If you check the merit history of
bitcoinermatt, you will see that he has sent merit to 6 users in 9 merit transactions.
All those 6 users has sent back merit to
bitcoinermatt immediately after they received merit from him.
Quite enough that anyone who wants to see what's really going on sees it, and anyone who doesn't want to see will just turn their head the other way. This has never happened to me personally, and I believe most of the forum members - but since I have been active on the forum every day since the merit system was created, I can only say that it was interesting to watch some members reward their main account with merits from their alt accounts - and when the airdropped merits dried up they almost didn't move up.
Both posts are hardly worth 1 merit. But 9 merits (from users who don't hold basically none sMerits) is just ridiculous.
This is not about how good the post is, but about the fact that probably one person distributes the merit between their alt accounts, and considering everything shown, not in a very intelligent way.
Is it allowed to give all your merits to close friends? I think it is...
In fact, practically everything is allowed - I think the admin intervened in one or two cases of abuse, but researching such things takes too much time, and some of these forum members sooner or later get a perma ban or red flag.