My idea is that merit should have more of a purpose than merely being required for ranking up. Merit could also function as a post moderating system where posts that earn merit can be viewed first. So spam and useless comments fall to the bottom and the best comments rise to the top.
That would work in a forum where you could merit a post without losing something. Here we are limited to the amount of merit we can give, so we can't merit everything we like.
I'm sure the numbers can be adjusted if needed.
Other sites have made it work very well. I am a very active member of Slashdot. You have limited mod points and it worked for a long time (the site isn't what it was a decade ago as far as technical conversations). I do think all merit should be x10. You should get 10x more merit points and 10x more should be required to rank up. Then you would be able to merit many more posts.
