The merit system was introduced to try to reduce spam. It has been a great help, but it has introduced a whole new begging structure, with people vying with each other to find the best way to beg without appearing to do so.
Word up. And OP, I'm totally with you. When I started lurking here around 2014 or so, right around the time of the full Mt. Gox meltdown, the first thing I noticed was all the nonsense posts--exactly what you pointed out. To me, there seemed to be no reason that anyone of sound mind would waste time posting that sort of thing.
....And then I discovered the reason. And it's the reason why probably 85% of users are registered here: Signature campaigns. They're actually getting paid to post garbage.
It's such a fantastic, novel concept, too. I'm in a campaign myself and I see the appeal it has, the ability to earn bitcoin by just writing some posts. Unfortunately most campaigns only pay for posts in the main board, which is English. A lot of users who've come here just for the sig campaign paycheck can't write very well, and they have certain phrases they know and use over and over and over, regardless of whether it's appropriate for the context of a given thread.
Then you have a multitude of alt accounts on top of that, and you've got users enrolling >1 account in sig campaigns and thereby cheating them. And if you use just a little bit of imagination, you'll be able to grasp how chaotic it can become here.
My suggestion: Avoid the Economics and Bitcoin Discussion sections, because that's where the thread titles are these vague questions that shitposters have pre-written answers to, and they just do a little spin trick and it becomes a bullshit reassembly factory, and the finished product is nothing you'd want to read. Check out Serious Discussion, Meta, and some of the others and you'll get a feel for which sections haven't been infiltrated by the goon squad.