For example, TMAN, I merited your cited above post because I was kind of feeling in the mood  to merit some posts, and I realized that I had not merited any of your posts for a while... so there is a bit of randomness to the matter, too.

Furthermore, I merited OP too, because I think that OP brought up a decent framing of a topic and provided a number of examples that seems to show some kinds of consideration that are at least springboard conversation points.... even if s/he/it might be wrong about some of the raised points.

  Just superficially looking at some of OPs post history does seem to support that s/he can be a bit of a shit poster him/herself..... but I still don't mind spreading out some merits to a variety of members with perhaps some glimmer of hope that some of these more active members are providing some kind of substantive help to various other members (and even to lurkers), to spark various conversations and even to encourage a bit of diversity of participation, thoughts and even springboards for thoughts.

I do admit that I get a bit irritated by shitposters who repeat themes that denigrate bitcoin or pump some other coin or project with misleading information, while sometimes trapping some innocent newbie bystanders into buying into their crap/scam projects.  At the same time, even scam/crap projects can serve some purposes to teach dumb money or even to provide avenues of investment and relief for dumb money.  It's not like we are going to absolutely get rid of dumb money, and I even know those kinds of people in real life.  They might not be teachable, and they tend to make the world more interesting and also they can cause mediocrely smart people feel even smarter.... hahahahahaha

I guess part of my point here is that there can be a bit of randomness to sharing and/or spreading out smerits, and even while sources have greater obligations to NOT engage in self-dealing with their source smerits, they also enjoy a decent amount of discretion that will inevitably have some subjective components and luck involved when they do end up spending their smerits that also might revolve around some of their real life happenings that can be difficult to know or trace, especially if the source might not say that s/he is feeling like x, y or z on a particular day when s/he sends out some smerits....

And lastly, a kind of repetitive point regarding the seeming randomness that might even be a bit irrational from time to time, I doubt that theymos wants bots serving as merit sources, so to the extent that people recognize, understand and accept that real people have irrational behaviors (from time to time), that irrationality seems to be a kind of feature, rather than a bug....even when some merit sources might be better able to consistently keep such  irrationality features under better control than other merit sources.