This really hurt me.
I'm a person who keep checking my profile (including merit) even though I'm not regularly earn merit, so this make me need to click my merit history and then found out there's no change at all.
Seriously though earning for reading isn't a totally bad idea. And maybe limiting the number of posts in a day, or losing merit for every post after 10 per day or something like that. Although it's in the nature of a forum/social media that on some days a lot of things might be happening, with a lot of posts as a result, in a heated discussion, not shit posts.
The thing is, we have no way to verify between people who read the posts or just clicking any thread as much as they can.