The introduction for one merit to rank up is not designed to prevent the average real member from ranking up. It is purely aimed at shit-posters from signature campaigns and "bots".
Shit-posters are people who purely post to meet bounty quotas, have no real interest in exchanging ideas or post incomprehensible garbled nonsense.
Often - just engaging with other members is not necessarily considered worthy of merit.
But they are valued as a conversation.If you are chatting to others - that is not considered shitposting. But it may make getting merit more difficult.
TMAN'S guide to getting merit.Giving merit to shit-posters is one of the reasons senior members are careful with giving merits to Newbies:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=merit;stats=topsendbanAs you can see - merit is sometimes wasted on those that really don't deserve it.
However - there has been a real drive to give merit to newbies who deserve it.
[TOP-200] Members who support newbies Senior members are not anti newbies (even though it may appear that way sometimes - senior members (especially on Meta) are often involved in reporting lots of spams and fighting scams - so they are anti spambies and anti scambies).
Users that participate are very welcome in the forum. Some things are un-moderated to it does pay to not be offended too easily.
The reason senior members often get a lot of merit is because:
1) To rank from Newbie 4 ranks to Full Member = 100 merit
2) To rank up from Full member 3 ranks to legendary = 900 merit
The changes are really working:
All posts:
+----------+-------+
| Days ago | posts |
+----------+-------+
| 0 | 26510 |
| 1 | 42433 |
| 2 | 46736 |
| 3 | 54921 |
| 4 | 45271 |
| 5 | 48072 |
| 6 | 48926 |
| 7 | 46559 |
| 8 | 45886 |
| 9 | 49366 |
| 10 | 55894 |
| 11 | 47335 |
| 12 | 50829 |
| 13 | 53678 |
| 14 | 48648 |
| 15 | 49082 |
| 16 | 50333 |
| 17 | 57172 |
| 18 | 48595 |
| 19 | 52579 |
| 20 | 57679 |
| 21 | 40384 |
| 22 | 54342 |
| 23 | 56030 |
| 24 | 61043 |
| 25 | 48891 |
| 26 | 48744 |
| 27 | 50118 |
| 28 | 47206 |
| 29 | 51689 |
+----------+-------+
Deleted posts (not necessarily by a moderator):
+----------+-------+
| Days ago | posts |
+----------+-------+
| 0 | 749 |
| 1 | 3004 |
| 2 | 2430 |
| 3 | 1950 |
| 4 | 2275 |
| 5 | 2395 |
| 6 | 2836 |
| 7 | 3439 |
| 8 | 2743 |
| 9 | 3244 |
| 10 | 3793 |
| 11 | 5510 |
| 12 | 5153 |
| 13 | 5681 |
| 14 | 4870 |
| 15 | 5974 |
| 16 | 4685 |
| 17 | 5909 |
| 18 | 7518 |
| 19 | 7709 |
| 20 | 6472 |
| 21 | 5671 |
| 22 | 8891 |
| 23 | 7594 |
| 24 | 6634 |
| 25 | 6694 |
| 26 | 6433 |
| 27 | 5401 |
| 28 | 6260 |
| 29 | 5504 |
+----------+-------+
That's "24-hour periods from now", not calendar days.
There was a bug for the last ~7 hours which prevented all newbie posts, so that's going to make a big dent in the stats.