It's nice to see a Newbie with more Merit than Activity! Welcome to Bitcointalk,
glad you joined*!
But for newbies like myself, getting to the next rank is exponentially higher because you really have to grind. Grinding isn't bad... but imo it's really unfair. Just a mini-rant.
The Merit system is meant to stop spammers from ranking up. You're doing just fine, and clearly you're not part of the many users that create random useless posts.
You may want to read
Merit is the best thing that happened to new users too. Thanks to the Merit system, you're now not just one out of thousands of Newbies who register each day, you're now one of the few Newbies who's posts can easily be recognized to be worth reading.
*alia turned out to be
a known scammer