To be honest, I see a lot of conflicting answers in this thread, and apparently some people don't understand the idea of rewarding members based on merit. This concept is based on encouraging users to publish quality posts. So that users have an incentive to reach the point where they will receive the maximum rate (this is why it is important to have several levels of rewards).

The peculiarity is that when a user crosses the mark of 3000 merits (mostly), he stops thinking about merits, so his posts are organic and such users are very interesting to managers. In addition, as soon as the user begins to position participation in the campaign as a hobby and not as an income, he immediately becomes desirable for any manager (believe me, this is very noticeable).

I want to add that no project will invest resources in marketing initiatives if there are no tangible results, and there will be none if the published posts are lost in mega threads (after all, the highest quality discussion fits on the first two pages of the thread).