Look, we all have our reason for coming to this forum. If I take myself as an example -as mentioned by a mod a few posts ago- I spent months never browsing this forum, reason being, I would only come here for business. If user stats were enabled I'd probably bet most of my posts were on the Marketplace.

Judging by the amount of posts on it, I bet a lot of users do the same. There might be users that come to this forum for the sake of finding a new ICO/Altcoin investment, some just want to gamble, others try to seek information on the development side of bitcoin, maybe someone wants to know information about mining, or the typical "how get bitcoin" newbie. The people who genuinely come here for Bitcoin/Off-Topic are either very very lonely, or mental.

But -unfortunately apparently-, if our reasons to make genuine posts are different, all of that changes once we get a signature under our names. Now we have a constraint to post more often, and now we have to "fake" interest.

"Fake" is really a loose word here, let's just call it "secondary" interest. See, I would very much like to spend most of my time productively either doing business on btctalk, or spending it doing other things of whatever my life needs. But if I am going to get paid posting,- and I did participate in sig campaigns before-, I start skimming for posts, find one where I feel like I can get invested into, and make a post. This post isn't spammy or a bad kind of "fake", it's just that because I'm paid to post, browsing the forum is now considered "being productive" for me.

Merit does exactly the same thing, except that :
1. I'm not paid in money.
2. I'm not even guaranteed to be paid at all.

So, in order to grind this merit, I have to go out of my way again, try to contribute to the forum for god knows how long, for the miniscule chance of a hero/legendary noticing me and blessing me with his Oh so precious merits. See this, isn't worth it for me. It isn't worth it for anybody, especially not for people who CAN already make interesting posts like me. I'm even better than your average user because I almost never write "+1" confirmation posts, loop arguments that recycle past posts, laa dee daa whatever most sig-registered users do nowadays. So, I no longer feel like I'm "productive" if I'm posting for the sake of unguaranteed merits.

Here's a solution I proposed a few posts ago :


Why are negatives so important? Because they give weight to neutral points. Just like trust.

If a user has positive merit : This guy knows how to get himself sucked by other users.

If a user has negative merit : This user writes shitposts and spam.

But 0 merit? This user just doesn't post a lot.

In fact, if you removed the positive merit and only kept the negatives, it would be a much more accurate indication of spammers, because as it is right now, I'M ALSO considered a person that spams, just like everyone else with default merit.

There are definitely other solutions to work around this, as long as you think about improving the main issue :

Merit is forcing people to post just like sig campaigns are.

I might not be the typical user the mods are looking for because I'm just a casual poster, but you'd be lying if you didn't believe the majority of the forum is like me. We all have specific interests in bitcoin, and besides the mods whose job is to browse the forum, I'm sure everyone would like to spend their time productively, or posting on topics they are genuine about. Merit just makes a biased system where users try to find the best places to "fake" interest into other users.