As other members already stated, this is a private forum, so the owner has any right to do what he thinks is the best move to improve his property.
It doesn't make any sense to complain about any aspect we don't like; much better to be grateful for the opportunity we have to learn a lot and - eventually - to have a little extra income from campaigns.
So, not with the intention to complain, but just to offer some ideas, here are my two cents: the intention behind the merit system is very good, and I think that only spammers and shitposters don't agree. What I find inefficient - and probably more of the "complainers" agree with me - are mainly these two aspect:
1) the system is really too unbalanced in favor of old members. I understand that I have to earn my position, and I agree that only "good members" will rank up. But if I read the old posts of a lot of high rank members, I find a lot of shitpost, and I just wonder why "they" had this privilege by luck in the meanwhile I have to work hard for the same results. I agree, life is unfair, but this aspect is very disturbing.
2) the merits are too scarce. I had ONE. Now I have THREE. Really, a so little number make me anxious to give them. Even if I like a post. I think it's the same for other low rank members. The result is that may be I write a masterwork (I'd like...) but nobody has merit to give to me.
The only members with a lot of merits to give are Legendaries (another privilege..), but it seems that they prefer to reward each other, may be just to show friendship. I'm pretty sure you did some math projections, but in this way the system it's really too rigid. Of course, may be I'm wrong. We'll see.
But please accept the idea that - even if the meirt system is a good point to start - there is a lot of space for improvement.
It's too early to get a clear picture, but my thoughts so far:
First, most people complaining about merit are constantly posting garbage, and
should not rank-up. The forum is not a welfare system; you don't run through a few hoops and then get paid for doing something that nobody actually wants. I like that good forum members can make money,
especially when said forum members are in poorer countries and this is a major opportunity for them. I very much do not want to destroy the sig-ad/airdrop/bounty "industry". But I am not going to tolerate people posting garbage upon garbage. If the merit system completely fails and I can't think of anything else to replace it, then my next step will probably be to completely
remove all ways for forum users to make money from posting (eg. removing signatures entirely).
Maybe there are ways for people who were making money by posting garbage on the forum to make money on other sites with easy bounties, etc. (For example, I don't know if they're actually any good, but
https://bountyhive.io is currently advertising on the forum.) But people should use the forum to
talk about these money-making ideas, not as a way of making money itself. Once you spend a lot of time here, you may be able to make some money here (which is great!), but you should consider this a far-off hope, not your primary objective.
BTW, if anyone has any ideas for simple things that these ex-nonsense-posters could
usefully do to make money, I think that this'd be a good project right now. There are apparently quite a few people who were making money on the forum and could use guidance. Even though their past activities were not good for this forum, I doubt that they are useless in general.
Merit awards may be too spotty/uneven currently, though it's still too early to say. In addition to continuously adding more sources, if things could still use improvement in this regard in a couple of months, I may do something like decay old sMerit and unused source merit and randomly redistribute the decayed merit. How the random distribution would work would
magnify past merit -- so perhaps you would get an increased chance of winning extra merit for every post you've made which has at least 1 merit, but certainly you would not get any extra merit if none of your posts was ever merited.
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.
I think that actmyname has been too hasty with some of his negatives, but I haven't had time to look carefully enough into it to justify making forceful changes. I did exclude actmyname from my trust list, so another DT1 could remove him from the default trust network by doing the same.
