tl;dr explanation as long as there is no infographic:
You have Merits, those you cannot send.
You also have sMerits, those you can only send, they have no other purpose.
When someone gives Merit to you they lose sMerit of the amount transfered and you gain Merit as well as sMerit (which in case you can send again).
Example: Should I send 10 Merit to you for a post, my sMerit would decrease by 10.
Your Merit would increase by 10 and your sMerit would increase by 5.
Merits are exclusively earned, but the sMerit part you also get keeps the circulation flowing.
(Ignoring merit sources here, for the sake of making an easy example.)
If you want to be a merit source:
Collect TEN posts that have not received nearly enough merit for how good they are, and post quotes for them all in a new Meta thread.
Does that mean all merit sources are hand selected?
Is there a list of currently active merit sources? Sorry, I was lazy, should have read in full first.The forum ranking system is a bit complicated now... It'd be nice if someone made an infographic explaining activity and merit.
I'll
try this.