If you are on this forum and only find spam posts, then there are far deeper issues at play. Quotas would not make sense from a time perspective, just an amount perspective.
That isn't even close to what I said, but thanks for trying to straw-man my perfectly reasonable refutation of your bad idea. I did not say there is only spam to be found, but you were trying to argue that :
In a given set of 10 posts, there will inevitably be the best post. A merit source will then in effect, be forced to choose the best post out of several posts, instead of arbitrarily picking posts that meet their personal requirements.
This is flawed, because the best post out of the 10 could still be undeserving of a merit. Merit and trust must both be arbitrary and not a sanctioned system, otherwise there will be even more abuse than there already is. You can not force a user to think your post deserves merit, just like you cannot force them to trust you.
Quotas would not make sense from
any perspective. If you must merit 1 post out of every X posts read then you will be forced to merit posts you don't believe deserve it. This ruins the entire merit system and encourages people to spam, in the hopes that they will, more likely, be the "best"-shitty post out of 10.