So it's been a day or so now since merit was introduced and I've shared some of my thoughts and opinions on it across a number of threads, now I feel I'll compile them all in one place.

The math

By now you probably know that the only long term source of sMerit is from selected accounts. Theymos has said that in total there will be 8175 sMerit to be distributed each month. Before we actually look at how this sMerit may or may not be fairly distributed let's just break that down with some numbers.

Each account previously if fulfilling its potential growth would grow by 30 activity per 30 days. Given that, dividing 8175 by 30 we get 272.5. That means that 272.5 accounts with the new measure could grow at the rate they were previously able to grow. Now as of writing we have approximately 1.7m accounts in this forum, of course many will be inactive but even removing those it's a lot more than 272.5

An alternative way to look at this point is to consider the posts per day. If we take the average number of posts per month from January 2015 to December 2017 (therefore discounting for the fact the forum has got a lot busier in the last months than at the beginning of this time period which would only serve to worsen things) we get an average monthly number of posts of 451,274. Given that of those 451,274 posts there will be a total of 8175 merit given out we can calculate that per post we are looking at approximately 0.0018 merit being given per post, or alternatively 1 in 55 posts earning 1 merit. Compare that to previously where a user could assume that per 1 post they'd gain 1 activity up to the limit then it's a much slower rate of progression. These figures were calculated from the official forum stats if anyone wants to check my calculations.