Is it just me or has handing out Merit become a lot less common place now? I rarely see anybody handing it out now, certainly a lot less than a couple of months ago.
I've only been keeping track of the number of transactions per week for 5 weeks, but it seems to be stabilizing:
1889 transactions added since my previous update).
2016 Merit transactions added since my previous update).
2055 Merit transactions added since my previous update).
1948 Merit transactions added since my previous update).
2152 Merit transactions added since my previous update).
Do we, as a community, need to do more to reward high quality posts, should we be more actively looking to hand out Merit?
I don't think you should only Merit high quality posts: I think "normal" good posts deserve Merit too. Merit was introduced to stop spammers from ranking up, but people with "normal" good posts shouldn't be should also be able to rank up.
Of course, high quality posts should receive more Merit, but that happens already and doesn't need adjusting. Ideally, I think good posts should receive at least 1 Merit, and high quality posts a lot more.
Its been a while now though & lots of posters may simply have run out.
It would be interesting to see if this is true. If theymos can make a data dump of the initial sMerit distribution, it's easy to see who has sMerit left.
It would also be interesting to know how many users received the sMerit airdrop. Until yesterday, only 15159 users gave one or more away. I think many users haven't even touched ther sMerit supply.
As of yesterday, 180742 Merit was rewarded since introduction. Theymos said that around 600k sMerit was distributed.
Is it okay to promote my latest
addition to my Merit history overview here? This is OP's Sent Merit (5 days per column):

And this is OP's Received Merit:

I can only conclude it looks quite stable!