Quote from: tranthidung on Today at 12:41:36 PM

Quote from: Rikafip on Today at 05:14:13 AM

Congrats to you, all the other merit sources who got their monthly allocation increased, and those 14 new merit sources

Changes are from 97 to 111 merit sources and 14 new merit sources is the assumption, from raw statistics we observe.

It can be exactly 14 new sources or more than 14 if one or a few old merit sources were removed and replaced by new ones.

I am going to make a humble estimation that there were probably more than 14 new merit sources - perhaps even double that number. So perhaps around 28 new merit sources.. perhaps? Perhaps?

Fun to speculate sometimes - unless anyone can show a statement from theymos or some kinds of facts that undermine my speculative inferences. Go on. I challenge you (not referring to you specifically tranthidung, or any other specific member) to show some evidence.

I am going to speculate that theymos removed any prior merit source who was not spending more than a certain quantity of their source merits per month (let's say less than 10 smerits per month or maybe less than 10% of their source merits on a regular basis.. whichever is causing theymos to conclude that the merit source is not sufficiently active in distributing smerits).

I understand that many of us would like to conclude that theymos would have either removed merit sources who were abusing their ways of spending their smerit, or alternatively he could reduce their number of smerits per month or just keep it the same depending on what kinds of meaningful and reliable inferences that he could reach from looking at their smerit sending practices and any reports of abuse that he may have received over the years in respect to certain merit sources.

Probably not always easy for him to conclude exactly whether some smerits might have been sent for either bad motives or just derelict of duties type reasons - even though a lot of discretion is left with merit sources regarding how to send smerits, how many to send and what might trigger sending versus not sending and how much of a duty any merit source might have to expand his/her going outside of his/her usual circles (threads)..

Even though I have not seen any place that theymos has recently described his process, I would imagine from some of his previous disclosures in that direction, that he had at least taken the opportunity to perform at least some cursory overview of the past practices of each of the existing merit sources and any of the members that he had considered to add to smerit source status. Of course, the conclusions that he reached may have come out different from the conclusions that others had made, and sure after a few months of putting these new smerit allocations into practice, we may be able to see some kinds of patterns above and beyond the admissions of forum members regarding which members have been added as merit sources and which ones had been removed - and some of that data will be assisted by some of the group sourcing kind of work and analysis of some of our fellow data crunching forum members to help some of us more technologically-challenged (perhaps dumber? including yours truly) ones to figure out some of the merit source changes from yesterday that have been made to the merit source members.

Another thing, since I have not seen any post in which theymos had announced and/or described the specifics of the changes to the smerit source matter, would be that theymos could perhaps have some follow up tweaks that he might want to make to the smerit source matter in the next month or two.. but you never know and we may well end up with whatever fairly significant changes that were made yesterday to get us by for the next year or two.. remember the significant changes to merit sources had gone around 20 months between changes from this one yesterday on July 7 since the most recent major and significant one that had taken place in around mid-November 2019. I cannot really disagree with any conclusion regarding "if it ain't broke, don't fix it," even if some members may have tweaked in some different ways to attempt to address issues that they perceive to be in need of fixing.. but they have evidence that may well be different from the evidence that theymos looks at (which I would speculate that member reports or even just being able to see which member sources are spending their smerits and also how many smerits they are spending on a monthly basis might be more accessible to theymos - even though some of us could look at some of that data too if we are able to perform some calculations or just look at the data produced by some of our data crunching forum members).