Right, but why should we additionally encourage them? When I first came on this forum there still were quite many one line posters with zero meaningless content. There were pages and pages on nonsense. Now we still have many posts made just to post something, just to get enough activity or reach a week quota in a signature campaign, but we have much much less meaningless content. So merit system worked as expected. By the way I came here just several months after its implementation.

Of course it's not an ideal system, but it made situation much less catastrophic. Who have seen what was before merit system will agree with me.