Quote from: Jet Cash on January 30, 2018, 10:20:54 PM

I may have chosen a bad example because I didn't know the guy who first used HODL, but I did a quick scan of the merit list, and most of themseem to be foreign language threads or announcement and sig promo related.

You chose an excellent example. Without the merit system you probably never would have found out about the origin of hodl.

Quote from: Jet Cash on January 30, 2018, 10:43:17 PM

Quote from: itsmeram on January 30, 2018, 10:38:31 PM

Well, I understand why people gave those Merits to him.. but they are wasted.
You should use Merit Points to help people to level up.

Thank you for posting that, and I gave you 2 points for stating the obvious.

I would have thought that a few days ago but now I'm convinced this is missing the point of the merit system. Most times I've read a good post the author seems to have already earned merit at a rate faster than 1 a day. The system isn't going to affect them ranking up at all. It's going to prevent spammers ranking up but that is only a small part of what the system is intended to do.

This is the post that enlightened me:

Quote from: theymos_away on January 28, 2018, 02:21:02 PM

@DooMAD
If they're really not adding anything, then they shouldn't get merit. But it doesn't need to be mind-blowing, either. Someone suggested a feature where all umerited posts would be hidden (which I may do at some point) -- I think that it'd be good to look at it as asking what posts you would want in such a summary. So not just incredible posts which might've taken an hour or more to write (those should probably get 10+ merit), but also the questions, arguments, jokes, etc. which couldn't be removed from a thread without starting to lobotomize it.

It's all very new, of course, so maybe this strategy will not actually be the best, but it is what I had in mind when designing the system.

@TMAN, I have been adding sources, and I will continue.

The system is here to help us see through the endless spam and find the interesting stuff. Now I can scan through a thread and just stop to read the posts conveniently highlighted for my attention. I've started using the Recent merits page as a better alternative to the Show unread posts since last visit page. I've stumbled upon all sorts of interesting threads were previously drowned out by all the noise and I would have otherwise missed.

I know there's a lot of merit being wasted on bounty threads, abuse and the like but that's a short-term issue as the airdrop sMerit will soon run out and only people contributing to the forum will be earning more.

When I stopped thinking of it in terms of ranking up and started to think of it as a tool to help me navigate the forum I suddenly started getting something out of it.