Grinding merits is extremely difficult, but defined possible: it’s kind of war of attrition, you put a lot of effort into this, often you can’t see any progress, you write what you think are beautifully crafted post that get almost no attention ofr merits, while sometimes you write a post via mobile, the right thing at the right time and you get a lots of merits.  Hopefully in the long run quality get recognition and eventually ranking up is possible.