How will you earn merit in bitcoin?
I figure you mean Bitcointalk ...
Actually, being concerned with what Merit is and how it is awarded on this forum right from the start is good, since you can avoid many of the common errors made on this forum, which head you completely in the opposite direction.
The basics that you need to grasp is that, in order to be awarded Merit, your posts need to stand out a bit from the average post, transmitting something that seems constructive, interesting, controvertíal, knowledgeable, or whatever it may be. The important thing is to focus is on investing time on your posts, and not posting just in order to increase your activity. Documenting yourself and being able to give a personal view on a given subject is appreciated, whilst non-contributive onliners will never ever get you any merit.
Bear in mind that all your posts count, helping to build your persona through your posting history. That is very often looked at by merit awarders, so even if you make a decent post, having a crappy posting history will likely get you nowhere.
Do not post in megathreads, as they are considered basically spam threads and merit awarders rarely go into those swaps at all. Visibility is a feature, and good posts in megathreads will render invisible.
99,9% of the times, bounty hunting is an enemy of merit. Unless you are rather exceptional, here again a posting history constructed by multiple bounty reports says very little for your persona, and you will very likely be ignored meritwise. If bounty hunting is your core goal, forget merit altogether, as you will never receive enough to rank up.
There is an overall shortage of sensible merit in my opinion (founded on what I’ve seen through statistics). This is also an increasing opinion amongst the higher ranks, but so is the fact that there is a lot of spam all over the forum. Spam will likely bury some good posts, but you need to stand out a bit to be merited since merit is rather picky, possibly due to it’s scarcity.
In summary, put effort into your posts. A decent amount of effort will likely be spotted, but no effort is just skipped at the speed of light.
Merit awarders are not magical creatures that roam the forum. They are people like you and me, and award merit because they believe it helps the forum overall to contain spam amongst other things. This is rather time consuming, so all in all this works both ways, as meriters would rather find decent posts to merit than waste their time.
A full explanation of how merit is generated can be found here:
re:Who can award merits.
