I think this restriction does not solve the problem of shitposting, 1 Merit not enough. It only harms newcomers. I'm personally don't want to buy merit. Merit it's something that you need to earn. But in the situation what I see in local tread nobody want to share merit because in the black market it cost around 7-10$. I see now a lot of people who will just buy it from the high-rank sellers for their army of junior member. I personally saw a guy bought 60 merits for his farm in the telegram chat. So tell me is this new merit system solve the problem? I think no...
If we want to stop an army of Junior member bots, we need to add more restriction.
As I see the main problem is bounty campaign with encouraging people to make more post or bump ANN tread.
There a few solutions which I see:
1) Don't take Jr. Member in signature bounty only member+.
2) Too many messages with social reports and "joined"? Encourage all bounty managers to use Google forms for weekly reports.
This forum definitely needs some rule to stop the army of bots and shitposting. But in this war between forum admins and an army of bots there a lot of victim from newcomers and usual people.