I believe I spent my normal (non-source) merits on that post, and I can pretty much do whatever I want with them. If theymos thinks that this is abuse, he's welcome to remove me as a source.
I don't understand why people care too much on how others use their sMerits (source or non-source sMerits).Good posters will do easily to earn merits, but it takes time to read & learn from documents, guides, rules; read carefully OPs and previous posts before commenting. For them, I don't think they have reasons to complain on why I have not yet earned a single merit? The merit system is broken, and should be fixed or removed. They do not care about the ways other good posters spend sMerits.
Nowadays, people think that sMerits are not only used for good posts, but also used to show agreement/ like. I have no issues with any kind of approach, as long as they don't do sMerits exchanges back and forth, especially for scam platforms, and terrible posts (in term of post quality).
Merit sales, transfers to aliases, back-and-forth trading, etc. are not much of an issue. All illegitimate merit will decay, and will account for a tiny and very expensive fraction of the total merit economy. It's basically a rounding error; fight it where convenient, but waste no sleep over it.
strawman #11134234 
