Money, always at the center of every fucking problems on earth.
What do you expect? The world revolves around money.
If it wasn't for bounty, every single user would be happy with this system, which might help this forum getting cleaner. And of course, if this wasn't about greed, this system wouldn't be needed in the first place.
That's not true. Although a huge majority of the shitposts in this forum is contributed by bounty hunters and signature campaign participants, it cannot be said that every single user would be happy with the merit system even without the presence of any bounty. The merit system has been detrimental for those who need to rank up and participate in bounties which has made a lot of them to complain and hate the system however this does not necessarily mean that the merit system is beneficial or favorable for those who are not involved in bounties.
Imo, I would even go farther, and distribute signature bounty according to merit instead of quantity. Let's say that instead of 15 posts a week, you must now get 4 merits per week to get your reward:
- You would divide by 2 instantly the number of (shit)posts on the whole forum. Cleaner, but also easier to moderate as well.
- Signatures, paradoxically, would be much more visible. Let me explain: When you have a topic with 100 pages of shitposts, you don't read it, so you don't see any signature ! So 15 or 30 posts doesn't really matter, it is just pointless if no one reads it. Now if you only have 2 pages of quality posts, you would read them before writing your reply, so you would see everyone signature. Plus, you could see if what you're about to say have been said already, which would reduce even more the number of post.
Cleaner forum, with ONLY quality, and signature more visible. Win-win (lose for spammers).
The thing is, sometimes people don't need a quality post to see a signature. So long as it's in a thread, it would attract attention. (the more times it appears in a thread regardless of it's content, the more attractive it is). And this is probably why some campaign managers hire participants not for the quality or content of their post, but because of often the user posts in numerous threads and sections of the forum. The signature still gets promoted in that way, which is the reality of campaigns so to speak.