People with a lot of Merit can earn $50 in BTC a week easily and more in signature campaigns. They have absolutely ZERO motivation to give others Merit because if anything giving others Merit will give them more competition in the signature campaigns.
The cancer that is Facebook with constant dopamine-addiction and global mass insanity and people just creating posts to get a like has also made its way to Bitcointalk now.
While Bitcoin promised to destroy the established system now and this place was great for discussions, now its just another Facebook. The old quality of message boards that you can still see in Posts by Satoshi and many others (in OLD posts where people actually made thoughtful posts and did own research and posted about experiences) is now completely disappeared because people rather make posts thinking they will get a like, or to spam their X posts a week for their signature campaigns.
While its great to offer people a way to earn bitcoin, basing this so much on the merit system is the stupidest thing Bitcointalk has ever done and it has ruined these forums. I must have seen the exact same ETH-shill post in different words 50 times last week in the Altcoin disussion board. Always by different usernames but probably the same people/same guy running all them in his bot network.
Was a great time but until this system is changed I rather write in some old mailing lists or even to my own notepad because there I have control over my words and thoughts and am not influenced by retarded distractions as the Merit system.
Have a nice day!
What I think you mean to say is
signature campaigns have ruined the forum, which is obviously why you're complaining in the first place. It's not merit that has ruined it for everyone but shitposters who came here in the masses. The merit system was meant to be a way to stop people coming here only to earn via posting and before the merit system anyone could farm as many accounts as they wanted to abuse campaigns hence why something needed to change. I agree it can be quite hard to get sufficient merit to achieve a high rank but it's not impossible and you seem to have a got a decent bit of it recently. With that being said, I'm still in favour of letting users bypass the merit system by giving them the option to buy new donator ranks that come with the benefits of some of the higher ranks ie Silver Member gets you Senior status in all but name and so on. I think that would help those who are struggling to get merit or are impatient.