.. if their is no monetary reward people will not be posting even when they don’t have what to contribute,
if there is no monetary reward, many people will not be posting at all...
Merit incentives
The incentives around merit here are completely broken, it has nothing to do about the quality of the post -- the only and primary metric through which one receives the msot merit is popularity. Make yourself popular, be a yes-man, join useless art contests and whatever other shit is going on and you get a lot of merit. Since the merit system does not actually incentivize quality posting itself, it is not currently doing anything other than making it slightly harder for people to rank up new accounts. Once accounts are ranked up through legitimate or illegitimate means (merit abuse), users can shitpost however they want.
I agree that popularity can influence merit distribution in some cases. However, I would hesitate to conclude that merit is primarily driven by popularity. There are numerous technical and development posts that receive recognition despite the author not being particularly popular. Also, one becomes popular only when they are known for producing quality continuously. So, we can say, quality post = popular.
No system is imperfect, but imperfection does not automatically render the merit system functionless. Even if merit does not perfectly measure quality, it still creates friction against effortless ranking through pure spam.
Active moderation and reporting
There is absolutely zero pro-active moderation here, and both the deletion of posts and the banning of users is quite lenient -- and has a similar popularity aspect to it. Idiots that make completely useless posts that just mention some word from the thread title will be considered to have made a post that is substantial enough, even if it completely misses the topic.
You are correct that moderation is largely reactive rather than proactive. But that design appears intentional. Theymos prioritizes minimal intervention unless rules are clearly violated.
Whether that model is optimal is debatable, but it is not necessarily equivalent to zero moderation.
I would be interested in hearing whether you believe that structural changes are necessary, or whether the current decentralized moderation model remains valid for the forum.
Many things need to change for this to become a good place again. The current model is centralized not decentralized by the way.
You raise an interesting point. The moderation model is decentralized in participation (anyone can report, merit, or form trust opinions), but centralized in enforcement authority. So perhaps it is more accurate to describe it as hybrid rather than purely decentralized.
