Quote from: RajaDen on Today at 07:17:33 AM

Hopefully what I have summarized can be useful as a reminder for all forum members including myself.

Personally I didn't need a reminder of all that stuff, but it was a nice summary of the early days of the merit system. Newer members here are probably not aware of how lousy the forum was prior to the system rolling out. We had account farmers all over the place, sometimes with multiple alt accounts talking to each other in the same thread and other very bizarre stuff that could only be accounted for by the presence of account farms.

Yes, the shitposters kept shitposting after Theymos introduced the merit system, but in an instant the incentive to create dozens of new accounts in order to rank them up and sell them or enroll them in bounties or sig campaigns was eliminated, and I think the effect of that was seen pretty dramatically.

Newcomers also may not realize what Meta looked like at the end of Jan. 2018 and throughout a good part of 2019. It was absolutely on fire with people either bitching about or praising the merit system, and there were also tons of shitposters who were obviously creating threads trying to earn merits (and it was kind of comical, because Meta was pretty shitpost-free prior to the merit system). Total chaos. And hey, those threads still exist for anyone who cares to go back and read them.