I saw in many local forums now (I wont mention names) people just keep giving each other Merit. And the more I looked into the
Merit system its a naturable behaviour. You will reward those who reward you. This does not improve forum quality at all.
I think you are right about this. In small communities, those that you help will tend to help you, and merit will be "circled" amongst those who are 'liked' in the community. This is a difficult problem to address because communities should have merit sources to give the community merit, and overregulation of communities can cause real harm.
Increasing the total sMerit available might somewhat alleviate this problem as sMerit will be less scarce, and there will be less of an incentive to send sMerit to only your friends.
Well of course they're going to give it amongst themselves mostly. If you're mostly posting exclusively in that board and can only speak the same language they're hardly going to be dishing it out to posts they either don't see or can't read/understand.
I was referring to people sending merit to their IRL friends for posts that are probably not deserving of merit for corrupt purposes. There are many good/interesting threads in the English subs, and most modern browsers have auto-translate features that allow people to translate content into their native language.
There is far too much spam in the altcoin sections, and probably not enough merit circulates there either.
This is probably not an ideal situation. Having close to zero merit circulating in the altcoin sub means that it is more difficult to identify good posts to read and respond to, which will lead to a worse signal-to-noise ratio in that section.