And dang, now I'm #40 on the bpip list. I soooo don't deserve to be ranked that high.
You've tagged countless (I'm lazy this morning

) shitposters, they'll all recognize you

Vod's argument is that newer users here don't recognize the early names. I don't believe this to be true.
Roger Ver has a Recognition Rank of >1000 &
Gavin Andresen has a Recognition Rank of 865, while
abhiseshakana has a Recognition Rank of 333. Which names do you recognize?
I don't recognize abhiseshakana either. He may be recognized in his local board, but not globally.
What would the ranks be if the original merit were included in the algorithm?
That would temporarily raise old users' Recognition Rank. Long-term, the airdropped amount shouldn't be a big part of the total Merit anymore (although at the rate Merit is currently being distributed, that's going to take a very long time).
Step 1 would be to not arbitrarily dismiss user merits that were earned through prior participation here.
Vod initially included all Merit, but changed is as previous contributions were already included in a higher Activity Rank:
For consideration:
If you're counting the initial (airdropped) Merit, which was based on Activity, aren't you double counting Activity?
Step 2 would be for people to leave merit for historical contributions, and not just current posts.
Agreed, but it's not realistic. Old posts are read much less often than new posts, which makes it much less likely to receive Merit. I made this thread:
Percentage of Merit received on old posts, deleted posts, and average per post, but since it requires scraping all posts for each user, I can only check selected users. I'll add your stats
here.
Also, Im a bit shocked users like Gavin Andresen have a 0 trust rating. In his particular case, satoshi trusted him to lead development on the Bitcoin client but hes regarded as not trustworthy enough to accept PayPal from? He was a major influence here whose first project when he discovered Bitcoin was to create a faucet to give it away. Users like him personally inspired me
I wasn't around when he was still active. What's stopping you from leaving Gavin Andresen trust now?