However, remember that the merit system is still only about 4 months old. That's pretty young in the grand scheme of things. Maybe after a year or so, it'll become common knowledge that you won't be earning merits from shitty posts. Maybe. Hopefully.
I want to discuss that a bit on blab if you get a chance to look in. I think we could tune the awarding of merits for everybody's benefit, and improve board quality at the same time. I think that Theymos is keen for good posters to improve their ranking, and maybe we can help in this. Hence this series of threads by me.