you basically haven't earned much, you are simply legendary based on your longevity on the forum...
Longevity, We are here just because of the longevity of some members. If they don't deserve to be Legendary, theymos definitely put some restrictions. Back in the day, the scenario was totally different. Most of the persons used to join the forum with the interest of learning about bitcoin, having some updates about bitcoins or learning about cryptocurrency. Their posts were objectively high quality because they didn't post for fulfilling signature requirements. Why most of the boards are full of shits now? Mostly because of the signature campaign, otherwise, merit system was not implemented, IMO.
What if demerit existed and it was free to give-
Well, I want to share a story with you.
I had joined a forum named icoforums.net which was paying 1 ETH for 100 posts. It was really lucrative. Of course, I had joined with the intention to earn. But, I tried to contribute to the forum. I had posted some decent posts. Apart from that, I started to report the abusers and copy/paste so that the forum gets cleaned. I was able to remove the spams through reporting but in return what I got from users who were spamming?
There was an option called upvote/downvote. To be honest, I was one of the best users of that forum but you know what, my reputation was -17, because there were some users who had fake accounts and they were only downvoted all of my posts.
That's what will be happened here too. Trust, merits are not moderated. If there is something like -1, you can easily destroy one's reputation. And that's why there is DT member for trust feedback. Otherwise, I may create 100 of accounts and paint anyone I wish which would be visible to everyone.