Merit farming in the
WO thread has gotten way out of hand.
Its been a problem for years now but really ramped up this year. Although I can't prove it, I strongly suspect we're now seeing merit farmers creating alt accounts which they use to send merits back to their main accounts, with the end goal being to enroll as many alts in signature campaigns as they can.
.
You are write. But the problem here is how can you prohibit the creation of alt account? Corruption is inevitable. It's like a virus to the system, you can cure some but all can't be cured. What you are talking about has been here for years. Many people commenting on your post, saying "it must stop" are the propeller or the master minder's of it. Some account you see as the original account of some person are even the second or third of it. Most alt account has been grown to legendary an you can never know.
The typical merit farmer post is a copy/pasted tweet from a large bitcoin-focused Twitter account, complete with picture and (often in smaller text) the word "source" with a link to the tweet. These accounts are literally just taking popular tweets and pasting them in WO for no other reason than to get merits. You'll see them on just about every single page of the thread this year.
.
If you identify these set of people what about the smart one's. The unsmart once will be victimized while the smart one's gets away freely. This thread will affect the innocent ones because the grases has grow with the crops and if care is not taken the crop will be weeded in replacement of the gras. If this continues the newly created account will be suspected to be an alt account. Even when reasonable post is made it will look as if it's coming from a legendary in disgace of a newbie.
This type of post is bad for a few reasons:
- It is a distraction that dilutes honest conversation between good faith participants.
- It is lazy, dishonest, and often wholly unnecessary.
- It lends to promotion of a culture of cheating.
The meriting of these posts is creating a positive feedback system where merit farmers are encouraged to continue this behavior... as a result the only skill they're actually developing is how to extract merits from senior WO posters.
The simple solution to the problem is to disable the meriting of WO posts. Much like how signatures were disabled in that thread, it will discourage spammers from flooding the thread.
All what you have said is true but is this the only way?