should still be proud of their total balance. On the profile page, I think it should display your TMB while your SMB is zero, otherwise it should display something like "UMB (+SMB)" (which, remember, sums to your TMB, so it's just a slightly more informative way of showing the same thing that it currently shows). For example, let's say that this system has been in effect for a few years and someone has 4000 activity and 1200 merit. When you encounter their posts/PMs and look below their name, those are the metrics you'll see. But, you might also notice something odd, and think, "Hero Member? How can that be? They have enough activity and merit to be a Legendary, so what's going on?", and then when you navigate to their profile page you see that next to "Merit:" it says "900 (+300)". That should be read as, "This account has received 1200 merits, 900 of which remain unspent, and 300 of which have been spent and lost their utility." (And the only change that profile scrapers will have to make is to maybe use a global regex like \d+ and mind the match count. If there's one match, then turn it into an integer and use it as is. If there are two matches, then turn each one into an integer and use the sum. If there are no matches, or more than two, then log an error.)


I've been working on this post for a few days, and I'm now out of energy to keep re-writing it, but, I do want to maybe revise my above answer to (2). What if, even on the profile page, your TMB was displayed (so, leave it the way it is, basically), and the "UMB (+SMB)" thing only appeared as a tooltip (that is, it was put into a title attribute on the td that contains your merit balance)? That way, it really would feel like your merit balance isn't being "messed with" by this system.

For example, here are my own current metrics:



Now, imagine that I never received another merit and that I made 3000 posts over the next 1000 days. Then my metrics might look like:



And, if you hovered over (or near to) my merit balance, you'd see:

[Satofan44]

What you are expected to do (and only if you care about maintaining or growing your rank) is to aim for a long-term merit:post ratio of at least 1:10 (and by that I mean a true merit:post ratio of at least 1:10, not a cheeseball ratio accomplished by deleting your posts, which, BTW, will not confuse the system that I'm proposing).

I believe that this is more than conservative and there should be no issue for anyone who is not a shitposter. My situation:

• These days I have a fair number of posts in the gambling sections. Those receive practically no merits because 99.99% of the posts in there are complete shit. Aside from a few people, nobody reads anything there and the users just write whatever they can, no matter how wrong or bland it is. Merit sources generally ignore it.
• I am specifically ignored by a few biased global merit sources because they don't like my tone of writing and by the CSAM reviewing retards in Wall Observer.
• I am specifically ignored by local board sources because I call them out for their shenanigans and local merit farming.

Despite all of these, I am at a very comfortable ratio of ~ 1:1.27 (with this post included). Meanwhile:

• d5000 is at 1:1.06.
• stwenhao is at 1:0.45.
• Your ratio: 1:0.104.

I don't see any significant members having issues keeping a good ratio. The highest quality contributors or users that engage in merit cycling (like in WO) will converge towards 1 or lower. Most users will probably be in the middle 4-8 and only the worst shitposters will have an issue with this over time. However, since there are contests and other easy way to get some merits they will still have ways to try to fix their situation if they put in some effort. Furthermore, they can just play nice towards merit sources (both global and local board) and this will increase their prospects of earning merits (and avoid limitations as in my case). I don't see how anyone reasonable could complain about this proposal.

I'd make it much stricter if it was up to me. Even 1:5 would be generous, but there is no chance that the admin would approve of something like that. The ratio that you propose, as you said, is very forgiving.
This is my post number 666, I guess that's some sort of sign.  

[ercewubam]

The ratio that you propose, as you said, is very forgiving.

Yes. Usually, reaching something around 1:0.5 is easy. I think the limit should be somewhat like 1:1 or 1:2. Because 1:1 basically means reaching a single merit per post, and 1:2 means one merit per two posts. For 1:0.5, it means two merits per post, and many people send two merits, instead of one, just because it allows sending back one merit by the receiver.

Also, the activity counter can tell something. Usually, it should be 1:1, meaning that your post count is the same as your activity. If it is not, then it is usually a sign of writing simply too much, and then, the quality can be easily increased, by making a delay. For example: if someone has one activity point per four posts, then by just posting 4x less things, the quality could usually significantly go up, by spending that time, to make one better post, instead of four average ones.

Furthermore, they can just play nice towards merit sources (both global and local board) and this will increase their prospects of earning merits (and avoid limitations as in my case).

That's why alt-accounts are needed: to say, what you want to say, without worrying about merit blacklists. Usually, owning at least two accounts is needed, because then, one account can simply "be nice", and earn enough merits, and another account can "say the truth". Also, it is useful, if you want to argue with yourself, because many people cannot stand the fact, that you can disagree with your old posts, and for that reason, alt accounts are useful, because otherwise, people would believe, that the account changed hands, if you start judging your old arguments.

not a cheeseball ratio accomplished by deleting your posts

In many places, removing/editing an old post is blocked. Fortunately, there are many crawlers here, so even if someone destroys "the property of the forum", by making old topics less useful, then the previous content can still be accessed. But in the case of just counting some ratios, removing posts can simply not decrease the counter, and that should solve it. Which means, that if someone produced 1000 posts, and removed 900, then if 1000 will be used, instead of 100, when counting ratios, then it should be hard enough to game the system.

I don't see any significant members having issues keeping a good ratio.

A rule of a thumb is to reach 1:0.5 ratio, which means two merits per post on average. Better results are great, but worse results usually means, that there are too many posts, and their quality should be increased. Another rule of a thumb, is to have 1:1 post to activity ratio, which means sending one post per day on average. Then, by just comparing these two counters, it is easy to determine, if a given post should have a delay of publication, or not. And then, if there are many delayed posts, then there is more than enough content, to moderate it, and make one good post, instead of many worse ones.

[Satofan44]

Also, the activity counter can tell something. Usually, it should be 1:1, meaning that your post count is the same as your activity. If it is not, then it is usually a sign of writing simply too much, and then, the quality can be easily increased, by making a delay. For example: if someone has one activity point per four posts, then by just posting 4x less things, the quality could usually significantly go up, by spending that time, to make one better post, instead of four average ones.

This part I can't agree with. There are times where corrupt forces are spending resources to attack Bitcoin, for example as they managed to corrupt luke-jr and cause the OP_RETURN drama. At those times one can easily make more than 14 posts per day only about that single topic, and you would be doing it for a good reason. There are other times where this would apply though, e.g., if there are a lot of large news relating to Bitcoin in a short period of time. The user would have force himself to abstain from contributing for longer periods of time to get back to the ratio. Anyhow, quality post =/= long post. Unless the idea is to turn every post into a long essay, then I can't agree with this idea.

Furthermore, they can just play nice towards merit sources (both global and local board) and this will increase their prospects of earning merits (and avoid limitations as in my case).

That's why alt-accounts are needed: to say, what you want to say, without worrying about merit blacklists. Usually, owning at least two accounts is needed, because then, one account can simply "be nice", and earn enough merits, and another account can "say the truth". Also, it is useful, if you want to argue with yourself, because many people cannot stand the fact, that you can disagree with your old posts, and for that reason, alt accounts are useful, because otherwise, people would believe, that the account changed hands, if you start judging your old arguments.

I think merit source bias and blacklists are issues that are of less priority though, so it would warrant tweaking the system in regards to this only after some measures have been undertaken (such as the one proposed here). Regarding the bolded part, I agree but it probably results from too much vigilance. On average it is probably better to be extra cautious this way as long as account trades are allowed.

The ratio that you propose, as you said, is very forgiving.

Yes. Usually, reaching something around 1:0.5 is easy. I think the limit should be somewhat like 1:1 or 1:2. Because 1:1 basically means reaching a single merit per post, and 1:2 means one merit per two posts. For 1:0.5, it means two merits per post, and many people send two merits, instead of one, just because it allows sending back one merit by the receiver.

This seems extreme but I understand where you are coming from. However, I can't agree with it at this time and of course the chance that the liberal admin would do it this way is zero chance. If a post does not receive a lot of merit that does not necessarily mean that it is not a good post, even if this is often exactly what it means. It can simply mean that nobody who has enough merit or wants to send merit has seen it. This is understandable. Who wants to read a 55-page thread titled "Is Gambling a scam" or a thread with more than 1000 pages titled "Buy the DIP, and HODL!" to find a few meritable posts? (most users who are participating in the latter are doing so to farm merit off of a single generous sender, they couldn't care less about the topic -- I am aware; still, other merit sources or quality contributors will ignore such massive threads).

I believe that starting at 1:10 or even down to 1:5 would be better and then this limit can be progressively tightened over time. If the proposal starts working which would mean that the number of junk posts started to diminish, then good posts shall become more visible and thus receive a higher number of merits on average. This could become a self-reinforcing positive loop, whereas right now there is a negatively reinforcing loop. A small observation here is that most shitposters (or their accomplices) almost never give merit to the best posters of the forum (such as the ones that I usually give in my examples).  

I gave you a merit even if we don't agree in the details. That's how it should be done; instead many users turned this into an Instagram style popularity contest.  

[ercewubam]

At those times one can easily make more than 14 posts per day only about that single topic

Sure, that's why the first metric to check, is activity to merit ratio (which is visible on the left, and can be easily checked). So, if you want to avoid punishing people with more posts, then you can replace posts to merit with activity to merit, and then it should work better.

if there are a lot of large news relating to Bitcoin in a short period of time

Many statistics on BPIP can be checked for the last 30 days, 90 days, 120 days, or 150 days. Even if there are bubbles, then they can reach more stable values over time. So, to avoid punishing some users, then it can be counted per more posts, or per more days, and only applied then. For example: for lower ranks, for the first 100 posts or so, rules can be less restrictive. But if someone made 100 posts, and didn't receive a single merit, then it definitely means, that there is some problem. And if that user can write hundreds of posts more, and also remains unmerited, then something is at least suspicious.

quality post =/= long post

Of course. But forum is mainly made for longer than shorter posts. For shorter messages, there are other channels, like IRC, Discord, or whatever. And also, forum is prepared for the content, that needs to be indexed.

If a post does not receive a lot of merit that does not necessarily mean that it is not a good post

Yes. But it is a clear signal: "try harder". Or "write better content". People don't have to make masterpieces, rewarded with 50 merits. Much more important thing, is if they can get any merits from anyone.

It can simply mean that nobody who has enough merit or wants to send merit has seen it.

And it is by design. To get at least a single merit from many sources, it is enough to just get their attention. If the content you make is not a spam, and if they reply to you, by just quoting it, then you should get at least a single merit from them. So, 1:1 ratio is achievable just by "being noticed", and "writing in the always-merited places". And then, going to "1:0.5" is all about "putting some effort". So, picking 1:2 or 1:5 is just "extremely easy". But well, even 1:10 is better than nothing.

Who wants to read a 55-page thread titled "Is Gambling a scam" or a thread with more than 1000 pages titled "Buy the DIP, and HODL!" to find a few meritable posts?

Topics like that are blacklisted by many sources, just because of the title. Also, if there is "a thread with more than 1000 pages", then it is usually considered as "the bubble for spammers". In that case, it is good, that we have such topics, because their main purpose, is to keep spammers in their own honeypot, and let other users talk in shorter topics, where things are easier to find and discuss.

Also, topics with a lot of pages, are needed mainly for entertainment. Serious topics are splitted out of such places, and developed separately. But because first, you need a content, and then you can give it a title, it is a good brainstorming tool.

[PowerGlove]

Hmm... I see that I left an unbalanced closing paren in my previous post. That's a bad bad PowerGlove. No steak with your chips tonight! OK, fine, maybe half a steak, but no fried egg! OK, fine, you can have one fried egg, but it will be cooked through! And don't let me see you having a slice of tarte tatin or asking your wife to dust cinnamon on your cappuccino!

Despite all of these, I am at a very comfortable ratio of ~ 1:1.27 (with this post included).

Don't worry too much about people not "liking" you. I've noticed you sometimes say things in an abrasive way and/or say things that a lot of people are probably already thinking but would never actually state publicly. That kind of thing, when it isn't trolling, is rare and appreciated on Bitcointalk (by some, anyway). That being said, and if I may offer you a bit of advice: I think you'll do better (as in, I think you'll avoid picking up trust-system-related "punishments" and will therefore last longer with a healthier frame of mind) if you find more constructive ways to express your perspectives. Thinking of my own trajectory, I'm pretty much certain that if I had just impulsively said everything that I wanted to say on/about Bitcointalk without first toning down my frustration level and then making a considerable effort to come across as polite, I'd have "flamed out" after a few months of posting and would likely have been thought of as a troll. (For better or worse, and among a million other forms of modern brain damage, the working definition for "trolling" seems to be: "Sharing upsetting perspectives, especially in an impolite way.")

For example, the specific incident that compelled me to work on adding 2FA to the forum (when I was still an ordinary user) was something that, at the time, made me think, "It's so very fucking stupid that the forum hasn't implemented TOTP. Can someone please pull their finger out of their ass and just get this done, FFS! Why is this so difficult? How has this been complained about for over a decade without solution? Can nobody here program? Are you all soft in the head, or what?", but, instead of sharing that perspective, I shared something much more politely worded and then quickly concluded that I should just tackle the problem myself (as in, if I had shared my honest thoughts on the 2FA issue, it would only have led to me rubbing people very much the wrong way and causing them to think, "Wow you're an asshole. If you think this is an easy problem to solve and that the rest of us are idiots, then why don't you try to solve it yourself, or maybe just fuck off altogether?", and so I skipped past that avoidable ugliness and decided that the only path with any profit on it would be for me to keep my criticisms to myself and quietly get to work).

I'd make it much stricter if it was up to me.

Yup. Me, too.

Probably 0.2 merit per post is where I would start if it were up to me, and I'd then ramp it up (slowly) over time until Bitcointalk became readable and enjoyable enough that a random intelligent outsider might choose to spend their time here without any financial incentive to do so. I'll know that it's starting to do some good when I can read the "Bitcoin Discussion" board for more than 2 minutes without feeling embarrassed for all of us. Though, on other days, I'm less bullish about this whole idea, and I worry that the "brain drain" is already so close to complete that it's now a lost cause to try to reverse it. It's as if years of "Bitcointalk's fine! In fact, it's better than fine. It's great!" has given its many problems the breathing room they needed to metastasize, and now its treatment options are severely limited (as in, all of the options that might actually work also carry the risk of quickly killing the patient).

I've gone back and forth about this, but, after I wrote my previous post, I was left with the thought that 0.1 is very close to "inconsequential". The thing is, 0.1 is about as high as I think might actually be implemented, and my thinking, especially as I wind down my "Bitcointalk career" [1], is very shaped by:

I think what a lot of people don't really understand about me is that I'm in a very particular "mode" when I'm on Bitcointalk: I very rarely suggest (or code) the things that I personally want, because I realize that the things I want are radical, and I don't have the energy to argue for them in what I perceive to be a very change-resistant environment (I don't only mean the user base; I'm also referring to theymos, because, ultimately, things come down to, or are at least very affected by, what he personally likes and dislikes). I don't begrudge theymos his iron grip on Bitcointalk, because I understand it, and my own grip would be at least as tight if I were in his position, but, it leaves me in a situation where I know that I'm not going to be able to get things over a certain complexity-limit or even with a certain flavor past him. Unfortunately, I also know that I'm not really built for the kind of work that I get to do for the forum, and so I'm almost certainly going to run out of interest at some point and move on to things that I actually find stimulating (or at least ideologically satisfying). So, I'm stuck with the problem of how to intelligently ration out my dwindling supply of energy so that I can get the most amount of "good" done while I'm still around to affect things (not only that, but, I also have to make my decisions as smartly as I can in the presence of a tech lead that seems to lean very heavily toward inaction, and a community that sometimes makes either the mistake of engaging in far too much wishful thinking given the status quo, or the mistake of encouraging inaction by discussing things to death, instead of just saying: "Yeah, that would be an improvement. +1").

[1] I've been alluding to, for a while now, the fact that I'm getting close to throwing in the towel and stepping down as the forum's fix-it guy. In case anyone cares, all that really means is that I'm finding it very, very difficult to operate within this environment (I can't tell you how much I miss working alone and actually getting stuff done), and I think that to prevent me from (very soon) just completely losing my sense of humor and leaving the forum permanently, it would be wise for me to opt-out of receiving further payments, to again consider myself to only be a sometimes-volunteer, and to then re-focus the bulk of my freed-up attention on the independently-pursuable Bitcoin(talk)-related projects that I've been wanting to work on for a long time now. In practice, what I think that will look like is me finishing one or two more SMF patches and then being mostly absent for 2026 and 2027 before showing up again in 2028 to ask people to help me test whatever mini-project it is that I've completed by that point. (I'm hoping that by the time I return, Bitcointalk hasn't yet crossed the event horizon dooming it to become just a few big fish left flopping around in the murky puddle of a micro-earning shithole disguised as a discussion forum, but, if it has, then, I guess I'll just politely wish everyone all the best and say my final goodbyes.)

[JayJuanGee]

I am pretty sure that it has been more than a month since you, PowerGlove, referred me to this thread, and finally I was able to go through it.

Maybe I should first of all express my sadness that you are planning to either greatly diminish or maybe even completely stop with your "forum work," which is too bad for those of us who are continuing to use the forum and not benefitting from your could have had been contributions.  Even your posts tend to be backed up quite well, even if there are times that I don't agree with what you are saying, yet many times, you have great ways of presenting your ideas so that I will at least gain some insight and/or aspiration merely from your setting forth your ideas.

Within this thread, I had sent you quite a few smerits for your various posts and your attempts to describe what you perceive as forum merit related problems and some attempts at mechanically incentivizing resolution of aspects of the problem that would seem to attempt to incentivize the improvement of posts.. and yes a seeming stick rather than carrot approach to the problem.. not that we always need carrots in order to incentivize our spoiled-ass little brats.. hahahahaha.

Even though I get the sense that your intentions are good (or at least you do not come off as a bad intentioned person), I have my doubts that you either described a problem adequate for needs of resolution and/or even resolutions that reasonably addressed such a problem without causing its own negative repercussions.. and sure, maybe it seems like no BIG deal if some members with "low quality" posts were slowly getting widdled away at in regards to their total merit counts and/or their forum rank, yet I hardly consider the retention of merits to be either a problem or a problem worth resolving as much as there are likely more important goals to inspire members to participate and contribute to a forum like this... even if there are a certain number of members who either produce pure garbage or struggles come from trying to find any level of value in the posts of some members.

I understand concerns about quality being less than good in a large number of threads on the forum, and I also understand concerns about some members farming accounts for monetary incentivized purposes, yet I doubt that disincentivizing posts through an attrition of merits mechanism is a good approach to address those kinds of arguably valid concerns. 

Within the responses of this thread, it seems an overwhelming majority of members don't really seem to like the level of elitism that seems to underly the motives for an attrition of merits approach and perspective that members need to continue to contribute valuable posts in order to continue to retain the merits that they have already stacked up.. whether they stacked them up by hook or crook or airdrop.. and by the way, even the initial airdrops from January 2018 are not without validity from the prior time in service as some members seem to want to automatically consider the January 2018 airdrops as if they were injustices based on their being justified under the grandfather clause previously existing forum rules.. In some sense the airdropped merits are just as valid as the previously earned merits, even though they surely were not earned in the same way as the post January 2018 merits.. .yet the forum did not spring into existence in January 201, it had around 8 years of existence prior to January 2018..

Isn't it funny how, now, January 2018 seems like such ancient history?  and such a timeline is also so much within our grasps of active memory.  I should have bought bitcoin.. hahahahaha

There have been quite a few days that I have spent hours going through the reading of various forum threads (and posts therein, of course), and then thinking that: "Horey sheit, I am really wasting my life by reading through so much garbage without hardly gaining hardly any meaningful insight into my own existence through so much non-impactful and meaningless text."

At the same time, it seems to me that the meaning of the forum is not ONLY for my own consumption and understanding, and in fact other members may well be able to get value from seemingly sheit posts... and for sure newbies are quite likely to get value in ways that are different from someone who might be searching for a certain kind of content, and even the more experienced forum members might be searching for meaning in ways that are different at different times in the day, different times in the week and/or different times in their bitcoin journey.

Maybe it goes without saying that any of us can choose to read or to peruse the forum threads and/or the posts of other members, and sometimes we might not even understand what we are reading, yet if we come back to the thread/post at some later date, it might make sense within a different context.

I have some recollections of some members who I had recalled to have had been contributing absolute crap (from my perspective) to the forum, yet later down the road their posts improved considerably, and there surely are some forum members who come out of the gate with ongoing genius contributions, and other members who seem to improve with age...

Of course, some members go down hill through their forum membership and sometimes even turn into seemingly bitter curmudgeons. I don't even agree with (isn't this a bad way to start a sentence?) any kind of automated taking away of merits or the de-ranking of those who had turned into bitter curmudgeons... even though there are likely cases in which moderators need to review the posts of some members and even to take away privileges of some members for cause... and we also hope that moderators and/or administrators are not abusing their own authority to censor members and/or their speech within this forum.

[I_Anime]

In effect, you'll need to earn at least 1 merit for every 10 posts you write (on average) if you wish to prevent your account from slowly drifting toward a lower rank. And you'll need to get beyond a 0.1 merit-to-post ratio if you're aiming to increase your rank.

How is it going to be. Did you mean after every 10 posts someone make without having one merit, 1 merit will be deducted? Or the merit will not be deducted but the deranking will be based on carry? I think you meant the later. I still like how the merit system is and I will not like anything to be added.

Did you think some people will rank up and later become spammers or you think some accounts are waking up recently which belongs to spammers?

I noticed some people will have 10 posts and not yet have merit consistently, while sometimes they will earn merit.

Funny how such would have made things quite intense, making users to be more desperate . And many are here to learn , now imagine one have to earn merit in every 10 post he or she will find any means to hit that criteria to avoid any reduction of any kind , if am not mistaken.  To be honest the merit system is better this way , cause no matter how we try to modify it there will always be spammers and shit posters , so the best thing we can do is to find other means to reduce spamming , like reporting shit account and stuff .

[MoonReaver]

So if I understand your approach correctly after reading it then “carry” (What will determine that who will be the judge the jusge of carry of a post?)
Carry might be a great idea somehow implemented with merit or scaling with merit somehow, there can be bias from merit holder to merit holder, you wouldn’t want to be the person who only follows and replies the posts of people who have merits this will be a bad practice.
For example I had merited a few posts in past I believe 2 and I couldn’t merit more posts those were useful to me to. You’ll still have to be dependent on merits to rank up if I understand correctly, but what if old timers leave the forum and inexperienced new people like me keep making a few mistakes then forum wouldn’t see a lot of legendaries. Does this apply to my copper membership too?

I would propose good contributers get merit for a ratio I mean for every 10 contributions you get 1-2 merits (Yes and keeping it decaying would be a great idea too keeping it seperate from merits we get from someone (This way I believe we can see people show good engagement whereever they post on the forum.

What do you think @Powerglove?

[odunybiz]

👉👉We should also remember that there are some struggling members in the forum who are learning and at the same time trying their best to make good post (I think I fall in here). For people like that, this deranking system may hit them big as it easily possible for them to make 10 post without a merit. Humans are not equal, some are good writer but are not too intelligent while some are intelligent but are not good writers. Moreover, we have people with the two qualities. So, we should try to consider those posters that keep trying without spamming but sometimes don't receive merit often.

👉👉This can easily lead to self-deleting of posts so that one won't be de-ranked after making 10 post without a merit. Meanwhile with this, one could delect a post which could have be useful to someone as not all good post receive merit.

👉👉Lastly, some members may have task that may require them to post on daily basis. Example is the one I just took upon myself in my local boardNAIRA/USD ($/₦) Daily Excange Rate Stat. Mostly, post like this doesn't come with merit. Let's assume I made a daily post for 10 days (that's approximately 10 posts) there without a merit, then what happens to my account? De-ranked right!!! That means I got de-ranked for taking my time to be helpful to my local board. I don't see this method as a good means to reducing spamming. It's negative effects on forum members is more than it's advantage.

[Faazs]

> well , it's a very well put up idea, but I don't think making these forum harder than it is already actually removes spamming, I feel these ideas practically demoralizes newcomers discouraging new followers , I also feel the forum will actually loose members if this is implemented, though it's also affects old users, but I think it would easier for old timers to get a merit or two in ten posts than new forum member. That's why u see some old users buy the idea of deranking system, so many old users have cliques they just distribute merits amongst themselves that won't be difficult for them. But for new users, that just coming into the forum it's not that easy.

> The essence of joining these platform is to learn right, for example someone that just joined new , doesn't knw much, should be allowed to make mistakes and then take correction , u learn by trying and trying again, along the line u might make one or two blunders but it's accepted in the learning process, but when such as person is met with such harsh conditions, it will scare them away , we should allow newbies be newbies, nobody grows dat intelligent in day or start dropping masterpiece contributions to the forum in a short time, though dey are some geniuses out their in the forum, and quality for different users might fluctuate over time, after sometime on the forum a dedicated member post would definitely improve as he or she has spent more time on the forum and is getting a hang of it. gradually posting quality improves. We have to understand that people are not the same, levels of intellectual proficiency vary.

> These would just encourage more merit dealing between the higher ups and the newcomers,, because their is no way a newbie is averaging a merit per 10 post why is he a newbie then, and a again it's not that merits are evenly distributed across board, sometimes they are a lot of post that deserve being merited but they aren't,  sometimes alot of merit sources are biased, other times s-merit's are distributed amongst friends and allies,,u just merit sources giving merits to particular set of people, u begin to wonder if they own those accounts,, being serious its already quite difficult already to earn merits on the forum already,,,lets ni make it anymore for our newcomers.

> I feel dey are other ways of tackling spamming like some have mentioned, maybe stiffer punishments, better moderation, let newbies breath oh,,,, it easier for those in legendary status to accept such rules,, as they are already up their, earning a couple of merits per post is already quite easy..merit sources should probably look inward ,see how their merit distribution has been off late, who are they actually been sending merits too off late. They might come to a realization.

 > Finally, what has made these platform stand the test of time,, is the fact that on a daily basis their is an influx of people into the forum their is continuity, people have something that  they are going to gain from these forum whether knowledge or money, either way ur gaining something, though we try to white wash the fact that most people are more interested in earning from the platform, but knowledge first is preached,,, but the reality is majority is trying to make ends meet through these platform. So how do you think followership would be when members are finding it difficult to survive on the platform u are definitely pushing followership backward, and that would be bad for the forum.

[ESG]

   !What's up PowerGlove!! =D)

 I've been trying to write here for you for a long time... Maybe today I can, I hope you're still here, because I've seen you write, that with time,  you won't be here anymore, I hope you're still here on planet Earth... And from time to time it shows up here..... hehheeee...

  I know I'm a clown, and I have no ambition to grow in the ranking, participate in campaigns and be forced to write anything here on the forum just to fulfill the obligation to write a certain amount of posts, and receive change for it.

 As I have already mentioned, for a long time, I was a reader here on the forum, without wanting to have an account here, but one day I needed to open one, to try to solve a problem of a site, in which I had problems with my mother's account, and I can say that the problem was partially solved, and nowadays the site is broken and I believe that it knotted many people who believed in its reputation, and they ended up losing a good amount of money, in this case, here at home we are included in this amount of people... that is, one more lesson, not your K not your coins.

 I'm sorry for the way I speak, but as always, without intending to offend anyone, just expressing how I see things, just as they are.

 From what I understand, there has been a problem for a long time with creating extra accounts so that they can participate in these campaigns with the ambition of earning more$
 I spent a long time trying to elaborate what I think and how it could be, but if I spend more time thinking about how I'm going to write this, I'll end up leaving, I'll still be thinking about how I'm going to expose my idea that may not be useful for anything, and or the opposite, it may serve to make more people here hate me even more... hehehe... So I'm writing straight, and more or less trying to organize what I'm trying to say, but I believe it won't be as good as I imagine, but somehow, I'll be leaving here what I think about.

 So, I'll leave my guess here, it can be sour or it can be bitter, but it can still be usable, or not...

....

 -Well, so I don't get lost in the idea, I'll be more direct, each post could have a voting field, and each one could give only one vote, with three options, good bad or null,. or represented by, 'coin', shitcoin' or not to vote (voting would be optional, but anyone in any ranking would have the right to rate the post with a coin or a shitcoin, or abstain from it, null.)

- Example:




-------

 -The purpose would be to automate this, without depending on a merit distributor, (but these could not cease to exist either), I believe that the way it is, it is not bad, but it could be improved, due to these problems... And then, each account would receive one merit for every 100 coins received (an example), however, for each shitcoin received, a coin is canceled, so if he reaches 100 coins, in general, but has received about 30 shitcoins, he would still have 70, and it is necessary to get 30 more, to reach 1 merit, being the parameter, determined by the administrator..

  -For example, monthly Coins automatically converted to equivalent merits, and/or reaching 100 positive Votes, are automatically converted to merit, and/or at the User's option.

For example:

 The User has the option to convert to merits and or not, however, once the votes are converted, they no longer have value, and only the votes not yet converted are active.
---

 -I also think that the merits acquired cannot be subtracted;

 - If the user earns more than 100 Shitcoins, he can get a provisional ban for a month for example, and be unable to make posts, for him to think about the shits he is doing... and he goes back to posting after the ban, and receives another 100 shitcoins, again, a ban for a month, and so on, until he understands that in the forum, it is a place to contribute and learn, not hinder the coexistence and learning of users in general
....

 Pros:
 
 .Encourage both new and old users to make new and good posts that contribute to the topic they are posting on;

 .Favor a method and/or parameter for tools to identify bad users, such as creating extra accounts to vote on your posts, favor a healthier, less ambitious environment, encouraging the creation of good posts;

 .Put an end to the greedy who take the part of those who are not;

 .Etc, etc, etc....;

................................

 ***If this post is not considered a contribution on my part, it can be deleted immediately.
I'm not at all worried about having wasted this time.
.
.
.
.
.
...
   -In times of artificial intelligence,
    I prefer to train my natural dumbest !!   !





-

***A hug to all who think and have logical reasoning, and think of a better world for all,
 Happy New Year!***

[PowerGlove]

(Whenever I sit down to write a post or PM these days, I always get about 20% of the way through, and then I sigh deeply and think, "Why am I even trying?". I don't know why talking to you guys has become so pointless-seeming, but, it has. Writing this post was its own little exercise in tenacity, and it took around 2 weeks of on-and-off effort and revisions before I finally gave up, deleted most of it, and decided to just mix a few keepable paragraphs with some lightly-edited "off the cuff" thoughts. Anyway, I've done my best to come across as polite and constructive.)

I am pretty sure that it has been more than a month since you, PowerGlove, referred me to this thread, and finally I was able to go through it.

Thanks for reading it!

Maybe I should first of all express my sadness that you are planning to either greatly diminish or maybe even completely stop with your "forum work," which is too bad for those of us who are continuing to use the forum and not benefitting from your could have had been contributions.

Thanks, JJG. I really appreciate that.

I have my doubts that you either described a problem adequate for needs of resolution and/or even resolutions that reasonably addressed such a problem without causing its own negative repercussions.

Yup. I can see how you'd feel that way. The OP doesn't really do a good job of making a convincing case that something like what I'm proposing is necessary. It also doesn't do a good job of explaining how it compares tradeoff-wise with every other SNR-increasing device that I've considered. I guess, I'm kind of being lazy and just sharing the blueprint for something that I've thought about for a long time and considered from very many angles, but, I don't really have the energy to expound on or justify it. I'm personally satisfied that what I've described belongs to the very small set of workable solutions given all of the constraints on the problem, and I suppose it's just one of those things where I expect that anyone who examines the issue deeply enough will come to the same conclusion.

All I can really offer you in my current mood is two little thoughts and one recent example (all three of which are kind of lazy, I'll admit):

(*) The first little thought stems from my evaluation of the following two quotes (both of which were written for the Welcome Message, under a section titled "The purpose of the forum"; emphasis is not my own):

A lot of people come here primarily looking to make money. The forum administration is very happy that people are able to use the forum in order to better themselves; indeed, one of the reasons for Bitcoin's creation was to break the artificial barriers which prevent so many people around the world from attaining prosperity. However, if your attempts to make money conflict with the forum's primary goal of enabling discussion, then you are swimming upstream, and you will not be successful in the end.

If you view the forum as some sort of "job" where you complete some basic tasks and get paid, then you will almost certainly be disappointed, and the forum administration will not be sympathetic. If you do make money using the forum, then it will be through innovation and entrepreneurship, not any sort of mindless busywork.

I don't know about you, but, when I read those quotes end-to-end and carefully, I'm left both with a feeling of very strong agreement, and with a feeling of very strong disappointment at just how untrue those ideas actually are. I mean... "you are swimming upstream, and you will not be successful in the end"? And, "it will be through innovation and entrepreneurship, not any sort of mindless busywork"? Yeah, right. My foot. Minus a few cool corners, and excluding our long list of resident crazies, all that the forum is at this point is a dwindling core of genuine Bitcoin enthusiasts getting drowned out by an endless procession of "I can make money by posting!?" types who are "successful in the end" doing absolutely nothing but "mindless busywork".

Now, I'm not under the illusion that it's even possible to make the reality of the forum correspond with those quotes, but, I do think that the correspondence would be a little bit better if there were a mindless-posting countermeasure in place (besides moderation, which, if you think about it, sits too close to censorship as an idea, and shouldn't be something that the forum seeks to have more and more of, especially not when there are systemic alternatives like the one I'm proposing; also, I don't like the idea of misusing the trust system for this problem: in fact, this is neither here nor there, but, if I were building a Bitcointalk-like environment from scratch, I'd say that the trust system would be the single thing that I'd be very hesitant to copy or draw much inspiration from, because I believe it has, over time, become a source of a lot more community-wise harm than good). I suppose you could argue that we already have a mindless-posting countermeasure in the form of the merit system itself, but, I think it's obvious to anyone that's been paying attention for the last few years that the merit system is not the "filter" that it once was, and that account farmers and individual would-be sigspammers have pretty much figured out how to systematically work around it.

(*) The second little thought is that theymos and I both agree that something needs to be done:

The SNR is definitely too low: that's one of the biggest problems on the forum.

Agreed. I sometimes wonder at the wisdom of a free-speech haven that drives away the people with ideas actually worth preserving.

(*) And finally, the recent example is to do with that obvious account farm that started spamming the forum with AI-slop meant to come across as very human-sounding and relatable/likable (the one with lots of uses of "ngl", "tbh", "idk", "lol", "imo", "xd", and suchlike):

My energy/patience is draining pretty fast, so, I'm not going to unpack the whole thing carefully, but, I will say that if I pick out an account like this one, I'm left thinking, "Wow. You really can just show up on the forum, have an LLM synthesize 178 agreeable posts about nothing, rely on the moderators to clean up ~80% of it, and then be left with a good-looking merit-to-post ratio of 6:29 and a fair chance that you'll now be able to weasel merits even more effectively."

If what I proposed in the OP was already in effect (and if you ignore the later adjustments I proposed to make things nicer for new accounts, which I'm now thinking wouldn't actually be so wise to implement), then the above account would have spent 17.8 merits with their "shotgun" approach, and would be 11.8 merits down rather than 6 merits up. That is, nobody would have to "thwart" that kind of user by madly reporting their posts and getting into disagreements with the mods and fighting with AI-detectors and de-humanizers and whatnot, because strategies like the one that that account farm is employing would just... not work.

(One last thing I'll share in support of this whole proposal is that I think it's very easy to sleep on how well this idea could accommodate a set of tunable countermeasures: I find it very natural to think of 0.1 as a kind of "base cost", and to then consider when it would be appropriate to increase that cost. For example, maybe it should be more expensive than normal to necrobump, and maybe it should be more expensive than normal to post in megathreads, and maybe users should have the ability to set their own higher-than-normal cost for topics where they're only looking for high-effort replies, and so on.)

What do you think @Powerglove?

I can't make sense of your post, friend. (But, please don't take that personally; I'm probably as much to blame as you are: I've been in a particularly bad mood recently, especially when it comes to forum stuff, and I don't have the kind of patience that I normally do, so I'm unwilling to carefully sift through your post to try to find the most constructive interpretation of what you might be saying.)

👉👉We should also remember that there are some struggling members in the forum who are learning and at the same time trying their best to make good post (I think I fall in here). For people like that, this deranking system may hit them big as it easily possible for them to make 10 post without a merit. Humans are not equal, some are good writer but are not too intelligent while some are intelligent but are not good writers. Moreover, we have people with the two qualities. So, we should try to consider those posters that keep trying without spamming but sometimes don't receive merit often.

I'm aware of all that. You're not telling me anything here that I haven't already considered and tried to account for as much as I'm able to given the constraints on this problem.

👉👉This can easily lead to self-deleting of posts so that one won't be de-ranked after making 10 post without a merit. Meanwhile with this, one could delect a post which could have be useful to someone as not all good post receive merit.

Sigh. No. With the system I'm proposing, the per-post payment is recorded as a "carry transaction" that's generated when you submit a new post. That is, once you've made a post, you've already paid for it (effectively, by having a small amount of your merit balance get converted into a form that the rank-determination function will no longer consider to be relevant). Deleting a post won't refund the small amount of merit that was "spent" in the process of that post's submission. So, the deleting of posts has no effect on the proposed system (as in, there is no deletion strategy that can offer you any carry-wise advantage compared to a strategy of never deleting your posts).

👉👉Lastly, some members may have task that may require them to post on daily basis. Example is the one I just took upon myself in my local boardNAIRA/USD ($/₦) Daily Excange Rate Stat. Mostly, post like this doesn't come with merit. Let's assume I made a daily post for 10 days (that's approximately 10 posts) there without a merit, then what happens to my account? De-ranked right!!! That means I got de-ranked for taking my time to be helpful to my local board. I don't see this method as a good means to reducing spamming. It's negative effects on forum members is more than it's advantage.

This is the third point in-a-row where you've phrased things in a way that makes me think that you don't understand this proposal...

You won't be "de-ranked" if you make 10 posts without receiving any merit. The proposed system plays out over much longer timescales than that (also, it isn't even keeping track of your posts, never mind the last 10). The whole "10 posts" thing falls out of the suggested cost of 0.1 merit per post and the fact that 1 divided by 0.1 is 10. As in, if, for every 10 posts you make, you wind up with 1 less merit (because each of those posts cost you 0.1 merit to submit), then, you'll need to average at least 1 merit received for every 10 posts you submit (or else you're operating at a rank-wise loss because you're spending more merit than you're receiving). Another way to interpret the suggested cost of 0.1 merit per post would be: If a post costs you 0.1 merit to submit, and if you're trying to operate profitably, then it's not sensible to submit a post that has a <=10% chance of receiving 1 merit (or a <=5% chance of receiving 2 merits, and so on).

On the specific point you're making about routinely updating threads with posts that rarely receive merit, let me ask you: If the bumps rarely receive merit, shouldn't you take that as a sign that maybe you should stop maintaining that thread, or learn to maintain it in a better way? As in, things that are honest-to-goodness appreciated by other forum members typically receive merit. That is, if you can't find some way to make those bumps merit-worthy, then I'd encourage you to stop wasting your energy and find something else to post about (or, alternatively, earn enough merit that you can then "afford" to post whatever and whenever you like; for example, LoyceV has so many merits that their next ~200 thousand posts would have to go unmerited for the proposed system to drop them down from "Legendary" to "Hero Member").

!What's up PowerGlove!! =D)

Hey, dude. I miss playing poker with you, BTW.

I'm sorry to get to you last, when I'm all spent. I appreciate the effort that you put into your post, and if you feel very strongly that it contains something useful, then send me a PM to that effect and I'll try to explain why something like what you're proposing can't really work in an environment like this one. I hope that we get to play poker again one day (you're one tricky bastard, and I have a lot of good memories of our games).

[JayJuanGee]

.....The first little thought stems from my evaluation of the following two quotes (both of which were written for the Welcome Message, under a section titled "The purpose of the forum"; emphasis is not my own):

A lot of people come here primarily looking to make money. The forum administration is very happy that people are able to use the forum in order to better themselves; indeed, one of the reasons for Bitcoin's creation was to break the artificial barriers which prevent so many people around the world from attaining prosperity. However, if your attempts to make money conflict with the forum's primary goal of enabling discussion, then you are swimming upstream, and you will not be successful in the end.

If you view the forum as some sort of "job" where you complete some basic tasks and get paid, then you will almost certainly be disappointed, and the forum administration will not be sympathetic. If you do make money using the forum, then it will be through innovation and entrepreneurship, not any sort of mindless busywork.

I don't know about you, but, when I read those quotes end-to-end and carefully, I'm left both with a feeling of very strong agreement, and with a feeling of very strong disappointment at just how untrue those ideas actually are. I mean... "you are swimming upstream, and you will not be successful in the end"? And, "it will be through innovation and entrepreneurship, not any sort of mindless busywork"? Yeah, right. My foot. Minus a few cool corners, and excluding our long list of resident crazies, all that the forum is at this point is a dwindling core of genuine Bitcoin enthusiasts getting drowned out by an endless procession of "I can make money by posting!?" types who are "successful in the end" doing absolutely nothing but "mindless busywork".

I would imagine that even theymos might have some struggles, from time to time, in regards to how much to say or how to say it, yet there still is a balance between free and open communication and members being able to be paid for their participating in a forum like this - and yeah, there are likely difficulties balancing - including an acknowledgement that free and open forum is the more primary of the motivations and some members have gone down the road of faking their genuineness that devolve into non-substantive crap.. yet I still cannot see how creating the algorithmic obstacles that you describe is good in an open forum context rather than in a system that might be more closed- since this forum seems to be open for everyone, even though surely if they are not humans and if they are providing crappy non-substantive materials then it can be harder to know the extent that any value is being added... and we might not even know if some seemingly crappy posts have readers from years later who get value out of the seemingly crappy posts. 

And sometimes culturally guys present there ideas so differently.  There are some threads that I have been participating in for years along with other members, and sometimes I see other members presenting the same wrong ideas over and over and over, and I wonder if they are even capable of learning.. not that I am claiming to be
an all knowing, yet I sometimes will get irritated since sometimes bad ideas get parroted.. and then we have 10 members repeating similar kinds of bad ideas.

I think that the nature of decentralized contribution is going to ultimately result in a lot of bad and mediocre posts, even from real humans who are genuinely trying to communicate their own ideas on the topic of the thread (or whatever subtopic is being explored within the thread at the time).

So then when there are mediocre ideas starting to proliferate a thread, my own participation might end up being to ignore it, to comment on it or to try to correct it, and surely my ideas are not superior, even though there seem to be guys who will repeat some of my ideas and I am not always clear if they are representing my ideas in fair and accurate ways.

Now, I'm not under the illusion that it's even possible to make the reality of the forum correspond with those quotes, but, I do think that the correspondence would be a little bit better if there were a mindless-posting countermeasure in place (besides moderation, which, if you think about it, sits too close to censorship as an idea, and shouldn't be something that the forum seeks to have more and more of, especially not when there are systemic alternatives like the one I'm proposing; also, I don't like the idea of misusing the trust system for this problem: in fact, this is neither here nor there, but, if I were building a Bitcointalk-like environment from scratch, I'd say that the trust system would be the single thing that I'd be very hesitant to copy or draw much inspiration from, because I believe it has, over time, become a source of a lot more community-wise harm than good).

I think that it is really difficult to detect intentions of other members and to know if they really are humans, so the best that we can do is try to assess from their posts and to attempt to make reasonable inferences.  There surely are some members who are more active in the meta process and others like myself who try to stay more active in bitcoin contents, and I know some members  who do not venture outside of the WO thread.  And, so yeah, sometimes members might be gathering evidence, leaving negative trust or comments, and sometimes the actions of members will get other members suspended or banned.

There are ONLY so many hours in a day for guys to spend on various areas of interest, and sure, of course, one of the recent issues is the use of AI to help in the sorting through posts and maybe even to save guys time, or allow them to participate in more than one place, so a normal human coming to the forum might ONLY be able to spend a few hours a week, and even if we have more time that we can spend on the forum, we might still want to limit how much time we are spending on the forum, even if we already spend a lot of time on the forum.

So then sometimes the work of other members will help to sort through or to learn which forum members to trust or to not trust.. yet the issue might not be completely resolved even if a lot of time is spent on the forum.

I suppose you could argue that we already have a mindless-posting countermeasure in the form of the merit system itself, but, I think it's obvious to anyone that's been paying attention for the last few years that the merit system is not the "filter" that it once was, and that account farmers and individual would-be sigspammers have pretty much figured out how to systematically work around it.

When a system is in place, then changes to the system likely need to account for the previously existing system, and yeah, each member might see the nature of the "problems" from a different angle.

(*) The second little thought is that theymos and I both agree that something needs to be done:

The SNR is definitely too low: that's one of the biggest problems on the forum.

Agreed. I sometimes wonder at the wisdom of a free-speech haven that drives away the people with ideas actually worth preserving.

Surely one thing is seeing that there is a problem, yet at the same time, trying to figure out what kinds of measures might be put in place that would be helpful rather than causing more harm, including disincentivizing participation, as many responses in this thread have been concerned about.

(*) And finally, the recent example is to do with that obvious account farm that started spamming the forum with AI-slop meant to come across as very human-sounding and relatable/likable (the one with lots of uses of "ngl", "tbh", "idk", "lol", "imo", "xd", and suchlike):

My energy/patience is draining pretty fast, so, I'm not going to unpack the whole thing carefully, but, I will say that if I pick out an account like this one, I'm left thinking, "Wow. You really can just show up on the forum, have an LLM synthesize 178 agreeable posts about nothing, rely on the moderators to clean up ~80% of it, and then be left with a good-looking merit-to-post ratio of 6:29 and a fair chance that you'll now be able to weasel merits even more effectively."

I understand that there are some people with abilties to really clog up the works, and then maybe it takes manpower to clean it up, so sure it could be a big time-suck for the forum, yet doesn't the forum have a pretty decent treasury to be able to pay folks to help with those kinds of clean ups?

If what I proposed in the OP was already in effect (and if you ignore the later adjustments I proposed to make things nicer for new accounts, which I'm now thinking wouldn't actually be so wise to implement), then the above account would have spent 17.8 merits with their "shotgun" approach, and would be 11.8 merits down rather than 6 merits up. That is, nobody would have to "thwart" that kind of user by madly reporting their posts and getting into disagreements with the mods and fighting with AI-detectors and de-humanizers and whatnot, because strategies like the one that that account farm is employing would just... not work.

Sure.  Maybe your system could work with really egregious accounts like that, and sure there are probably several ways to screen the new accounts when they are so obviously abusive.. .  it seems problematic to apply to regular posters, even if there were a post count, like your system would go into affect if the person had more than 20 posts per day or some secret criteria that could not be gamed by the account farmers.

 There could be ways to apply such a system of screening in regular ways to help moderators, yet not necessarily affecting all forum members with losing merits, since there are a lot of us who might have a lot of crappy posts that are not mal-intended and we just did not receive merits.

(One last thing I'll share in support of this whole proposal is that I think it's very easy to sleep on how well this idea could accommodate a set of tunable countermeasures: I find it very natural to think of 0.1 as a kind of "base cost", and to then consider when it would be appropriate to increase that cost. For example, maybe it should be more expensive than normal to necrobump, and maybe it should be more expensive than normal to post in megathreads, and maybe users should have the ability to set their own higher-than-normal cost for topics where they're only looking for high-effort replies, and so on.)

I still have a problem with long time members and/or regular members losing merits once they had earned them... even though I understand that you are trying to brain storm a system that would create disincentives to spammers.

[LoyceV]

(*) And finally, the recent example is to do with that obvious account farm that started spamming the forum with AI-slop meant to come across as very human-sounding and relatable/likable (the one with lots of uses of "ngl", "tbh", "idk", "lol", "imo", "xd", and suchlike):

My energy/patience is draining pretty fast, so, I'm not going to unpack the whole thing carefully, but, I will say that if I pick out an account like this one, I'm left thinking, "Wow. You really can just show up on the forum, have an LLM synthesize 178 agreeable posts about nothing, rely on the moderators to clean up ~80% of it, and then be left with a good-looking merit-to-post ratio of 6:29 and a fair chance that you'll now be able to weasel merits even more effectively."

I feel you on the energy/patience thing, which for me translates into just Ignoring users instead of going through the painstaking process of reporting endless piles of chatbot verbal diarrhae only to have the posts removed without the user doesn't getting banned. I like your example of how ranking down through Merit would make this spammer's efforts fruitless, but I'd very much prefer the much simpler solution of banning this user account farmer.

I miss the days when I would report hundreds of accounts and Mods would actually get rid of the bad ones (after checking them). I don't get why Bitcointalk is now so lenient on (mindless) chatbot plagiarism, but it's very demotivating for humans to have to wade through bots.
But worse than that: it makes me fear the future of Bitcointalk. Lazy dumb chatbot spam will only become more accessible, and as long as there's money to be made I expect the usage to increase until the Dead Internet theory becomes a reality.

[Satofan44]

A lot of people come here primarily looking to make money. The forum administration is very happy that people are able to use the forum in order to better themselves; indeed, one of the reasons for Bitcoin's creation was to break the artificial barriers which prevent so many people around the world from attaining prosperity. However, if your attempts to make money conflict with the forum's primary goal of enabling discussion, then you are swimming upstream, and you will not be successful in the end.

If you view the forum as some sort of "job" where you complete some basic tasks and get paid, then you will almost certainly be disappointed, and the forum administration will not be sympathetic. If you do make money using the forum, then it will be through innovation and entrepreneurship, not any sort of mindless busywork.

I don't know about you, but, when I read those quotes end-to-end and carefully, I'm left both with a feeling of very strong agreement, and with a feeling of very strong disappointment at just how untrue those ideas actually are. I mean... "you are swimming upstream, and you will not be successful in the end"? And, "it will be through innovation and entrepreneurship, not any sort of mindless busywork"? Yeah, right. My foot. Minus a few cool corners, and excluding our long list of resident crazies, all that the forum is at this point is a dwindling core of genuine Bitcoin enthusiasts getting drowned out by an endless procession of "I can make money by posting!?" types who are "successful in the end" doing absolutely nothing but "mindless busywork".

Now, I'm not under the illusion that it's even possible to make the reality of the forum correspond with those quotes, but, I do think that the correspondence would be a little bit better if there were a mindless-posting countermeasure in place (besides moderation, which, if you think about it, sits too close to censorship as an idea, and shouldn't be something that the forum seeks to have more and more of, especially not when there are systemic alternatives like the one I'm proposing; also, I don't like the idea of misusing the trust system for this problem: in fact, this is neither here nor there, but, if I were building a Bitcointalk-like environment from scratch, I'd say that the trust system would be the single thing that I'd be very hesitant to copy or draw much inspiration from, because I believe it has, over time, become a source of a lot more community-wise harm than good). I suppose you could argue that we already have a mindless-posting countermeasure in the form of the merit system itself, but, I think it's obvious to anyone that's been paying attention for the last few years that the merit system is not the "filter" that it once was, and that account farmers and individual would-be sigspammers have pretty much figured out how to systematically work around it.

(*) The second little thought is that theymos and I both agree that something needs to be done:

Excellent findings. The current situation with the forum could not be further away from these two quotes. Around 90 to 99% posters are writing complete generic junk, depending on how strict one wants to be when evaluating the posts for this context. It seems that for some reason enforcement has effectively completely stopped. The merit system is broken and seems useless for this, you can track individuals that are examples of this by following recent applicants for signature campaigns. Many who apply there have received a lot of merit in the last 120 days but they are complete generic shitposters.

I feel you on the energy/patience thing, which for me translates into just Ignoring users instead of going through the painstaking process of reporting endless piles of chatbot verbal diarrhae only to have the posts removed without the user doesn't getting banned. I like your example of how ranking down through Merit would make this spammer's efforts fruitless, but I'd very much prefer the much simpler solution of banning this user account farmer.

Who can issue bans here? Only admins and global administrators? I don't see why this has stopped. I see apathy from the forum administration to even explain what is up with all of this. Quick permanent bans would work much better and much faster for cleaning up the forum than anything else. They would be more effective than any busting in the Reputation section and most certainly more effective than the merit system.