If this about trend of Managers adding criteria about merits is true then you are right and then my theory is disapproved.
Thank you for providing solid argument.

There is already a manager who applied this rule, the campaign starts last week, just not too long after the merit system was introduced. I guess this is the future for the campaign in a near time, since merit indicates (hopefully) people who did a great posts, so it is natural that people with higher merit will get a better payment than other in the same rank who doesnt have merit.
This is the payment rate for my campaign


This is the link to the campaign if you want to look at it https://bt.irlbtc.com/view/2827626.0

This can be possible if he is not convinced with the quality of posts made by that member. That member can try on other signature campaigns.

I like this. Hopefully, I can get merit soon!

I´m sympathetic to this viewpoint. Many people don´t seem to bother with the merit system
at all, which artificially reduces the supply of merit. I read somewhere that roughly 600k merits
were initially distributed. As of now merits are not really circulating as freely as theymos envisioned
it. The situation is going to get worse, because only ~11k merits are generated by the merit sources each month.

If the system is not working properly in spite of the huge supply due to the initial starting
balance of each user, how is it ever going to work when new merits are only generated by merit sources?

I know the theory is that merits will trickle down, because each awarded merit generates 0.5 sMerit.
However, this is clearly not working as intended, because many users don´t award merits at all.

Just take a look at a recent 1 hour period:
A few random observations:
-only 16 merits were awarded in one hour
-for nearly 25 minutes of this hour not a single merit was awarded
-maybe 3/16 merits were awarded to a quality post (I concede that this is subjective and only my opinion) ... but if you take
a look at the posts that were awarded with merits most are pretty terrible

There are several other 1 hour periods where exactly the same problems
occurred (low total amount of merits awarded, merits for questionable posts) and I didn´t really
had to invest any time into cherry picking.

I like the general intention behind the merit system, but it clearly is not working very well.
I also disagree with the viewpoint that "you have to give it some time" or "it´s early days" or
similar adages, because as I argued above it should work great at the start due to the merit starting
balances of most Member-Legendary users.

Besides, I completely understand why many people don´t want to bother with the merit
system at all. Even if giving out a merit only takes a few seconds if you are fast it still
interrupts your reading experience.

I would compare merits to a shitcoin with a 600k coin supply, where probably half
of the supply belongs to inactive users and will never be spent while many of the remaining
HODLers don´t want to bother with it, because it is worth nothing and isn´t traded
at any exchange. Consequently, we are left with a few enthusiasts, who use the shitcoin
for its intended purpose and a few people, who just use it to troll or to have fun (e.g. stuff
like awarding merits to random shitposts or old classics like the Satoshi posts).

Disclaimer: I´m not even particularly affected by the merit system personally, because even though
I would be a Sr. Member based on activity, I have already "earned" 91 merits since the introduction
of the system and will likely rank up soon anyway.

I just don´t think that the sytem is working as intended and that theymos has to take
some measures to increase the circulation of merits.

Possible solutions could be:
-increase the amount of merit sources (I´m not talking about 2-3 new sources, I would increase them by 100 % or more)
-lower the merit requirements for ranking up to take into account the fact that they are not circulating as intended
-remove the merit system completely and replace it with another solution
-impose a minimum merit requirement to prevent people from only awarding a single merit to a post
(theymos argued in one of his recent posts that he initially envisioned that people would award 5-10 merits to a good
post and 1 merit to every post that is remotely readable)
...

[/list]

600k  merits were not announced in the official thread and it can  be a rumor. That figure seems to be quite high for me.

2. Collect TEN posts written in the last couple of months by other people that have not received nearly enough merit for how good they are, and post quotes for them all in a new Meta thread. The point of this is to demonstrate your ability to give out merit usefully.


In other words we are supposed to become cheerleaders for other people.
This new merit system is nothing more than a popularity contest. You think people will give out merits because the post is good? Think again. People will hand out merits to their friends and people they know. Even merit pump groups will appear.
Also there are lots of people with multiple accounts, all they'll do is keep giving merits from one acount to their other accounts and keep racking it in, while others will stay stuck in same rank no matter the quality of their posts.

You want quality posts only? That's easy. Get enough moderators working on the site that will keep on deleting one line posts and shitty posts and people will fall in line in no time.
With this merit system this place is going to turn into highschool in no time. Allready lots of topics have opened that are selling merits. Ofcourse they opened the topics with completely new accounts so their high rank accounts can hand out the sold merits behind the curtains.

Also I have gone through the entire 112 pages of this topic and the quality posts I saw can only fill like 5-10 pages max, so the highschool antics are still in place. There are even tons of single line spam posts in this topic alone and some might even have been merited.

And not anymore seeing the trust immediately under a user while reading in a topic doesn't help things either, now one has to click upon that user to see it.

Edit: Might want to make it so that one can only give a certain max merits per month to the exact same user no matter how many quality posts made. This will force that user to spread around their merits instead of keep handing them out to their 'select' few.

It's too early to get a clear picture, but my thoughts so far:

First, most people complaining about merit are constantly posting garbage, and should not rank-up. The forum is not a welfare system; you don't run through a few hoops and then get paid for doing something that nobody actually wants. I like that good forum members can make money, especially when said forum members are in poorer countries and this is a major opportunity for them. I very much do not want to destroy the sig-ad/airdrop/bounty "industry". But I am not going to tolerate people posting garbage upon garbage. If the merit system completely fails and I can't think of anything else to replace it, then my next step will probably be to completely remove all ways for forum users to make money from posting (eg. removing signatures entirely).

Maybe there are ways for people who were making money by posting garbage on the forum to make money on other sites with easy bounties, etc. (For example, I don't know if they're actually any good, but https://bountyhive.io is currently advertising on the forum.) But people should use the forum to talk about these money-making ideas, not as a way of making money itself. Once you spend a lot of time here, you may be able to make some money here (which is great!), but you should consider this a far-off hope, not your primary objective.

BTW, if anyone has any ideas for simple things that these ex-nonsense-posters could usefully do to make money, I think that this'd be a good project right now. There are apparently quite a few people who were making money on the forum and could use guidance. Even though their past activities were not good for this forum, I doubt that they are useless in general.

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Merit awards may be too spotty/uneven currently, though it's still too early to say. In addition to continuously adding more sources, if things could still use improvement in this regard in a couple of months, I may do something like decay old sMerit and unused source merit and randomly redistribute the decayed merit. How the random distribution would work would magnify past merit -- so perhaps you would get an increased chance of winning extra merit for every post you've made which has at least 1 merit, but certainly you would not get any extra merit if none of your posts was ever merited.

Merit sales, transfers to aliases, back-and-forth trading, etc. are not much of an issue. All illegitimate merit will decay, and will account for a tiny and very expensive fraction of the total merit economy. It's basically a rounding error; fight it where convenient, but waste no sleep over it.

I think that actmyname has been too hasty with some of his negatives, but I haven't had time to look carefully enough into it to justify making forceful changes. I did exclude actmyname from my trust list, so another DT1 could remove him from the default trust network by doing the same.

No system is perfect, I think you have give time to the staff to review and make adjustments where necessary. It does look like they're open to suggestions and making changes for the better.