Interesting thread. Just found out about it!

Just out of curiosity: are there sub forums that usually there’s more merit exchange? I’m more often on te announcements for altcoins and usually only OPs get merit there.

Maybe I should explore more the other places of bitcointalk. Including local language communities. I barely gonto the portuguese and spanish sections.

You are right indeed.
All language local forums are open afaik

There was a whole thread about that topic. Local subforums are, indeed, the sub-sections where most merit points are awarded. However, I think you'll only get some there if you speak the language well (or if you engage in illegal actions like merit trading).

Altcoin subforums are the second section regarding merit points, but the merit distribution there is very concentrated on what you already found out - original postings in ICO ANNs (which may be "unofficial" parts of bounty campaigns and thus, in reality, "illegal").

The reason that other altcoin posts are not likely to be awarded is simple: There is much spam there. I tried for some weeks to merit posters in the Altcoin Discussion forum that brought up some good contents, but it was so difficult to find good posts that I got bored and gave up. I think merit sources are also not likely to search the few pearls in the amount of trash there.

As @d5000 mentioned above, Local Boards on aggregate constitute the most merited area, but we should consider that we’re aggregating 21 Local Boards here... That’s a large mass we’re aggregating (half of the subsections on all Bitcointalk). There are some local boards which from the overall perspective may seem really merited (Russian, Turkish and Indonesian are amongst the most), but this should be seen as relative to the number of posts on these boards, since the number of total merits on these boards does not reflect this and may be misleading.

Take a look at a post I created not too long ago: Bitcointalk – Posts per Day - evolution during past six months. Specifically checkout a section called "4. Merits per post Ratio". There you will see a column called "Merit/post" which tell us just that. The ratio of each individual local boards is not that great, and certainly does not standout.

I can speak for the Spanish Local board. I have not seen any merit exchange or abuse there. What there is there a smallish pool of good posters, way above the average in terms of quality. These standout of the crowd and substantially contribute to the local forum richness. They are therefore amongst the most merited there due to being good at posting, and nothing else that I’m aware of. Nevertheless, merit there is distributed at a very slow pace, being 79,89% of TXs of a single sMerit, and 88,28% of the posts merited by a single person.

In fact, I published yesterday a list of the members that have needed merit to rank-up there: Only 22 people have ranked-up so far needing merit in the process. Out of those, 5 people have received all their merit on the Spanish local board, whilst the remaining 17 have had to emigrate in a sense to get a large part of their merits on the regular English boards … not really that great.

By now, you should start working on it.

Looking at your post history, I can tell that you are not that much aware of how to earn merits. You have two redundant post on the top!

I hope you do not mind to remove one of it. May be this: https://bt.irlbtc.com/view/5002503.msg45138304#msg45138304

Yes, if the number of merits continues to fall even if we have more and more merit sources and at this rate it will be very difficult for many people to get a +1 on their rank, however the drop in spam is relative for me and follows google trends, as soon as, and if ever Bitcoin will return on 15k + spam will increase new for the growing hype and the new number of new subscribers





I bet it is the same on this forum activity.

There are no stats yet about the forum history for this year https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=stats but is safe to assume that those number in there are following BTC price indeed

Well i hope we can get more merit sources in the future so the distribution of merits are faster and wider. I guess there must be an initiation to encourage people to apply to be merit sources. It would be great to if it can be started on local board first i guess.

Merit offering is relative to the total market cap of the cryptocoins!
I guess it makes sense since a lot of people came here to make easy money last year and while the prices are falling and their money have gone to smart people, they're starting to leave the forums.

Most of them were spammers and didn't affect the merit system anyway, but still a lot of free sMerits were given to these people when the system first went into effect. Some other newbies had to be good fellas too, worthy of merit! (statistically speaking)