the merit system shouldn't discourage users to share their view on things either. You make thing someone may not agree with your post? Do not worry it's not like down votes are a thing in this forum yet. As long as you are posting up to date relevant information and most importantly original content then you should expect to pickup merit points along the way. You shouldn't expect to gain several hundred merit points in a small time frame unless you have contributed greatly.
The merit system it working as a whole although it has caused a few little problems here and there like for instance many people are copy and pasting older topics or older replies and trying to pass them off as their own. This is quickly being regonised and dealt with either by defaulttrust or the moderators.
maybe what we should consider is a system where people who do not have merit can flag a post up for review by a merit source. I think this way merit sources wouldn't have to worry about finding posts actively and can rely on the rest of the community to find them and their job would only be to distribute them fairly.
this is a hacked account - this has been my account for 3 years but was hacked in Dec and now this hacker is using it
can you prove it? do you have a staked address you can sign a message from?
Wait, I think we have something here. I saw the exact same thing posted by another user in Decent Signature Campaign thread,
here.
Here is that text:
Btctalk name: h0lybyte
Rank: Hero member
Current post count: 1281
BTC Address: 3QahtLHGGMnyos3o4GfXW9fTiTCvh4WpSi
Wear appropriate signature: yes
this is a hacked account - this has been my account for 4 years but was hacked in Oct and now this hacker is using it
And, both users have the same (with just name changes) Personal Text. Both accounts are probably being used by the same user, though I don't understand the reason behind these posts of claiming the accounts were his. If you check their post history, about 40% of their posts are on the same subject, and almost in the same wording.

P.S: Sorry for being off-topic.