I think if we were to be paid for distributing merits, it would only negatively affect the distribution. It's best we don't go there. Imagine if the admin were to introduce some kind of satoshi per merit rate. It wouldn't take long before the posts that usually got 1-2 merits from user X started receiving 5 from the same individual. Or if we were paid based on how many unique members we merited. People would be searching for posts from users they haven't merited yet.

Anything that shows you made an effort to write it or you displayed knowledge.