I would be in favour of a system in which some merit is generated to give for all users. That is, a newby may get 1 merit every month to give away, a junior 2 merit, etc...
Free sMerits would encourage account farming on a massive scale.
Ok, but members like me, that are not here for the signature bonuses, but don't make state of the art articles, will be discriminated. I'm not extraordinary, and i don't want to be stuck waiting for someone to merit my posts. I want to help the community and learn from it at the same time, but from now on, will the community spend time thanking me for doing it?
If you're not here for the signatures - why do you care about ranks? How exactly are you discriminated?
To post faster, to get access to some campaigns, like bounties or airdrops. Don't take me wrong, i still like money, just don't see this forum as a way of getting rich by posting x posts per week to get some bitcoin.
I remember being a noob here and had to wait to reply almost 5 minutes. NO access to campaigns, good airdrops, even signatures. Not even quoted until i've reached higher rank. People tend to look at what you write, you can write faster and you evolve like that, not by likes. Imagine that you can only post in Facebook from 5 to 5 minutes until you have 10 likes... and your friends have limited supply of those. Not logical imo.
But let's see where it goes.
I don't know much about how those rank-based airdrops work, but if they want more participants then I guess they could always relax the requirements.
Facebook isn't a good example of quality content. Literally the birthplace of fake news.