Hey guys. This is not a bashing post. I was thinking about some cool bitcoin topics and checked out the forums were I could post. Sometimes I like to spend some time making an awesome post. As you know it takes a while to write a quality post that will encourage quality engagement from other users. I noticed that on quite a few forums the moderators do not give out insignificant amounts of smerit. I will certainly post regardless, but I thought that it is discouraging to see so many threads that are 300+ replies but no smerits assigned, not even in any of the threads.
What do you guys think is a solution?
You are indeed correct. However the real fault lies with the myriads of spammers and bots and puppet accounts because they make it far more difficult to locate good posters.
This will eventually be solved meanwhile don't worry too much about merit. If you are determined to get optimal recognition for good posts (in terms of merit) you will need to use the stats provided on meta to locate the best boards to post on. Sadly for you the fact is the top 0.02% of merit receivers cycle over 50% of their merit between them at this time. I calculated that if you were to remove merits given by the top 300 to the top 200 and removed all merits given in this meta sub board most people (except a handful) would only have got max 100/150 merits. Most of the top 200 saw reductions in the 50% - 75% range (that was without subtracting merits given on the meta sub board. With that you could be looking at reductions up to 95%.
So if you have got even say 10 merits and none from the meta board (except what I just gave you for noticing this and making a relevant post here) then you are doing very well actually.
If you are a good poster you will eventually get known on the basis of your work here and I would then not worry about the rankings and merits too much.
On top of all of that there is serious gaming going on. There was a case of a legend just giving 50 merits each to 2 other accounts for nearly identical post (not really deserving of any merit) when analysed all 3 shared an eth addy so looked like highly probably alts. I would think these cases should be treated a little more harshly but merit is subjective so not really possible to police to make it fairer right now.
There does not really need to be a solution right now because merit is working to prevent a lot of negative behaviour ( as opposed to having no merit system) and also over time once the bots, account farmers, ico spammers vanish it will be easier to locate your posts and you would hope the merit system will balance out. I have suggested a few alternatives but nobody really liked them.