For me, it's like a badge of honor from the forum after spending much time learning bitcoin, learning good things. Or can be said Certificate 
I would encourage anyone who questions the value of being a higher ranking account to review this thread. Quickseller- I'm not saying sources per say. Just a feeling that people who have given out a large amount of merit may tend to merit posts that agree with them more than they would a post they disagree with. Nobodys perfect and I believe most try to merit objectively.
At the very least, this shows a hidden bias. I personally try to remove as much of that bias from the merit I send by soliciting people to make submissions to me of examples of high effort posts, made over a period of time, although I do make some exceptions to this, for example, if one person gives an accurate answer after many people have posted nonsense (so to highlight the accurate answer). The above also gives the maximum benefit of the doubt to merit sources, that I don't think is necessarily appropriate to give all of them. For example, I have seen at least one merit source make subtle efforts to get rid of certain forum members they do not like, or get along with -- if you accept my conclusions of this at least one person's behavior to be "trying to get rid" of the person, then it would probably not be unreasonable to say they also make an effort to de-facto censor those who they do not agree with.