Anyone should be able to recognize and/or appreciate a certain level of parody and fun, but I doubt that the parody and fun is quite as obvious as Bob is suggesting it to be - when there is a certain kind of tinge to his own inabilities to control his own emotions and sending a kind of spiteful message while at the same time saying.. "I am only joking; I am only joking." 

Surely trolls do that and it can be quite annoying even though sometimes even the trolls end up either making decently good points or the responses to the trolls end up contributing valuable substantive responses..


It's likely that I had nearly 10 posts responding to these kinds of questions of smerit sending in the WO thread, and the above response remains largely representative of my thoughts on the topic, for anyone who might be able to interpret what I am saying through the attempt at poking fun at the seeming nonsense positions in which some forum members seem to be overlly concerned about the merit sending and/or receiving practices in the WO thread.


Even you might realize, Poker Player, that I am not quite capable of ONLY writing a couple of paragraphs... even though surely this topic (including the related thread that you link) may well ONLY be worthy of a couple of paragraphs, at most.

Initially, when I saw this thread and the other one, I thought that maybe I should just let them play out for a while before chiming in or even sending any smerits regarding points that were being made in the thread(s) - especially, since several times I had already given my opinions regarding the topic, and so this particular "parody" thread likely made the topic more targeted towards me, and probably ended up saying what Nutildah was trying to say, but a bit more directly..  hahahahaha....  to really show how dumb both of the threads are.. even though they got quite a few responses (even some decent responses) and even quite a few votes (relatively speaking) in terms of actually showing that members are willing to entertain and support such dumb, ill-thought out and even spiteful ideas (even though they are framed as if they were "valid concerns" that deserve something less than a bat slappening).

There actually were some decently good posts in each of these two threads, especially when LoyceV attempted to put some numbers on the matter, and I recall that earlier on, I was pretty low on those charts showing the meriting of banned members, and it seems that recently my numbers had gone up.. and perhaps some of my practices did change in regards to sending more smerits to newbies and/or low ranking members.

I do recall some places/instances where I would send smerits to seemingly disingenuine posts who had brought up good points on whatever topic was the thread (whether WO thread and/or other threads).. for example, in the art thread, the pumpkin carving thread and the pizza thread, I sent smerits to almost anyone who made a submission that seemed to be their own original work (or the work of their family member), even if it might have been a pizza made with noodles and corn or some other ridiculous idea of what would be considered to be a pizza.

So yeah, it may be the case that I had increased some of my sending smerits to banned members through my practices, and even identifying AI submissions is not always easy to accomplish, even though after the fact it might seem apparent. I recall sending two or three smerits to a member who ended up being an AI, and I was starting to get my suspicions, but then once a member pointed out the AI angle, then it became more apparent.. and the same could end up being true for the identification of plagiarized content, and beyond maybe common-sensical practices, there is no requirement that a merit source needs to be able to identify plagiarized content when sometimes, it is might not be very obvious.

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Even though in the other thread, LoyceV pointed out a few of theymos's guidances in regards to smerit sending, including that he would like to see that there are attempts by merit sources to merit objectively better quality posts, yet many of us likely realize that there are a lot of subjective aspects involved in regards to putting smerit sending into practice, and rules about supposed objective quality of posts are not as high as members seem to want to assert them as being or should that the rules should be turning smerit senders into objective standard robots.. which really would not be very practical..

And at the same time, theymos has the ability to remove any merit source member or to reduce or to increase the quantity of their source merits at any time and for any reason or for no reason at all.

Surely, there is quite a bit of discretion in terms of whether to send any smerits or how much due diligence that any merit source member exercises prior to sending smerits, and many times, I had suggested that there might be some benefits to the forum to rotate merit sources and/or to retain more merit source members - yet many folks likely realize that if such an increase in merit source management were to be carried out, either theymos is going to have to do a lot more work or he is going to have to find a member who he believes would be a good fit in terms of carrying out some kind of merit czar type duties - which surely has its own risks and even potential for drama... but not necessarily something that would not end up working out, after members got used to some of the changes and theymos and merit czar were to work out their own merit czar performance expectations.

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Maybe this part of my response should go in the other thread, but with regards to the WO thread specifically, we have already known that since the beginning of the merit source system (in early 2018), the WO thread disproportionately spread the most smerits, so nutildah's assertion that the WO thread has gone downhill in the last year seems to NOT be supported by actual reality, even though it is quite likely that the word has gotten out that there are a bunch of softies (perhaps including but not limited to yours truly) in the WO thread who will send smerits to almost any crap bitcoin-related that is posted. 

By the way, prior to early 2018, I rarely ventured outside of the WO thread, but I have not really stopped reading many f the WO thread posts - even though sometimes I may or may not understand them prior to determining whether to send an Smerit.. which is similar to other threads in which I send smerits.  I do not claim to understand or even agree with everything that I send smerits to, so the extent to which I engage in any due diligence beyond searching my memory banks about the poster (which might not be good) may well vary depending on a variety of factors including how much time I feel that I have available or other physical things that might be going on in the real world or other things that I might be attempting to do at the time that I decide whether to send an smerit and whether to look further into the matter before hitting the send button.


There may be some truth in that.  I did feel that I needed to read this whole thread first, and then that I also needed to read that other thread too..., but I am not going to claim that I understood anything in this thread or in the other thread.