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.
You are right. I was too narrow in the way I said it because it does happen on occasion but I still believe it is not the norm.
I also need to work on not saying "you" so much in my posts or addressing a certain other poster like that because I certainly don't mean/want to put a specific person on the spot like that, usually..
I should have said something more like - "How many merited posts do you all see merited for quality of writing and effort despite the sender profoundly disagreeing with the message of the post they merited?"
I'd still say quite a lot. I'm abrasive with pretty much everyone and I'm still getting merited occasionally. I can see some merit sources sending merits to both sides of a good debate.
I think it's
easier to send merits where I don't need to take sides (e.g. some purely technical discussion that doesn't involve Bitcoin Cash).
I think it is natural for us to use merit as a "+1", or a "Yeah, what he said." to show our support for a well placed message that we want to back up as an endorsement.
Or even something funny but low effort, just whatever we enjoy.
Possible. But for the top 200 or some other group to collude in a way that cryptohunter was implying is just unfeasible. I might "like" your post here but after that I have no control whatsoever whom you send your two earned sMerits to, e.g. it could be TECSHARE, whom I don't "like" at all. Not to mention there are 119 merit sources with many different viewpoints. So even if I'm being too naive about bias on the individual level I still think the system ends up quite diverse and unbiased overall.