Thinking of the two "voter" criteria...
- You must have at least 10 people directly trusting you each with an earned merit of at least 10, not including merit you yourself sent. These "votes" are
limited.
- You must have at least 2 people directly trusting you with an earned merit of at least 250, not including merit you yourself sent. These "votes" are
limited.
Somebody PMed me pointing out an example of someone included in DT1 only because they were trusted by a permabanned member. I was aware that permabanned members were allowed to be voters, but I thought it'd be too rare to matter. But now I'm leaning toward excluding them.
Also, I've increasingly been feeling that something should be done about inactive voters. Currently, a user can be inactive for years, but still contribute toward those two criteria. The specific way I'm leaning toward addressing this is to require that voters must have received merit from at least 2 distinct users in the last 3 years.
I did a pretend reshuffle, and compared to the 136 users who were eligible for DT1 last time, with the above 2 changes, these users were no longer eligible: bavicrypto, be.open, Best_Change, comit, digicoinuser, ekiller, ezeminer, finaleshot2016, Gunthar, Harkorede, Heisenberg_Hunter, hybridsole, joniboini, Koal-84, Lachrymose, mandown, and witcher_sense. (Some of these users may have become ineligible for reasons other than the above two changes; I just compared the output today after the changes to the output on Feb 1.)
If instead it was "voters must have received merit from at least
3 distinct users in the last 3 years", then these users would also become ineligible: Baofeng, MinoRaiola, and Russlenat. I'm leaning toward 2, mainly just on the principle of preferring a larger list generally.
What do people think of these two changes?
I personally agree it is a good idea that members should be active to be included as part of your trust calculation, at least active in the sense of receiving merits like you mentioned, and I am not opposed to either the 2 merits or the 3 merits idea... but I would prefer if you would frame your timeline in terms of four years in order to try to stay with something in the ballpark of the bitcoin cycle, which might cause you to have to increase the merit requirement to 4 or some other number that might seem largely fair without being overly inclusive or exclusive.
While I'm here, here's a thought that's been floating around in my head for a while: A while ago I realized that if you are among the ~136 people eligible for DT1, then your probability of being in DT (DT1 or DT2) after the cross-DT1 exclusions are applied is the CDF of the hypergeometric distribution, with the shape of the function largely dependent on [the number of people eligible for DT1 trusting you minus those excluding you] (ie. your "net DT1 inclusions"). If your net DT1 inclusions is very positive, then you will almost always be in DT; if your net DT1 inclusions is very negative, then you will almost never be in DT; if it's within a few of zero, then it'll switch randomly back and forth. This got me thinking that maybe it'd be more elegant to determine either DT1 or perhaps even all of DT by just directly computing a probability distribution based on net-inclusions (perhaps with other inputs) for every user, and then shuffling according to these distributions every month. But it's just a vague idea in my mind at this point; I don't plan to do anything with this soon, and I might never pursue it.
Probably I am not refreshed enough about this whole dynamic, yet I have noticed that through the years, the eligibility list has not really changed very much, and surely if you make the above changes to exclude non-active (non merit receiving) members, then the eligibility list will shrink towards almost all eligible being included as you mentioned, so surely it seems that it would be better to have an eligibility list that was closer to 200 rather than 100.. or alternatively you could just set the system that no matter the number eligible, that ONLY half (or maybe 2/3..some percentage that makes sense) would be on DT1.. and maybe if the eligibility were to go up to 200 members, then it would then be at 50% so that you never go over 100 with the actual monthly selection, so then perhaps the number of DT1 would end up ranging between 50 and 100, but figuring out some way to get more members to be eligible if there might be some reason that 100 is a preferred target number for DT1. For sure, I don't claim to be deeply enmeshed with the idea, and so I am just throwing out some ideas that might not exactly make sense from your perspective of the current situation and if there might be needs to expand some of the members or not.. since maybe there is not a lot of variety in members that are DT1, even though maybe you might not consider it to be broken either since the forum has largely been operating with this somewhat rotating (but mostly the same members) 100 DT1 group for the past nearly 7 years..