The abuse of the new merit system is off the charts in my opinion.
....
I know that it is too early to condemn the merit system, but my initial optimism has quickly
faded.
The thing is that they'll soon run out of the sMerit they got in the airdrop and then all Merit will have to be earned. So I don't think this period will last long.
If they could only print sMerit like Tether can print USDT...
I´m just kidding
![Grin](https://bitcointalk.org/Smileys/default/grin.gif)
The problem is not only due to people giving away their initial sMerit balance. One
of the links I posted shows an example of blatant plagiarism where a newbie
copy&pasted posts by theymos and SM23031997 and received praise and merits
for this. These rewards were not coming from random accounts with nefarious intentions,
they were made by Hero members, who have already earned merits for their own posts.
They mistook a blatant plagiarism for a genuine high-quality post. Would the user in question
have made this plagiarism without the new merit system? I´d guess probably not, because
in order to rank up he could have made a random short post anywhere over Bitcointalk. But now
he is incentivized to at least create the impression that his posts are high-quality.
This opens up a whole new angle where we potentially will see a lot of plagiarized posts
in attempts to get easy merits.
Besides, a highly-active high quality poster like you has only earned 7 merits so far
while countless of shitposters have earned a multiple of that. Is this the way that
the new merit system was intended? Genuine, high-quality posts in Technology & Development
are seeing 0 merits while random ICO thread bumps are rewarded with dozens of merits.
As of now this system is completely broken and I can only hope that the situation will
get better once the initial sMerits balances are gone. However, due to the issuance mechanism
for every sMerit that gets donated to a random ICO thread bump, the person, who received
the merits now has also new sMerits to spend.