Merit sales, transfers to aliases, back-and-forth trading, etc. are not much of an issue. All illegitimate merit will decay, and will account for a tiny and very expensive fraction of the total merit economy. It's basically a rounding error; fight it where convenient, but waste no sleep over it.
That is what theymos said on merit trading.
DT Members- they are not allowed to red tag those who are trading and exchanging their merit as what The Pharmacist said.
I would gladly tag merit abusers, but as I've said before it appears Theymos doesn't want that, and I have to respect his stance. Also, these cases of abuse are much less clear to me than account sales or even campaign cheating. There definitely can be users who really like what one particular person has to say, and I might tag such a person unnecessarily. I don't feel like dealing with the backlash of that, nor do I really want to neg someone and be totally wrong.
This all will take care of itself eventually; I have some faith that this'll be true. We're only in month 2 of the merit system, so it's still young. It wasn't designed to stamp out shitposters immediately--it's a gradual, long-term thing I think. We'll see in a year or two.
I think you misinterpreted what I wrote, which shouldn't be construed as giving people the freedom to openly post offers to trade merit like OP just did. I tagged him accordingly.
Who I'm not tagging are people I come across who have
seemingly traded merit, where there's a judgement call to be made as to whether that's what's going on or not. OP's is a very clear case. He wrote an offer to trade merit with other users, and that's a violation of the rules of the system, or at least the spirit. Not a potential violation: an actual violation.
This Merit method is not working like it should in removing spam.
But it's working great as far as keeping the low-ranked shitposters from ranking up. Yeah, maybe some of them have slipped through the cracks, but I'm seeing plenty of them stuck at Jr. Member when they normally would have ranked up already. It's certainly succeeding in that respect. The fact that these shitposters are too stupid to realize they're not going to rank up can't be blamed on the merit system. Eventually they'll learn.