Quote from: Quickseller on November 23, 2018, 04:20:13 AM

Quote from: Vod on November 22, 2018, 06:24:53 PM

I have been trying to enforce the merit abuse rules.

Where can one find these rules? How were these rules enacted?

I'm not one for too many rules. However, if you can just give 50 merits to your alts or mates for making the same 2 posts then let's just stop worrying about merit and I would say after making full member merit should not be really be linked to rank. Lots of good posters in the ALT section will never rank up. Merit can just be a nice way of tipping your hat to a post you agree with or as a friendly gesture. The danger is trying to imply it correlates to the net value of the user in anyway.

I have seen even high merit and high rank members give chunks of merit to posts that are incorrect based on hard observable evidence contained within the same thread. Merit is more for sharing an opinion that demonstrating the post has real objective value.

Also the most damning of all was a bunch of stats that show if you remove all merit passed between the top 0.13% of users on this board (that's if we say 150k real users that have posted this month not the 2 million members that have joined at some point) ... so going towards a 1/10th of 1%.

If you remove their internal merit swapping their merits crash by 50-75%

If you remove the merits gained in meta you would likely see no body except a handful have more than 150 earned merits. I am talking satoshi, theymos and perhaps literally a handful of others.

Those that never leave the alt boards are likely to have zero earned merits whatever they post and bitcoin talk does a bit better.

So to me meta has 2 real applications if taken at face value

1. a weapon against scammers account farmers (that could be used with way more power with junior boards)
2. a friendly hat tipping and acknowledgement of sharing a view or stance on something and saying thanks for a request.

I have seen so many persons using their merit score as part of an argument as it if lends weight. To me it does not.

I don't actually think there is anything wrong with merit as it is because already it is helping with scammers, account farmers, and is very net positive. However implying there is some deeper objective meaning to it is false.

I think if we had junior boards even just for the alt discussion board you would over night see the people here just trying to cash cow this board would drop away.