Edit - why the f would anyone waste time over there anyhow?
I used to spend probably an hour a day trashing pointless threads in off topic and politics and society and banning those who post exclusively in them but I gave up. It's a neverending task and one that is both tedious and extremely time consuming. Now that we have the merit system these sorts of trash threads will likely dwindle and hopefully go extinct because posting in them will be futile. People only used to do so because they could easily rank up by posting in them but now that's not going to be possible. If you report them I will handle them though.
Totally agreed. People aren't going to spam as much in them now because nobody's going to read it that actually has merit points to give away. Instead, they are just going to be spamming to themselves, essentially.
But still I feel like a lot of the discussions are probably better moved to off topic, since at least 20-30% of the threads are indeed off topic and has nothing to do remotely with politics or society discussions.
I don't know how it can be handled any better than it is right now, apart from taking down the entire politics and society subforum.
Merging the two sub is a good idea imo.
Merit system will reduce the trashy topics maybe but will not end it. Those users need to increase their post count anyway, 50 posts from 100 between these two subs will be less noticeable.