I was discussing the awarding of merits with another member recently, and he made me aware that we have both started to award merits as an alternative to posting a reply in a thread. If you agree with a poster, but don't have much to add to the point he has made, do you think it is good practice to award merits without quoting and posting an agreement? It will certainly keep the thread cleaner and easier to read, but it may be difficult for those seeking to build a post count to restrain themselves.
Definitely, you don't even have to merit it, if a user doesn't have anything useful or new information to add on to the existing conversation, there's no actual use of the post except for the monetary gain the person receives in form of the signature campaign payment. I see so many people just using the concept of the verbose on an excessive scale here and that's usually nothing but spam that makes sense when you read it but is still spam and is unnecessary.