I think the list can be useful, but must be treated with caution. On occasion it can be very unfair to stigmatise someone as a merit hoarder. I am of course speaking out of self-interest, as my name does crop up on that list, but I feel that I do give out enough merit. If you look at the sent and received on my profile, I'm giving out merit most days.

Take December for example; I am 33 on the list. What happened was that I received around 40 merit in the last 3 days of the month. I'm not going to quickly dump the sMerit from that on the first posts that I find before the month is out, instead I'm going to award them when I see good posts. If people were to throw merit away as soon as they received it, it would undermine the whole system.

In general I have a steady inflow and outflow of merit, which I believe balances quite well. The whole thing gets skewed when I receive a lot at the same time, generally in the Quantum Computing threads. I don't know if those are more frequented by merit sources, but that might be one explanation for the fact that I get way way more merit there than anywhere else.


Don't stop now, damn you, I'm only 59 away from Hero!
Please can you edit the post to make the word 'Joking' bigger font size? And red. And bold.