And I thought the whole point of User ranks was exactly that, "you should have to have actually achieved something before you're allowed to earn from posting".
But ranks are meaningless when all you need is time and they were being colossally abused because of that because all you had to do was log in and make one post every fortnight regardless of quality. Do we let eighteen year-olds drive or fly a plane as soon as they turn 18 or do we require some sort of qualification from them before they're allowed to do so? Now that you need merit ranks will actually start to mean something and are at least some sort of achievement if you earn them, but they previously didn't mean anything other than you've made a certain amount of posts over a certain amount of time.
The economy made itself, anything below Junior member is most of the time completely irrelevant in sig campaigns.
But this just wasn't the case. Many ICOs accepted anyone, even Newbies, and people were literally farming Junior accounts by their dozens and in some cases hundreds (and probably even thousands) just to abuse campaigns because that's all they needed to do to maximise earnings. That really needed to change and one merit is only a small spanner in the works for the biggest abusers and doesn't go far enough in my opinion.
Other more elitist campaigns only accept hero and legendary members and make the barrier to entry even higher, I don't mind all that.
I wouldn't call them elitist. I only wish more campaigns only accepted certain higher ranks, or just people who actually made great posts. If campaigns did their due diligence and had some quality control then we wouldn't have even needed ranks or merit in the first place, but the problem is many campaigns accepted anyone regardless of quality and that was the whole crux of the problem.
And finally, Merit. The centralized limited supply currency. I objectively can't see anyone agreeing to this system, unless they're renowned members who can use connections and biased feelings from other fellow sMerit owners to exchange points.
The only people who wouldn't agree to it are those who now actually have to start writing half-decent posts, and that isn't a bad thing. Any 'renowned' member wouldn't have an issue getting merit because they already make great contributions so it's largely irrelevant to them, but something needed to be done about the droves of people coming here just to post utter drivel over their 200 alt accounts each, especially when they can't speak English very well or know little to nothing about bitcoin and are only here because someone told them they can get paid for spamming or copy and pasting. Merit isn't a perfect system and it does work, but if you have a better solution I'm sure everyone would love to hear it.