Yay a chance to use my reference thread. I remember there used to be a lot of them popping up all over the place. I even ran one for a while, but stopped receiving submissions that met my requirements. OP already mentioned they were "lazy" so it makes sense to me they'd like to be served posts. I'm not disagreeing that a lot of the threads have self serving motivations but even so where's the problem, if worthy posts receive some merit.
If your concern is alt's, it would be a stupid way to try and abuse the merit system. You are essentially holding a sign up saying "Watch me give these people merit", given the amount of people who hunt alt's and account traders that's risky. I have merit from time to time so will watch this thread if OP runs out and maybe hand some out.
My concern is not alts as I don't think this would be a very effective way of distributing merits. If posts are good then they probably warrant merits anyway if they are not then it'll be easy to identify alt accounts. My main concern is that these threads generate unnecessary bumping hiding content that others might want to read. Especially when these types of topics are looking for said material. Not everyone likes to link their content because it just feels wrong to do so. I wouldn't link any of my posts to receive merit. If someone thinks that I deserve merit than they can come to that conclusion without me ramming it down their throats.
The thing is this is like exchanging merit. The OP creates a new thread hoping that they'll receive merit and further inflate their merit then they'll topics that they could of merited anyway especially since they already have the sMerit to do so. Especially when these topics exist everywhere there are currently a few being run all over the forum and recieving submissions. Why can't existing members stop creating new threads and just contribute to the existing ones that are still active?
There is a thread over in the reputation sub forum which is being run by a default trust member for the exact same end goal. Meriting those that deserve it. Wouldn't it be better to contribute to a active already existing thread than creating a new one?
The topic over at reputation:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5093271.0