It's really very simple and what I've been saying since almost day 1, is that they messed up. The concept is just fine but the implementation failed. It's like they created BTC, set it to 18 decimals just in case and now boom, a few years later we are actually talking in SATs. If I'm not being clear, they brought 5 apples to a picnic of 10,000 people. Yes, bring food to a picnic, good idea. But 5? Who thought that was a good idea? I sure hope that person is not involved in any ICOs.

Solutions:

1) Drop the rank up requirements to something more reasonable, like 2 Merit points.
2) Distribute sMerit, at least sometimes randomly (it's called liquidity people)
3) Distribute Merit to some active (not just old) accounts (who says tenure is the only way to find people who should be have enough Merit points to give away?)

I help organizations design interventions like this Merit system and the designers here failed and  the result is that this system is are chocking off an institution. I literally run into almost NO ONE who uses BitcoinTalk anymore unless I find those people on here directly. Wow. That's sad. Don't judge me based on this account. I lost access to my 2013 account one because I hid from the market in 2014 and for some reason that means I'm not allowed to use that account anymore (another great decision fellas), but for the record, I've been in crypto since 2013 and this place is the best archive of what is now the history of crypto. This Merit system is turning Bitcointalk from a university into a library. This should be a place of knowledge exchange, not the National Archives. But my voice doesn't count because I only have like 15 Merit and some artificially low "rank."

See my other posts on this topic...you guys have walled in the castle. Why not just create a super fancy private section for your buddies instead of killing this place for the public?