nMerit is unnecessary. The forum will always be better with positive vibes.
We do not need that kind of negativity in the world. Yes, I meant world. The world already has enough hate and negativity, we need to work on diminishing that as much as possible. We have to spread love, not hate. This forum is considerably small compared with countries and big communities, but this is where we should start. We should start spreading love at the very nuclear, so that it can be spread at the very plenary.
Have you seen a "dislike" button on facebook, or a "least-liked" button on twitter? No, right?
Why do you think the developers never added them? In fact, this question has been asked to Mark Zuckerberg, CEO and coFounder of Facebook.
The facebook team stated that "the worry with a dislike button is that it would be used to bully or upset people, downvoting their posts as a way of being cruel to the people."
Instead of dislike buttons, they added
like buttons with different emoji's (representing different emotions) such as anger, misery, overjoy, etc. And that's actually really sensible, as human's don't think in binary 0 and 1's. Instead of only like and dislike, they react with complex emotions towards many of events.
So no, there's no need for a negative merit, but if it's mandatory, expository merits can be a good idea. Imagine if you could merit and at the same time comment saying "Creative!", "Informative!", "Funny!", "Shows depth of knowledge!", etc.
EDIT:
There's no need for nMerit, imo. That's the same thing with facebooks Like system, if you don't like it, then don't like it. So if the post is bad and doesn't deserve merit, then don't merit. But if it;s a spam then report it.
Exactly my point. We wrote at the same time
Facebook's like system is a great example for this.