In my opinion it's better this way. It improves the quality of discussion on the forum and
weeds away the spammers and shit posters.
Most of the concern around merit is I guess raised by bounty hunters who may be losing out on signature bounties.
I myself used to do the same. Made my share of mistakes and realized after a long time that the need and purpose of this forum is
bigger than each one of us. In the future, when crypto becomes main stream, this forum will be known as the place where it all started.
Merit prevents shitposters from ranking up. It does not control the spam. Spam and shitposting is controlled by our mods who have to clean up the diarrhoea of the bounty spammers. What is ironic is that some people come to this forum to make some cash through these bounties and feed their lowlife families - but if you ban them form the forum for shitposting then they start complaining and call it "racism"
Modifying my comment. Yes. In fact, after the introduction of merit system, the number of alt accounts has increased exponentially, which in
turn has increased the spam. In almost every bounty you find people entering with 10s of accounts and its very sad when they brag about the
number of accounts they are maintaining.