I am fairly new to Bitcoin Talk. I learned that the merit system used to be more "liberal" before, but was changed recently. Before, users would earn merit based on the number of posts they made. Later, the stipulation that they earn merit from other users was added. While I see the logic in doing this (to ensure higher quality posts), this gives an unfair advantage to people who were here before. These people earned merit almost automatically by contributing to this community, now, doing the same would not earn users merit automatically.

An alternative would be a system such as used by Reddit or Stackoverflow, any user can easily vote a story or post up or down, granting merit (or reputation) on those other platforms. By making a few select people the "custodians" of merit, this creates a biased, undemocratic, unlevel playing field that unfairly rewards older members and punishes new ones. If a user makes a post that benefits 1000 members of this community, but those 1000 members are mostly new members so are not able to give merit, their efforts go unrewarded. However, if an older member makes a post that is seen by 10 of his other older member friends, that member gets more merit for that. This is an unfair and biased system. I get the reasoning and idea behind it, but practically, it's not the best way to allocate merit (IMHO)... Especially on a platform that is known as one of the most important sites for decentralized technologies like Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency in general.