What examples can you show of well written posts that you profoundly disagreed with, and you gave merits to?
Quickseller's
post about Kavanaugh for example. A few other posts in P&S as well, just can't find links quickly.
I considered giving merit proportional to activity, but I decided not to because doing so would probably give far more undeserved merit than deserved merit in total. But undoubtedly some people got screwed by this, and if they have decent posts, by all means, give them the 250 or 500 merit that they need to rank-up.
I have not seen this done once.
There is a 50-merit limit per person per month so if it did happen it would have taken months or multiple senders. I didn't intentionally try to rank anyone up but I did hit the limit a couple of times.
You sources are conservative with your merits, giving just enough that it is working while making high rank much harder to achieve and more elite. You are just doing what you think is right.
You aren't giving 10 merits to posts you pick instead of 1 because you must thing that is too many.. You think 1 is enough and they should be more scarce than giving out 10s all the time. You are keeping high rank elite. Whatever..
You 2 (first 2) deserve a higher rank than the old legendary, so maybe it should be more elite.
Sources shouldn't be pressured into giving more than they think is right. If Theymos wants more, then he needs more sources.
Some people feel that way. I'm in the middle and can feel for both sides.
Again, I can only speak for myself, but I'm trying send out all my sMerits because theymos said thou shalt not hoard LOL. If I have merits left over it means my standards are too high and I should lower them. Originally I had made up a bunch of criteria but right now when I'm considering a post for meriting it's basically like this: would having more of such posts improve the forum? (e.g. essentially "better than average"). If yes and if I have sMerits available - the post has a chance of getting merited (depending on how many other such posts I encounter during the day etc).
I still haven't figured out how the source merits get replenished.
They come back exactly 30 days (to the second) after being sent. So if you look at your
sent merit history you'll see that you may have 6 or so sMerits coming back over the next couple of days, assuming those merits you sent 30 days ago were source merits and not earned merits - impossible to tell from the history unfortunately.