The introduction for one merit to rank up is not designed to prevent the average real member from ranking up. It is purely aimed at shit-posters from signature campaigns and "bots".
Shit-posters are people who purely post to meet bounty quotas, have no real interest in exchanging ideas or post incomprehensible garbled nonsense.
Often - just engaging with other members is not necessarily considered worthy of merit.
But they are valued as a conversation.If you are chatting to others - that is not considered shitposting. But it may make getting merit more difficult.
TMAN'S guide to getting merit.Giving merit to shit-posters is one of the reasons senior members are careful with giving merits to Newbies:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=merit;stats=topsendbanAs you can see - merit is sometimes wasted on those that really don't deserve it.
However - there has been a real drive to give merit to newbies who deserve it.
[TOP-200] Members who support newbies Senior members are not anti newbies (even though it may appear that way sometimes - senior members (especially on Meta) are often involved in reporting lots of spams and fighting scams - so they are anti spambies and anti scambies).
Users that participate are very welcome in the forum. Some things are un-moderated to it does pay to not be offended too easily.
The reason senior members often get a lot of merit is because:
1) To rank from Newbie 4 ranks to Full Member = 100 merit
2) To rank up from Full member 3 ranks to legendary = 900 merit
The changes are really working:
All posts:
+----------+-------+
| Days ago | posts |
+----------+-------+
| 0 | 26510 |
| 1 | 42433 |
| 2 | 46736 |
| 3 | 54921 |
| 4 | 45271 |
| 5 | 48072 |
| 6 | 48926 |
| 7 | 46559 |
| 8 | 45886 |
| 9 | 49366 |
| 10 | 55894 |
| 11 | 47335 |
| 12 | 50829 |
| 13 | 53678 |
| 14 | 48648 |
| 15 | 49082 |
| 16 | 50333 |
| 17 | 57172 |
| 18 | 48595 |
| 19 | 52579 |
| 20 | 57679 |
| 21 | 40384 |
| 22 | 54342 |
| 23 | 56030 |
| 24 | 61043 |
| 25 | 48891 |
| 26 | 48744 |
| 27 | 50118 |
| 28 | 47206 |
| 29 | 51689 |
+----------+-------+
Deleted posts (not necessarily by a moderator):
+----------+-------+
| Days ago | posts |
+----------+-------+
| 0 | 749 |
| 1 | 3004 |
| 2 | 2430 |
| 3 | 1950 |
| 4 | 2275 |
| 5 | 2395 |
| 6 | 2836 |
| 7 | 3439 |
| 8 | 2743 |
| 9 | 3244 |
| 10 | 3793 |
| 11 | 5510 |
| 12 | 5153 |
| 13 | 5681 |
| 14 | 4870 |
| 15 | 5974 |
| 16 | 4685 |
| 17 | 5909 |
| 18 | 7518 |
| 19 | 7709 |
| 20 | 6472 |
| 21 | 5671 |
| 22 | 8891 |
| 23 | 7594 |
| 24 | 6634 |
| 25 | 6694 |
| 26 | 6433 |
| 27 | 5401 |
| 28 | 6260 |
| 29 | 5504 |
+----------+-------+
That's "24-hour periods from now", not calendar days.
There was a bug for the last ~7 hours which prevented all newbie posts, so that's going to make a big dent in the stats.
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This user just started posting after the new rules announced back in September 17 while the account were created back in August 30. An alt account probably and were trying to receive more than 1 merit to send merits to his/her main account that might be a demoted Jr. Member for now. This is only my instinct but I feel like I'm 100% correct 
