You are not wrong and yes, I've noticed this behavior and who knows I may even be guilty of this. I just think that since this is a social space, there are different peeps with their behavioural patterns that don't really see it as much of a necessity to do something out side the box. This attitude is because they don't bother to read what the person before them said just as you keenly observed. This matter of users making repetitive words just to meet post count is something so many people have complained about, proffered solution for yet it still happens and this often occurs in the gambling section and I'm wondering if there will ever be lasting solution for it or will just have to make do?
There are solutions. The easiest one is to use text comparator. But if you want to go a step further, you can also read the whole discussion and use it to judge whether a post deserves to get paid or whether it doesn't.
However, this solution is not possible, because the most reputable campaign managers, manage a bunch of campaigns each. And each campaign has several members, so reading all the posts is a very time consuming task.
What I would do, if I were a campaign manager, would be to pay differently depending on if the post is merited or not. And to avoid merit exchanging I would put a requirement of being merited by at least 3 different members.
Imagine something like this:
Each post will be paid with X dollars.
Each post merited by at least 3 different accounts will be paid with Y dollars.
Each post merited by more than 10 people will be paid Z dollars.
You've stated it yourself that this is a tough one to handle by some CM and to be honest, your solution on the pay rate is really strict and I bet you, at some point you'd want to relax your conditions because by the time users stop meeting requirements and their payments get reduced, they get forced to leave the campaign and look for another with less strict rules and I think that makes you one campaign short because when there is no traffic or the owners of the campaign you are marketing are not satisfied or aren't seeing profit, they are left with no option but to pack up shop and leave.
Or option two, these participants may decides to exchange merits within themselves but without your knowledge and that doesn't solve the problem at all, it only gives you the illusion that it's being solved, but rather it's just there, operating on a low key.
Like I said earlier, we've had countless solutions offered but this issue still remains like a stubborn acne. For me, I think its best left to the mods or CMs to detect and rate a post that is worthy of being counted as quality posts...
In just imagining a situation where a sub board dedicated to spam gets created, shit! It will be the most active after the WO