Quote from: DdmrDdmr on May 12, 2018, 09:51:19 PM

Now whats left is determining the sorce/sources. That is where we would postulate as candidates users that award most in the given section/subsection, combined with a wider spread of awarding history over multiple posts and/or users. That is, better to have as a source someone who awards few sMerits to many users that a lot to a few users.
Divide the sMerit deficit by the average you want to give to a source, and you get the number of sourced to have in a given section/subsection.

Its not perfect as finer details need to be outlined, but thats how I would approach it and build up from there.

Theres one more thing that buggers me which is, regardless of it all, what is a good overall sMerit circulation that is needed to keep the system healthy, working, and having users believe in it?.
Too much sMerit circulation would render it useless, as it would defeat the purpose, but having a very restricted amount may drown the system and its credibility through inanition.

Even when it seems difficult to be done, that's a great idea. I just see a problem in detecting "good posts" in between such a daily amount of newcomers and new posters...
So, based on your idea, another one comes to me. Maybe merit sources can be chosen per area. I mean: not everyone loves to discuss society, and not everyone loves to discuss tech, for instance. So let us select the merit sources per area: for instance, Flying Hellfish can be the merit source in the Politics&Society area, and he can be dedicated to merit this section.
But, how many merits will the area receive? It just depends on how much activity the area has. If we select for instance a local board, we can make an analysis of how many users are in there, how many posts per month they are used to have, how much are they growing up, how many mods do they have... and etc. So the Smerit can be given to the local mods (or other useful users in the area), and they will share it in their local board only.
The meta section, again, the same. How many posts do we have per month? how many users are active in this section? how much is it growing? after an analysis of each section, we can determinate (approximately, of course), how many Smerit a section will need.

Of course, it is impossible for it to be constant. We can have a nice week, with many nice posts, and a bad one with none to be merited. But the common situation will be, at least, a couple of good posts per day (hopefully!!!). Being in communication with the merit sources in each area can be really refreshing to the system.
I also think this is necessary to have global merit Sources in order to refresh some areas, but it can be a way to refresh the merit system and to encourage people to make some good posts.

Just an idea...