This. I feel threatened, my posts from 2013-2015 would be golden buttons for the demerit function.

While I do also happen to find lots of completely crappy posts made by newbies, a demerit button does more bad than good in my opinion. One more misuse case for this button is if someone simply does not agree with my idea and beliefs thinking they're utter bullshit and uses the demerit button as a replacement of expressing his own thoughts opposing mine.

Sometimes silence and ignorance does more good than punishments. When I started being considered a shitposter & spammer on the forum and most of the higher-ranked members were ignoring my posts, that alone made me understand something must be wrong. I still feel the guilt over my first few spammy & crappy years on the forum, but the ignorance from members, signature campaign managers and basically everyone besides those contradicting my posts & calling out my bullshit made me change my attitude and behavior.

Nowadays, whenever I see a Newbie (or Full Member) posting crap I just skip their posts until I find a new one. The following might not be the best comparison (sorry but I really can't find a better one), but it works the same way we teach dogs to stop barking or sit. Once you give it treats for having a good behavior, it'll understand it's not okay to bark randomly so its attitude improves. If you start shouting or hitting a dog when their behavior is not the best, they'll only become more aggressive - in consequence, your violent actions become counterproductive.

Demeriting users could become counterproductive the same way. If I demerit 10 of your posts, you may start believing I have a problem with you and we may start a beef on the forum as if we don't have enough already between some of the users.

One idea I have is that we could have a "mark as nonsense" button which, after X amount of interactions from members with >1k merits, would automatically hide the post in threads. But this is turning, like you say, into censorship and I don't think it's the best path we can go for.