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THE GOOD
As everybody already knows, the merit system has been introduced to fight shitposting, especially the one produced by account farmers. To this regard, one important fact we have to realize is that shitposting has been growing at alarming rates in the past year, and without the introduction of a slowing down factor, like a merit system, this would have led to the complete destruction of this forum within a few years. Just imagine, in a few years from now, an army of 20,0000+ Legendaries posting just stuff like "Bitcoin soon moon luckily, if not dump" and "why do you bitcoin?". This would have meant the complete loss of any residual meaning of the ranking system on top of a complete loss of any residual meaning of the whole forum, since the background noise of a 99% rate of shitposting by 200,000 Hero Members + possibly millions of Full Members would have made it impossible for anyone to find the very few interesting posts lost in the garbage. We still don't know how efficiently the new system will be able to fight the shitposting spam, but at least it will confine most of it to the lowest ranks, making it economically less remunerative. The merit system is likely to slow down ranking up for everyone, which is obviously frustrating, but this is a very reasonable price to pay to avoid the guaranteed destruction of the forum by the locust swarm.
THE BAD
The new merit system is not yet functioning as it should. It will take time before it will. Whenever people receive a number of merits, they also receive half of the same number of sMerits, which are the merits that they can give to others. This system is strongly deflationary, which means that the initial distribution of sMerits will very soon extinguish itself. If the sMerits don't flow, the rank system overall freezes, which is bad. To replenish the system with sMerits there are merit sources, people who have been chosen to distribute a monthly quota of merits to posts which deserve it. Currently, as far as I know, there are a bit more than 50 sources or so. My sensation is that for a forum with tens of thousands of members, this could end up being largely insufficient, unless each of them had so many sMerits to distribute, that they would be enough to ensure that the overall circulation would keep going. This actual lack of supply of new sMerits is leading many people not to spend the few they have been given initially, which is also bad. Theymos has mentioned that the numbers of sources could grow to up to 200 within a year, we will discover if that will be enough. Merits are now a sort of lifeblood of the ranking system, if they won't move, neither will ranks.
As for the initial distribution is concerned, there is a lot of frustration in the community for the merits not having been distributed proportionally to the activity, which would have been fair for all, but instead each member has received the minimum merit that their rank could get. This has strongly penalized members of high ranks who were about to climb to the next rank, and has been perceived as an injustice, which obviously is. But there is a reason for that. This is a quote of theymos on the subject:
(...) I considered giving merit proportional to activity, but I decided not to because doing so would probably give far more undeserved merit than deserved merit in total. But undoubtedly some people got screwed by this, and if they have decent posts, by all means, give them the 250 or 500 merit that they need to rank-up.
Theymos has clearly a point. Of course the other way a lot of people would have got undeserved merit. While by lowering merit for everybody (but Legendaries), in some way the system has been rendered effective retroactively, which for the sake of the forum would be a good thing, even though it would still be bad for those who actually would have deserved that neglected merit. A good compromise would be to effectively manually review the people who "undoubtedly got screwed by this" and to give them the missing merits if they have decent posts. But I still didn't see any trace of this happening in the forum.
THE UGLY
No matter how good the merit system is meant to be for the forum, there will always be hordes of people trying to turn something good into something bad. The stupidest of them have already been caught sending the sMerits to their own alts and getting red trusted for that. But others will find ways to stealthy make trade of sMerits. Cliques could form for sharing merits in close circles for mutual benefit. Human imagination is limitless when it comes to find ways to bypass a rule.
And then there will be the beggars. Merit Begging has started in the very fist moment the new system has been enforced. And there are many ways to beg. You can do it openly, you can do it in a more discrete, almost implicit way, and you can do it just by trying to please the big holders of sMerit, by telling them what they want to hear and just hoping for their mercy - in other words indulging in that ancient human habit commonly known as "buttlicking". I am afraid, one of the prices to pay to try eradicate one annoying form of ugliness - that is shitposting - is that new form of ugliness would make their appearance in our space. The outcome of a merit system turning bad would be a kind of "feudalistic" Bitcointalk, were the rich sources of sMerit would live surrounded by courtiers doing their best to curry favour with them. Let's hope we don't turn to the dark side...
