Well, I'm frustrated as you are, because next week I'd reached the full member rank, and now I have to earn a lot of merits to achieve that result. And of course I've no idea when I'll succeed.
But... firstly, I received already a few, and some of them from "difficult" high ranks members, so... it's possible.
Then, I improved very much the quality of my posts, and this is very positive. I'm ashamed of my first ones. I'll write a specific post about this.
Much more, I understood that I'm not here to earn some cheap money just spamming the forum.
WTF! I'm here because I want to became a f...ing cryptomillionarie, not a shitpost worker.
So, after this enlightenment, suddenly all this discussion about merits and ranks becomes insignificant: if I'll receive a merit, I'll be happy just because I give a contribution and someone appreciated me. That's all.
And don't forget: the merit system has still a lot of space for improvement, but - like it or not - it stopped the tsunami of shitpost.
Of course now the situation is a little stuck, but it was necessary. Now we'll see how can we make it better.
First, just to clear the air (if anyone will actually read this) I am biased because I don't feel I can personally rank up anymore. So, take this with a grain of salt.
My thoughts:
I know the merit is new, and I really like the concept because BitcoinTalk.org is a core part of the community and needs to be protected, but based on the evidence, I don't see this working as planned. Rather, it appears to be simply a caste system where the current ranked people have now just hard coded their levels and almost no one else will be ranking up from this point forward.
I don't have access to the actual data so I just have to go with my observations. But I would LOVE to see the ranking growth rates since the Merit system was implemented. Probably went from some rapidly growing rate to near zero. Was that the goal? To turn off leveling up? I bet that's what happened.
Here are my limited observations:
1) Merit does not appear to be moving from the haves to the have nots.
-This means we have a liquidity problem
2) Where Merit has moved, it appears to be too infrequent to work as intended, where better posters would be moving up in rank.
-Easy to confirm, just scan the latest threads you are reading and see how many people are still sitting at a round number of Merit (e.g., 10, 100, 250, etc). It's just about everyone. Again, I would love to see a % of accounts that now have anything other than a round number of Merit.
3) Where Merit has moved, it's very hard for the public to know why, who gave it, and for what posting, which leads me to believe, most of the movement has been from people who control several accounts. As a member of the blockchain community (ignore my 'creation account date' I've been in crypto since 2013) we are supposed to be about transparency and accountability.
-For those without a round number of Merit, they appear to have earned just 1 to 4 added points, and again, a scan of their recent posts do not yield anything more impressive than other people's posts (in my opinion). But the lack of transparency will lead to suspicion in this community, as it has done with me. That's just how we roll!
-I realize there is some public tracking going on, but it's not easy to find and therefore doesn't actually work as transparent (IMHO)
4) While BitcoinTalk is flooded with spammers and multiple accounts (and I completely agree that is a problem) under the new system, ranking up has become virtually impossible and will no longer reward activity. While spam is a problem, I believe a new problem will emerge, a lack of interest in posting on this site which will lead to degradation of utility.
-I've worked in many settings where leaders considered cutting some requirement (like how under the old rules, simply posting got your rank on this site). They wanted to cut the requirement because it seemed extra, unhelpful. But I argued against cutting it because although it was not helpful directly for the intended purpose, removing it would very likely lead to a situation where performance would decline and then this seemingly unhelpful requirement would actually once again become useful. I know I'm leaving out detail here, but think of it like an ecosystem. Some would say "who cares if species XYZ goes extinct" until years later they realize that caused a chain reaction that killed off an entire jungle.
Problems and complaints, that's not very helpful. So how about a solution?
I prefer small changes, so what if Merit was no longer tied to ranking up, but the activity level requirements doubled or tripled. Or what if some small amount of Merit was required to level up. Like, people had to earn at least 1 Merit point before moving each rank level. AND, I would recommend you grant people more sMerit to solve the liquidity problem.
To summarize: the Merit change, appears to not be meeting the stated indented goals, and I would urge the leadership of this site to consider an alternative before significant damage is caused to a key institution of the crypt world...this site.
is there a better way out?
. Hopefully we'll see an increase in post quality 
