Merit is good and also a bad one. Merit helps the forum for spamming and also for having a good quality posters but the negative effect of merit is farming and abusing those sMerit to their alt accounts. It is very unfair to us, we're just new to this forum and even I am having good post I didn't receive merit.
I certainly agree that merit helps the board for spamming. I see that you polluted a thread by spamming and embedding that massive infographic, presumably this was in the hope that you could scratch a bit of merit. The reality is that if you do it too often, you will be put on ignore to preserve the legibility of threads.