@DooMAD
If they're really not adding anything, then they shouldn't get merit. But it doesn't need to be mind-blowing, either. Someone suggested a feature where all umerited posts would be hidden (which I may do at some point) -- I think that it'd be good to look at it as asking what posts you would want in such a summary. So not just incredible posts which might've taken an hour or more to write (those should probably get 10+ merit), but also the questions, arguments, jokes, etc. which couldn't be removed from a thread without starting to lobotomize it.
It's all very new, of course, so maybe this strategy will not actually be the best, but it is what I had in mind when designing the system.
@TMAN, I have been adding sources, and I will continue.
Surely, we are all getting used to this whole system, and it may take several months to assess how it is playing out.
Right now, it seems quite likely that several members have not even figured out what is the merit system and they may be a bit trigger shy about using it or they may have already tried to use it in ways that were experiments, or mistakes.
Furthermore, there can be a little bit of an adjustment for members to start thinking about the quality of posts of others and to employ such a merit sending tool, even though there are some similarities and differences with upvoting or liking.
I understand that you want to create incentives for members to not hoard their smerit, yet there may be a variety of strategic reasons that members want to hoard some of their smerits and to strategically send them or to have them available to send at a time and kind of post that suits their awarding preference(s), so I don't really like the idea of decay, unless such a decay were to be implemented in a very conservative manner and still allow for some hoarding and maybe would be a very slow decay, if there were not any movement of smerits in an account, that would be enough to incentivize some spending/sending of completely non-moving smerits.
By the way, if a user only wants to see merited posts, then sure, that seems like a good option; however, I am doubtful that I would ever use that option because I have a preference to see contexts, which is also the same reason that I do not use the "ignore" button because I can easily skim through or skip any poster that I have recognized to post shitty. On the other hand, I don't really find fault with any member who wants to use the ignore button - because they feel that such a feature is helpful to them in terms of their time management, or stress, or information overload or whatever personal reason that they have.