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.
That's not true, even with the excessive way you're presenting it. If I send a merit to a person, it can be seen on my merit history. It can be seen by everyone that
BlackHatCoiner merited <someone> which shows that BlackHatCoiner liked a high quality post. So no, I don't have ZERO motivation to give my merits. They are useless units if I keep them, but I can show my generosity by giving them away.
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.
I can't really compare any forum boards except Altcoin Discussion with 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.
I think you've confused Bounties with Signature Campaigns. On bounties you can literally see the same kind of post. Call it spam, call it meaningless. But on signature campaigns, it's entirely different. People try making high quality posts, otherwise they won't be accepted in future campaigns. At least this is the way I see it.
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.
We can agree here.
So basically, what annoys you is the spamming. Not the merits. If the merit system didn't exist, have you any idea how much spam it'd be? The altcoin discussion is the cancer you're describing that has
"ruined" the forum. Not the signature campaigns. And you can verify that by observing that only signature campaign participants have replied on this thread. None from bounties.