I seem to be the sole idiot who hasn't really noticed what OP's talking about.  He didn't give any examples, so maybe those excellent newbie posters do their thing in sections I have on ignore or something. 

If you can write good English and know just a little about bitcoin, you might be able to garner some merits, but I'd imagine that approach to account farming would be extremely tedious, given how niggardly people are being with their sMerits.  You'd have to be consistently writing posts made out of solid gold (like nullius, for example) to even have a chance of ranking up ONE account, much less a whole stable of them like farmers used to have. 

And yeah, merits can be exchanged between alts, but I think the community is doing a really good job of catching that, and DT members are tagging these untrustworthy, dishonest, merit traders.  Sunshine is the best disinfectant, my peeps.