I think this restriction does not solve the problem of shitposting, 1 Merit not enough.
People will just buy it from the high-rank sellers for their army of junior member. I personally saw today a guy bought 60 merits for his farm in the telegram chat.
If we want to stop an army of Junior member bots, we need to add more restriction.
As I see the main problem is bounty campaign with encouraging people to make more post or bump ANN tread.
There a few solutions which I see:
1) Don't take Jr. Member in signature bounty only member+.
2) Too many messages with social reports and "joined"? Encourage all bounty managers to use Google forms for weekly reports.
To implement this we need the strict rule for bounty manager to not encourage shitposting.
Here I totally agree with you.
I am a Bountyhunter and 95% of my posts are reports and confirmation posts. I noticed whole armies of Jr. Member accounts scamming the bounties that I participate in. A lot of them have been flagged already by high ranking members on the forum for multi-accounting bounties, but they are still accepted and receive stakes in most bounty campaigns (apart from signature).
Make the possibility to wear a signature from member+ or even full member+. Most (if not all) of the spamming on the forum is a result of greedy multi-accounters.