Quote from: Piggy on February 10, 2018, 02:43:45 PM

If the problem was the shitposters why not act on that? Peraphs closing the forum to new users, banning all the shitposters? And then adding an invite system maybe? Or something else?

This is acting on shitposters. Except instead of having moderators do it this system attempts to spread the responsibility to the users.

Quote from: Grafschmidt on February 10, 2018, 02:54:10 PM

That may be true. There's twitter to spam wide and large. And facebook. That place is a huge advertisement banner.

But I know that now I'm stuck at senior member. I won't get merit because it's held like Gollum holds the One.
You may say I will get merit if I post quality text.
Except for the fact there is a lot of shitposts everywhere with a lot of merit.

And as far as I can see, only high ranked people are enthusiastic about this merit. I wonder why.

Yet you already got 14 merits in 2 or 3 weeks since merits have been implemented, which is not far off the regular activity rank-up pace.

Quote from: pvk444 on February 10, 2018, 04:36:03 PM

I don't mean any offence to either the merit recipient or the merit givers. But I believe this post is an example of the unexpected consequences of the merit system as implemented:

The post of suchmoon has received a rather significant amount of merits, which, I dare to say, reflect agreement with the opinion, rather than the quality of the post.

Again, this is not to critique the comment of suchmoon. I hole-heartedly agree with it. Also, everybody has their own reasons why they give their sMerits to somebody.

But I also don't believe the comment provided can be regarded as a "high-quality" post, in the original sense of what the sMerit system is expected to encourage.

If the merits are then being used to award simply for stating an opinion one is agreement with, then over time this will lead to the messages becoming biased towards the "majority opinion", and will not have much relevance with the quality of the post per se. (Again, I don't mean to imply that the post above is bad quality. But I also fail to see that it would be of such high quality deserving all the merits it received)

Unfortunatly I also can't offer up a remedy at this point in time, as with any such system it will always be possible to award an opinion expressed in a message rather than the quality of the message.

I don't think individual anecdotes are reflective of the overall state of the merit system. I could come up with dozens or even hundreds of "unfairly" merited (or not merited) posts but the idea is that in the LONG RUN this system will help to separate egregious shitposters (who should never rank up) from slightly shitposting but generally harmless trolls (who will likely rank up eventually) and from truly constructive/helpful/valuable users (who will likely collect most merits but will also spread most sMerits).

I can't speak for others but I have merited some posts that I disagree with or have no personal opinion about. I'm not naive to expect that everyone will do this all the time, however I have no doubt that there are ways to earn merits without bowing to the majority, whatever that is.