You may find that some of the top 100 posters are merit source and they post there. As long as the post is constructive and of good quality on certain topic, then someone may give you merit. Even in the trash, there are usually some hidden gems there (although rare).
The problem is not like merit sources are ready to read visit altcoin board and read posts in this board for finding hidden gems then meriting those gems. There are threads to submit quality posts to merit sources for review and if they see quality, they will do merit distribution.The issue is merits are used to merit shit posts around the forum like no issue at all, and it is going far against why merit system was launched in January 2018. Monthly sourced merit is limited and if more sourced merit is used for shit posts, more quality posts will not be merited. When we allow it to happen at big scale, merit will concentrate to shit posts and we will have more shit posters with more beautiful merit stats than good posters. I of course don't say about best posters (like top 100, top 200 or top 500) in the forum, but normal quality posters will receive less merit while shit posters will receive more.
I'm hoping that this system will increase post quality by:
- Forcing people to post high-quality stuff in order to rank up. If you just post garbage, you will never get even 1 merit point, and you will therefore never be able to put links in your signature, etc.
- Highlighting good posts with the "Merited by" line.
While we will not be directly moderating this, I encourage people to give merit to posts that are objectively high-quality, not just posts that you agree with.
Now shitpost can receive not only 1 merit, but 5, 10 or more.- Forcing people to post high-quality stuff in order to rank up. If you just post garbage, you will never get even 1 merit point, and you will therefore never be able to put links in your signature, etc.
- Highlighting good posts with the "Merited by" line.
While we will not be directly moderating this, I encourage people to give merit to posts that are objectively high-quality, not just posts that you agree with.
As consequence of that abuse, there is proposal of demerit sources.
LoyceV's deMerit source application.
One of merit sources in altcoin board is tk808 was banned months ago.
It seems to me that generally merits tend to gravitate towards better quality posts rather than shitposts, and sure there are some low quality posts that receive merits, and sure there could be some more oversight of the ways that merits are being spent, yet it seems that theymos is not getting too much into micromanaging the way source merits are spent . .but yeah, sure it is difficult to know exactly what tools he might be employing behind the scenes, and surely he could have gotten help in reviewing how smerits are spent, as had been suggested previously, something like a merit czar.. to the extent that could be helpful if he were to want to review merits a bit more closely and even to potentially double the quantity of merit source members.