I find it highly annoying that this merit system is still around.
It is suppose to be stimulating people to make good quality posts or topics, but i doesnt seems to work this way.
I believe that there is no perfect system and the merit system is not perfect. Even though the system is working fine (at least for me), there are some loopholes in it and the users can abuse it anytime. As you can see, even the most crappiest post here have been merited and some by 50 merits.
I see alot of people selling there merit to whoever wants it, is this even legit? It means people with multiple accounts can dominate bitcointalk, earn the most bounty rewards( multiple with more accounts) and can give merrit out to themselves and can get alot of bounty stakes, while other who do there best arent even able to join because they cant reach member status!
There is a section called "Reputation" where you can report users who are abusing the merit system. Yes this happens to those users who has multiple accounts but if somebody can trace their merit history and found that he is abusing merit, maybe all of his/her accounts will deserve a negative trust.
Even more annoying is the fact that members and above( not all of you ) just post crappy posts all over the place, and keep spamming away with no consequences. Its just sick, like in the real world, the rich get richer, its insane do something about it.
This is the worst problem now, spamming. Its like a virus that has been spread thru the forum. People spamming useless shitty posts everywhere especially in the Announcement section.
For me, I think the merit is doing great although like I said its not perfect. In the next years, maybe the admins and mods will implement another features here that will help to lessen or remove the problems here in the forum.
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P.S. This thread has been invaded by newbies and Jr. Members. I saw that the last posts of this thread composes of mostly Newbies who are appreciating the merit system (or maybe not).