In short, there are likely some factors that affect how users at different ranks have different merit usages:
- Understanding and experience on forum structures, rules, systems (include merit system)
- Post quality
- Ability to assess post quality of the others
Please read my very old analysis:
Where receivers received merits from, and meriters sents merits to.
If you don't like boring figures, you can look at given bar charts. The fact is Legendary and Hero members have earned most merits on the forum and they surely have better knowledge on the forum structures, rules, especially how to use merits appropriately. More importantly, their post quality is much better than lower ranked users. Hence, I don't feel strange to see they send most of their sMerits to other Legendary and Hero members.
However, if you look at lower ranks, they have received most of their merits from higher ranks, especially from the Legendary and Hero member ranks. The three lower ranks: Jr. Member, Member, and Full member tend to send their sMerits to users who have same ranks too. I don't blindly say what they do are merit abuse but I am sure part of them do abuse the merit system. There is no in-depth analysis about it but I know when the demotion on Junior members in September 2018 (a spike, you can easily see it), there were massive merits distributed to demoted Jr. Members and help them ranking up again to Junior Members.
In ntransactionsReceivers:- They received merits mostly from Legendary, and Hero members.
- Exception is Global moderators, who received merits from Legendary (1st), Staff (2nd), and Hero Member (3rd) but the difference in percents between Staff (15.3%) and Hero Member (14.8%) is very small.
Senders:- They mostly send their sMerits to Legendary members.
- Jr. Members, Members, and Hero members usually sent their sMerits for the others at the same ranks.
In values of transactionsReceivers:- For all ranks of receivers, majority of their earned merits come from Legendary members.
- Jr. Members: received their merits mostly from Legendary, Hero members, and Members (descendingly).
- Members: received their merits mostly from Legendary, Hero members and Members (descendingly).
Senders:* Rememebers, stats are percentages in
values of merit transactions.
- Brand new: Mostly (50%) sent their merits to Members.
- Jr. Members: sent their merits to Members (31.9%), Jr. Members (27.6%).
- Members: sent their merits to Members (39.6%), Jr. Members (14.8%).
- Full Members: sent their merits to Full Members (21.7%), Jr. Members (21.2%).
- Sr. Members: sent their merits nearly equally to Members to Legendary (with percentages from 16.7% to 18.8%).
- Hero members: sent their merits to Hero members (26.3%), Legendary (22.4%).
- Legendary members: sent their merits to Legendary members (37.2%), Hero members (20.4%).
- Staffs, and Global moderators: sent their merits to Legendary members and Hero members (from 16.9% - 34%).
- Admins: mostly sent merits to Sr. Members (23.1%).
