I appreciate the helpful comment. I saw a post awhile ago about someone talking about how participating in a signature bounty lowers the chances of earning merit because it shows that the user wants to do bounties, rather than providing value to the forum or something like that.
I don't give merits to members of signature campaigns for exactly that reason. I know that there are at least a few other people that also do not give merits to members of signature campaigns, but I don't know how much of a difference it makes overall.
Honestly I didn't agree with you. Wether some member doing signature campaigns or not should be the base for giving Merits. I think sometimes person who didn't do bounties does not mean that member contributes to the forum greater ways. May be that member is shitposting more than the member who do the signature campaigns.
I think some members looking at their reputation in the forum ( I also think it matters ) before giving away their sMerits. Though Bitcointalk is not a money making place, I don't think getting some passive income while contributing to the forum is not a big issue. I don't need to do any signature campaigns to earn few bucks since I covered my income sources. But sometimes we didn't know about other members story from their point of view.
I don't encourage to do Bounties or signature campaigns since most of the occasions it ends up creating spammers/shitposters. That's how typical behavior of humans when it comes to the money. Finally I want to quote what our great "Theymos" said about Merits. However at the end of the day, it's up to the members how they should spend their hard earned Merits since it's theirs not the people who commentating( including me) about how they should spend
While we will not be directly moderating this, I encourage people to give merit to posts that are objectively high-quality, not just posts that you agree with.