Poll has finally ended. 38 for Yes and 59 No. Not completely surprising, but for the 38 people who voted Yes, well let me just say I am proud of you.
There's been a considerable dropoff in merit farming in the WO since I opened this thread (although it still exists to a certain degree). I reckon I will re-open and bump it if it picks back up again.
At least Duderino seems like he's considering being more selective with merits, so that's good.
Just a reminder to all merit sources, you don't need to give away all your source merits! Ideally you are giving them out for good posts that demonstrate the slightest inkling of original thought, and not just for copy/pasted tweets about number going up, or because somebody expresses admiration for you or agrees with you. I dunno, I guess the takeaway is don't let yourself be so easily fooled and manipulated. Its happened to me a few times, nobody's perfect, but let's not consistently reward low effort copy/paste posts. It just leads to a multiplication of such posts in what is arguably the best thread on the forum.