You shouldn't be creating content soley just to rank up. You should be making content to contribute something constructive. If you create a thread and it receives no merits so what? If you keep making quality content then you will get the merit eventually but if you're just seeking merit then you're doing it for the wrong reasons and if this causes you to lose motivation then good riddance.
Why don't we demerit for spam, off topic, insults or scam attempts and increase thereby the quality of this forum?
If their would be somehow a punishment for bad quality post this would really motivate people to increase their forum behavior.
I would be against everyone being able to demerit as it would be abused by nefarious individuals just demeriting people for saying something they don't like. Maybe it wouldn't be a bad idea for staff to be able to do so instead of just removing threads or temp banning certain individuals for instance when people create a thread like what are you doing for valentines day in Politics & Society. I certainly think if they received minus merit for these sorts of threads they'd get the message pretty fast.