Merit is like Fight Club. The trick to earning merit is to not talk about merit. A lot of people for some reason act like guardians of the merit and will do things like ignore you for even mentioning it. This post not receiving merit is a good example.
Yeah, that's true as much as we probably don't want to admit it. We as a community sort of boycott anyone that mentions merit, even though if we were in similar shoes, all exicted about being part of this community, we might've been asking the same questions.
I'm not sure I agree with that 100%, though I get what both of you are saying. The members who get ignored or have scorn heaped upon them are the ones who create threads about merits in which they're obviously hoping someone will give them merits. The OPs of such threads are usually way too wordy in addition to being poorly written (usually), and from what I've observed the creators of threads like that usually don't participate in the discussion which ensues.
OP hasn't received any merits because his post was two lines, and he's asking a question that he could have found the answer to himself if he'd searched Meta.