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Besides, one of the most confrontational parts of the merit system is that merits are given 1 by 1, the most of the time. I think this make truly difficult to rank-up, so I kind of understand how can a good poster get desperate, for example, ranking-up from member to full member is going to take a while, at least you are a genius (there are few in this forum by the way).
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Just to backup your argument with data, the number of sMerits awarded per TX during the current month of June (01/06/2018 .. 22/06/2018) is as follows:
Merit NumTX %
1 4.136 68,30%
2 942 15,55%
3 233 3,85%
4 93 1,54%
5 395 6,52%
6 46 0,76%
7 14 0,23%
8 4 0,07%
9 4 0,07%
10 107 1,77%
11+ 82 1,35%
So 68,30% of awarding involves 1 sMerit, an additional 15,55% involves 2 sMerits, and 16,15% of TXs involve 3 or more sMerits.
Contrary to what I believed, these proportions are roughly the same whether we focus on this current month, or we consider the whole history of transactions from January 2018 onwards.
The question is perhaps not only the number of merits per TXs, but the
number of times a post actualy gets merited (number of different meriters). The overall distribution is as follows:
nTXs nPosts %
1 45.513 81,43%
2 6.372 11,40%
3 1.932 3,46%
4 786 1,41%
5 404 0,72%
6 255 0,46%
7 139 0,25%
8 119 0,21%
9 70 0,13%
10 48 0,09%
11+ 255 0,46%
81,43% of posts have been merited only by one person, another 11,40% by two people, and so on.
Maybe there is a kind of "the post has already been merited before/got enough merits" hand brake that works behind our awarding habits.
EDIT: Added the above to the Merit Dashboard (Post Summary Tab), although still needs a bit of tweaking .
