So what's the difference between the merit badge and User of the Year? I'm so out of the loop. I have no idea how this site is run anymore.
There is barely any. The merit badge is just a User of the Year handed every 4 months to multiple people.
The problem with that notion, which you will notice if you take a look at the previous nominations, is that the same people keep getting selected. No surprise there, given there's not going to be a lot of new different people between those time periods.
◘ What if we limit the number of people or disallow the same person to be nominated a number of consecutive times? The latter case already has a name: Pyritie's 2008/9 Excellence Awards — they were nice until the point (which was the 2nd or 3rd round of nominations) we realized that, while the Hive is a large community, it is not large enough to protrude a revolutionary selection of new people every short burst.
Then, until the merit badge, we could divide awards into two large groups: Arena awards and User of the Year. The more awards you keep adding that fall into this... now “community/social-based” category will just diminish the credit of the other awards already in that group—such as User of the Year—, in my perspective. That may be because neither aesthetically (vB's fault?) nor conceptually is there a lot of — if any — difference.
Anyhow, I believe I warned about all of this when that award was first proposed.
