Therefore I'll repeat what I said in the OP and in another post inside this topic:
Yet again I have to disagree with you my fellow cinephile & spambuster, and repeat what I said before, that just because it was easy for you to reach Legendary merit requirement way ahead of the curve doesn't mean that it should be made harder in general. You are not an average bitcointalk user, not by time spent here and your knowledge, you even have experience in running news website, and when theymos decided on those numbers, he probably had an average users in mind, and not experienced writers, crypto experts and generally creme de la creme of the forum. Given the above mentioned details, I still believe that the rank-up should be a bit more difficult.
By even doubling current merit requirements it wouldn't change anything for you while it would discourage those that are not on the same level. Based on all available metrics new users are rare, forums are not as popular as they were 10-15 years ago so there is no reason to make additional obstacles when main purpose of merit system is to prevent spammers ever reaching higher ranks and not make some kind of "forum elite".
Before introducing something like that, you have to ask yourself how exactly would that improve quality of the forum as I honestly don't see how would that happen. As I said before, new users are rare, especially good enough, just look at this interesting fact shared by @suchmoon the other day
A few notes on the new data:
- Banned and Active numbers are lower and higher respectively for the more recent months for obvious reasons (I even removed September from the Active chart because it looked too weird). However it's quite interesting that Active number drops off very quickly. After a few months 99%+ users no longer post, not regularly anyway.
- More registrations don't result in more long-term activity. Look at the Dec 2017 - Jan 2018 boom.
- 80% of users never making a single post is just mind-boggling. I'll triple-check this to see if I didn't screw something up but so far it seems like that's an accurate number. Must be some bot farming going on.
99% of the new users give up after few months. I know that increased merit&activity requirement shouldn't discourage quality members and those that are genuinely interested in crypto, but it might some of those that are new to all this and forums in general. Because of them, and all the others that struggle even now, I don't think that increased requirements is a good idea.
Or look at these numbers from @DdmrDdmr Merit Dashboard, rank of the people who created account between 1.1.2019-31.12.2019. Numbers are not the best, imho, and show that it's not so easy for new users to rank up.
https://public.tableau.com/shared/B8ZB5M7FT?:display_count=y&:origin=viz_share_link
Last but not the least, congrats on reaching 1000 merit. Cheers!