deeming people untrustworthy with quite literally no factual evidence other than some account links is absurdity.
No, it doesn't have anything to do with trust. It has to do with the privilege of being able to use signature space for advertising, which has been woefully abused--
especially by Jr. Members. I don't know what sections of the forum you frequent, but take a look at Bitcoin/Altcoin Discussion and you'll see that it's unreadable because of all the signature spammers there. There's an epidemic of people being referred to bitcointalk as a place of employment, and thus a lot of noobs generally have nothing to add. They just crank out generic posts, and many of those are even plagiarized.
If you help noobs to rank up to Jr. Member and they really don't deserve it, you're not helping things here. It's not that they're untrustworthy, it's that they're incentivized to crank out garbage.
You're free to do with your sMerits as you see fit. I'm just advising you not to make things worse here out of some sense of perceived injustice. This isn't a conspiracy. It's a real problem.
