This would stop all account farming and spamming since the rank would no longer be that relevant.
It would indeed be a lot less, but i could still see accounts being farmed to scam/bump ICO threads etcetera.
This would even benefit the forum since normal ads would be more lucrative and could be sold for more I guess.
Where do you think all the traffic that bitcointalk is getting is coming from? Most of it is from Signature spammers and account farmers.
If Theymos were to do this he would essentially be killing his own forum. ( This might be over exaggerated a bit, but you get what i mean. No signatures = Less spammers/activity = less traffic = would probably correlate in less advertisers aswell.)
The last time this forum received a donation from someone i believe was over a year ago? Which basically means the forum is completely dependant on their reserves/ad revenue. (albeit that the reserves are quite large.)
Ofcourse i am biased on this issue, ( since i'm wearing a signature aswell... )
This merit thing will not prevent shitposter from ranking up. If a person is a good quality poster but no one wants to give him/her merit theres nothing he/she can do with that. Unlike those one liner posters and shitposters they will still get merit if the member wants to give him merit. I saw a lot of shit post and one lined post that recieved merits.
That sounds delusional, do you have some examples?