Unfortunately the way that most older members act on this forum encourages it. There's so, so many threads which are so obviously just made as a merit grab. "List of all X's" (normally something to do with merit), some weird thread stating something that's obvious to everyone already, etc, and bonus points if they can come up with an excuse to update it regularly. These then get flooded with merit...perhaps partially due to the fact that a lot of people have trouble getting rid of all their sMerit right now, so posts that aren't amazing get a lot regardless.
You're not wrong... the number of "stats" threads which have received insane amounts of merit is quite staggering...And then there is all the fairly obvious [TIP], [GUIDE], [WARNING] threads being posted in "Beginners & Help". There are only about 3 or 4 posts on the first B&H page that are actual questions from Beginners seeking help... everything else is people bombarding newbies with "help" hoping to get merits
