I joined the forum on the December 14th (2017) and so far my logged time is: 59 days, 7 hours and 38 minutes. Not sure about others but I believe this time log should be enough for me to claim that I spend good amount of time from my days on the forum.
I fail to see why a long "uptime" should deem you "worthy" of becoming a merit source.
"Uptime" can be gained by installing an auto-refresh in the browser. This doesn't mean anything indeed.
Again, a merit-source should be somewhat trustworthy.
I can easily imagine a situation where a rogue merit source could undermine the whole recent changes to the ranking system, where 1 merit is all that stands between us and the Spambiecalypse.
Although I don't disagree, there's this:
BTW, if any merit source goes rogue and sells a ton of merit, then I will probably go through the transaction graph and undo all of the transactions touched by that sold source-merit. Merit ain't no immutable cryptocurrency!
That makes buying Merit from a Merit source more risky than buying from anyone else.
I love the word "Spambiecalypse"!