Quote from: The Sceptical Chymist on February 23, 2025, 07:02:04 AM

It's kind of disconcerting to see members who earn a decent number of merits not giving them back, and from the last few months of data it looks like there are quite a few members like that.

While there definitely are members like that, I'm not sure that I'd try to pick them out using the monthly snapshots. For example, if you look a few posts above (at the stats for October 2024), I'm near the top of the list, but that doesn't really say anything useful about my merit-sending habits in general...

I've received 5573 merits in total, giving me 2786.5 sMerits, 2706 of which I've put back into the system (~97%). So if someone were to look at that one month of data and think "That damn PowerGlove guy, getting all those merits and then being a stingy bastard when it comes to giving them back out.", they'd be mistaken. (Honestly, I often wish that I had more sMerits to hand out, because it always feels really cheap to me when I leave just one merit on a post that deserves more, but, if I routinely spent my balance in bigger chunks, then I'd basically only get to merit a small handful of posts before I'd have to turn my attention back to earning merit so that I can top up my sMerit balance, and I can only do that at a fairly pedestrian pace; I mean, I know that my merit-to-post ratio is high, but, probably that's precisely due to me not posting at a rate much beyond the natural rate that I can add value at.)