If you then see that they are a lot of free merit / scam threads this really dumps your motivation in creating serious content in this forum - cause its simply unfair.
Now consider there is a newbie who affords lot of time in creating some nice content in order to rank up, not merited at all. What do you think the motivation of this guy is going? Do you think he is gonna try this again?
I personally think that merits should be viewed as a convenient
byproduct of constructive activity on BCT instead of the main focus. That said, the implementation of a de-merit system would actually be pretty neat. It would reduce the verbal junk throughout BCT even further.