It is possibly that the new rank requirements, which specifically target at Junior Members [abundant in the forum before the implementation] has shown its strongly long-lasting effects.
Despite of merit abusements from demoted Juniors who ranked up again, but it is obviously that there are so many guys who can not abuse the system and have still got stucked at Newbie.
Most of them stopped showing their shits around the forum.

One more thing, the total merits distributed within the week from 28th of October to the 4th of November fell dramatically.
Therefore, it is interesting to wait for next weeks to see that whether we will see the first week that has total merits distributed below 2.5k.
2.5k is a figure which imply potential outliers 25th quartile.
More details analysed and presented there:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2818350.msg47817456#msg47817456