It's not inherently bad for someone to merit announcement threads, since you might legitimately view them as particularly interesting and noteworthy. But some of those do look like a conflict of interest...

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The Japanese section is in a very poor state, so I ended up selecting merit sources in that section who were all less than ideal according to my usual metrics, due to a lack of better alternatives. My idea was that if the quality of the Japanese section is currently 0 out of 10, and these merit sources are generally ~4 out of 10, then at least some increase in quality may be achieved. I just looked through the merit histories, and I did see a few good posts there getting merit, at least.

I'm starting to regret creating the Japanese section at all, since there are many posts there, but incredibly few that actually deserve merit. (It's especially frustrating for me because I can kinda-sorta speak Japanese, but not fluently enough that I could actually be an effective moderator or merit source there.)