In July 2021 total sent 26411 merits (in 13235 txns to 2037 users):
- 3% to Newbies: 810 merits (to 517 users)
- 4% to Jr. Members: 1068 merits (to 296 users)
- 9% to Members: 2479 merits (to 306 users)
- 8% to Full Members: 2010 merits (to 216 users)
- 11% to Sr. Members: 2808 merits (to 246 users)
- 15% to Hero Members: 4044 merits (to 246 users)
- 50% to Legendaries: 13192 merits (to 423 users)
Although, I'm not one for taking into consideration the rank of the user I'm meriting or at least I try to be conscious about being non bias. I would like to see the distribution a little better than this personally. 50% of the merit circulation going to legendaries makes sense, however I do believe that might be because there's some bias creeping in. I feel like some users are less willing to reward newbies with high amounts, because there's not enough data available to determine whether they would be a contributing user in the long term.
This is probably backed up by the fact that 517 newbies received merit, and only 423 legendaries received merit, however the amount of merits was significantly larger when being sent to legendary accounts. I think it could be argued that generally, legendaries are more likely to be posting better content, but without going through each post, that would likely be hard to accurately predict.
Sometimes the merit distribution system calls for unnecessary agitations over it. For sure there are those who effortlessly earns this and there are those who don't. That doesn't mean some users are more preferred above others and even though it seems so, a look into there profile and post history is all that it would take to note why.
Again, it's not a very strange thing to have ranked up members earn more merits than beginners. Some of this is due to the fact that, there are some replies that comes off these users experience that in one release, they could earn the highest merit in any instance in the forum but beginners responses are hardly accorded this sort of appreciation due to low quality replies.
Another thing is, the boards for which you do frequent. If you take a look at the technical discussions, a little technical reply, either as question or answer to a question it all that it takes to be merited based on the technicality of your response but, this is a board for experience for which, beginners don't participate so much.
Again, even beginners play the bias game. They come up with the notion that, ranked up members have got more merits and in giving ranked up members some merits, your most likely to have some back in some merit return response. This is really not up to you @beginners but, goodluck with that though.