I understand that Meta is flooded with Merit postings, but I believe I have found the one simple solution to solve everyones complaints: Merit Source Quotas.
If a merit source ultimately has to reach a quota, similar to police officers issuing tickets, the merit system will be a raging success. More merits will be passed around and post quality will increase just as it would without the quotas in place.
Why? You ask...
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 leads to more merit being passed around, and users ultimately being awarded for posting the best posts - not just the posts that meet highly specific "quality" requirements.
There is no need for demerits and no need to adjust merit amount to level up.
Yep, this post sounds as good as the "
Useless Ethereum Token (UET) " .
a) It addresses a need that does not exist, that is ranking up members. Ranking up a certain number of members is not an objective of the forum per-se AFAIK.
b) Addresses it in a counter productive manner: By forcing sources to merit even if there is nothing to merit. That is, if everything is shit, they would have to find the ones that are less of a shit, yet still being shit.
c) Measures "success" wrongly: The objective of the system is NOT to let merit flow, but to increase the quality of the posts. Merit flowing is desirable, not an absolute need.
d) The only end of the post is to address a personal "need" of ranking up, not to improve the community.
e) It is biased mentioning "everyone's" complaints. People who are here to share their concerns and learn would have no reason to complain.
If you want to shitpost or go bounty-only you are free to do so (I do bounty hunt myself), just don't expect to be rewarded for it and don't try to force sources into it.