And I don't think I'll get above #6 unless some merit sources above me drop out. I'm not even sure I can maintain #6 on a monthly basis, as it's not easy to distribute that many merits consistently. I'm glad some members have taken me up on my offer of monthly post history reviews and that the "Ranking up" thread exists in Meta. If I had to rely on finding good posts all by myself, I don't think I could give out 600-800 merits monthly.
This problem is solved by expanding your merit distribution area (if you have time, of course). If I distributed merit within my locale, as it was before, then I could hardly distribute even 700 merit, not to mention 1200. Therefore, I began to expand my allocation to different locales and sections of the forum. But you need to devote a lot of time to this, this is a fact. I recently discovered that in a Turkish locale (the largest locale after Russian), merit sources only give out 700 merit a month. Of course, posts in Turkish can become a serious obstacle to understanding, but in principle, using auxiliary tools, it will be possible to understand what it is about and support active users of merit.
For sure, each of us are going to have our differing methodologies, and maybe if some of us have been sending smerits over a longer period of time, the drasticness of the changes that we have to make is not as great.
Before I was a merit source, I hardly ever ventured outside of the WO thread, so I suppose that becoming a merit source has caused me to explore more threads and topics than I would have otherwise done, even though I did not really attempt to make any kind of conscious effort of spending more time or causing myself to work more..,... but still like The Pharmacist said there is inevitably a certain amount of additional work that comes from having a lot of smerits to send out.
So sure, sometimes some of us might decide to send more smerits per post than we otherwise would have sent, and within that category would also be to decide to send smerits to some posts that we might not have previously considered high enough within our considerations of what is smerit worthy.....
So, what is a value-add post, and sometimes I am not really sure if some posts are value add or not, especially some of the more technical of posts that I will sometimes merit.. and surely there are some topics that I have trouble in determining how many smerits to send because I am not sure if I understand the posting content sufficiently.. and there are other kinds of posts that I surely do not agree with the points being made, but I may well still send out smerits if I believe them to add value or to be well-presented (even if I disagree with some of the points being made).
Another trick might be to attempt to skim rather than read in detail, but sometimes if I might be attempting to determine how many smerits to give, then I might have to read the post in more detail, even though the skimming practice might have allowed me to come across a post that I would not have otherwise even bothered to look at.
By the way, my own style is to type somewhat long posts (and sometimes detailed too), so frequently typing posts will take more of my time than reading through posts, yet I feel that many times typing posts help me to engage with various bitcoin related topics way better than if I were not in the habit of typing posts, and in that regard, I feel that I am in a better position to understand what I am reading when I am more actively engaging in various topics (mostly bitcoin related) from time to time.