Given your post history which consists mostly of those "proof of authentication" posts its a miracle that you even managed to get those 5 merits.
He has earned 3 merits on Bitcointalk community awards post and rest 2 are by signing the message thread from OgNasty and they are not in past 120 days which we can conclude from his post history that he is bounty hunter not with constructive post.
To even get a chance of a higher rank you should start writing an actual posts outside of altcoin section. Since you opened this thread you did the first step, now just take your time to get yourself familiar with the forum as its so much more than altcoin section.
Altcoin section is messed up with members spamming the whole board with shit posting and there are very less chances of getting merits there so he will have to spread out his post to different boards and yes the main and basic thing is to acquire knowledge for the same what you are going to write in your post which will help you to rank up.
Merit is simply same like the likes you get on social media platform like Facebook or Twitter when your post amaze or interest the reader.
On like here you get merit for your Quality post.
Rank is gotten by numbers of activities, Post and merit.
Merits are awarded to you when you share something useful on the forum, exchange of knowledge, helping out members with their doubts or initiating healthy discussion on the forum with good post quality and the content must be on topic.Then you get merits from other members who find it useful and knowledgeable.
But your rank increase solely on the activity and number of merits not the posts you have made on the forum.
OP, do bounty hunters actually earn any more for having a higher rank? I know that's true for bitcoin-paying signature campaigns, but as far as I understand it a big part of bounties is spamming social media and not necessarily forum posting (although I know it's a big enough part that it contributes to forum shittiness significantly).
Still the same unless you are joining some campaign as junior rank member although I doubt there are any for them these days.The bounty hunters are concerned with spamming social media with the post of project they are promoting in hope to earn some tokens that will not give them anything at the end because once it's over you either don't get tokens but if you have joined some good manager they have funds in their wallets already to pay you but many turns scam.The other thing is they get dumped as soon as they are listed on exchange and you are in loss only.