Just like I have said before, merit system has been the reason we have quality posts on this forum. If merit system was not introduced, this forum would be a place of trash posts.
You can noticed someone not posting as good as another person, but having more merit, but still he is having merits and ranking higher. People that are giving merit can be partial, especially those on local boards, but merit still ensures that posting quality on this forum is achieved.
Merit system is not a direct cause of quality posts on the forum. Qualified content existed even before the implementation of this system. Moreover, many users who have been here on the forum almost since its inception claim that there were more high-quality discussions than now. Merits did not affect the improvement of the quality of the posts. They just contributed to reducing the number of users who spam.
Because such people do not have enough motivation and they stop visiting the forum. And those who write useless nonsense but still visit the forum, just do not get any attention, often precisely because they do not have merits at all or there is not enough of it. But still such users are present here and they continue to write garbage. The Merit system did not make their posts quality and interesting.
And those who write well did it with and without merits. There is no system here, because the system presupposes the possibility of foreseeing which post will receive merits. That is, guarantees are assumed. And they just don't exist. Because you can write high-quality posts, but you won’t get merits, because either the merit sources didn’t notice or ignored you, or those who would like to give merits didn’t have such an opportunity at the that time. And no one waits for sMerit to show up to retroactively reward a post, such a post is simply lost and left unappreciated. And such situations are repeated very often.