This.

As 1miau pointed out even the most knowledgeable posters/people who really know what merit system is meant for doesn't merit posts very often. Many feel like the post doesn't deserve their merit even though it does deserve at least a merit. We do know the people who are the top merit receivers make quite good posts rather than others who have less than 10-20 received merits right after the introduction of the merit system 2 years back. Some doesn't like to merit top merit receivers nor they can never find people who have received less than 20 merits. I was once an active poster in Altcoin Discussion helping out tech related queries but over the course of time, it was really difficult to find good topics out there in spam and it was like hunting for 'Heart of the Ocean' in the vast spread out Atlantic!

Either way, merit sources and only few of the posters really care about spending their merits and perhaps the rest of them are hoarding them. We need to know the functioning of merit from a shitposter point of view and not from the Beginners board I guess. We can change most of the low level shitposters to good by educating them about the forum and merits and probably they can turn into some of the most helpful users on the forum.. But the knowledgeable posters who are hoarding their smerit can never be changed upon and if we tend to, we might receive a backlash as well!

Truly speaking many of us were shitposters in the earlier days of account registration and later changed to helpful members of the forum. When I was new to the forum and after the introduction of merit system, even I have received backlash/hate from Hero members for being somewhat helpful.  All I would say that, if people don't want to spend their smerits for good posts then they shouldn't instruct others to stop meriting.