Primary costumers are the whiners here in the forum who spams a lot complaining about why are they demoted when obviously you can read it because it was posted here. smh.
Simple tip: Dont be too desperate to rank up. It will come eventually.
Merit will only come eventually for users who are showing people that he is truly making an effort to change by improving his posts quality over a period of time, I believe it would be hard for some newbie users to get any merit if they still insists to make tons of low quality posts, my advice to them is to embrace the change and start putting in more time and efforts to increase the overall quality of their posts slowly.