Just a thought, wouldn't it be fair if we had a feature where we could report such topics or posts to administrator [not mod] to reverse the merits. The goal for merit system is to appreciate good posts, not the empty posts. If it was one or two which happened accidentally then it seemed fine but when a user constantly is trying to remove his contents but keeping the merits earned by these contents then it become weird.
I think there was a similar discussion, it was about merit farmers and resellers, where posts were deleted to reduce the possibility of recognition of giving credit for meaningless posts between alt accounts.
Although I am sure that Ratimov did not plan such an epilogue.
I'm interested in why the threads that Ratimov cleaned of their content are not deleted. As far as I can see, they are all still there, although they are now useless. I was reported to the moderator by one of those, but I see that the ad is still unhandled.