The problem is the posts in Altcoin Discussion are so atrociously bad that merit sources (for the most part) don't go there anymore. So there may indeed be a few informative, substantive posts being added to that section every day, but they are sandwiched between heaving loaves of shitposts, in shit topics about nothing, so nobody will ever seen them.

I actually remember a time when there was loads of interesting stuff in Altcoin Discussion. And every once in a while I necromance such threads for the sake of adding some new context. Frequently I'm surprised at how good posts there used to be compared to what they are now.

Mr v and eth crushed ath gpu mining

I did thousands of posts on mining with gpu all made obsolete by eth going pos.

Only scrypt is viable for mining.

But there are around 9000 pos coins to bs about.

Trump coin is on a roll bla bla bla.

Once gpu mining died alts became a ghost town

It seems a strange position to proclaim that a person should feel inspired to waste brain cells on content that he knows to be overwhelmingly shitty in order to potentially discover some value within the shitty content.

I am not going to proclaim that I am of the practice of removing myself from shitty content (or shitty threads), since I already have a practice of reading through quite a few mediocre posts and threads, and so even within the mediocre threads that I read, there are a lot of shitty posts... which brings me back to a question regarding why would I want to purposefully go to threads that I already know are shitty with a hope of finding a gem in the rough? 

That does not seem like a good goal, and sure there might be some merit source members who are more interested in shitcoins and shitcoin related topics, so incidentally some of the shitty threads still might have participation from merit source members, and yeah, maybe theymos could purposefully identify some of the good posting members who are interested in shitcoins, and turn them into merit  source members.  I had frequently thought that the quantity of merit source members would go up, yet the forum has been stuck at a similar number of merit source members for most of the time that the merit system has been in effect.  Yeah, maybe in the very beginning there were less than 100 merit source members, yet as was posted above, it seems that we have been stuck between 108 to 130 merit source members for more than 6 years..and for some reason theymos seems reluctant to raise the quantity of merit sources to a higher number, yet maybe there is a sense that "if it ain't broken," yet members still do seem to raise valid concerns that the distribution of merits is not spread out sufficiently enough.. even though the complaints in recent times do not seem to be as great as they were in the first few years of the merit system, so maybe many of us are getting used to the current status quo merit source member dynamics.

The problem is not like merit sources are ready to read visit altcoin board and read posts in this board for finding hidden gems then meriting those gems. There are threads to submit quality posts to merit sources for review and if they see quality, they will do merit distribution.

The issue is merits are used to merit shit posts around the forum like no issue at all, and it is going far against why merit system was launched in January 2018. Monthly sourced merit is limited and if more sourced merit is used for shit posts, more quality posts will not be merited. When we allow it to happen at big scale, merit will concentrate to shit posts and we will have more shit posters with more beautiful merit stats than good posters. I of course don't say about best posters (like top 100, top 200 or top 500) in the forum, but normal quality posters will receive less merit while shit posters will receive more.

Now shitpost can receive not only 1 merit, but 5, 10 or more.

As consequence of that abuse, there is proposal of demerit sources. 
LoyceV's deMerit source application.

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One of merit sources in altcoin board is tk808 was banned months ago.

I've visited that section pretty recently and in fact have started up one thread this year and at least one last year.  I was genuinely looking for community input, but what do I get instead?  97% nonsense--if I got any replies at all--which was enough for me to give up completely on every single one of the altcoin sections. 

Unless you create a thread with a title that asks a simple question (like ETH vs. gold or some such BS) that bounty shitposters can have a canned answer for, forget it.  Any good posts with thought put into them get drowned in the ocean of zero-thought, zero-value crap.  And it's been that way for years.

I visit the altcoins boards every now and then to distribute merit, but there is usually so much spam there that I can barely find any decent posts in there and end up meriting only 2-3 posts.

That is how it has always been even though quality has dropped over the years as there used to be more high quality discussions there when we had the ico meta on the forum. Now, even people that used to be active there are actively pissing on the place lol.

imo, the reason most people don't visit there at all is due to the assumption that all posts in that section of the forum is outright spam. So even if there are a few good ones, it doesn't matter to them which is fine too. they often say the same about the gambling board as well.

There has been a little change, which I observed from the merit source data board. We previously had about 109 merit sources, and currently the number has been reduced to 88, and the total number of Smerits by source is down to 31318 from 32990. A lot of inactive merit sources have been removed, and from the announcement on Meta, it appears that a few merit sources have also been added. This could be what the admin was doing the day merit sources were experiencing a bug on their merit send page (negative Smerit).

You're right. I saw that there have been some new updates specifically here on Meta regarding the new merit sources. As of June 6th, Theymos sent out a message about it. So far, I know that Charles-Tim and Cryptoaddictchie have officially been appointed as merit sources. It also seems like Theymos has approved them as Local Board merit sources.

Edited to include link.