When a post truly deserves to be merited, it can be merited as many as possible, for example someone might post a topic that and it was read and loved by 1000 people, 200 of them chose to merit the post and what you are saying is that if I read the post and it touches a chord in my heart, I shouldn't merit it just because it has been merited by others? <…>
I was actually wondering about that a few days ago, from a psychological point of view. When we see a post that is (well) merited, we focus on the content, but cannot avoid looking at who merited it and how much. That could lead to:
a) Nothing, I’m immutable to influence other than the post content itself (poster may or may not also be a subconscious factor, but that’s not what I’m on about right now).
b) It influences me (conscious or subsconscious) to merit the post, because others have already found it deserving of merits.
c) It influences me (conscious or subsconscious) not to merit the post, because it has already been merited
enough.
Scenario "a" is the most objective one, but I bet "b" and "c" play a heavy hand on some multi-merited posts. That is part of the psychology, and it would be an interesting experiment (conceptually) to do something similar to what Instagram is doing is some places (hide the "like"), by hiding the merits on the posts from viewers (except the person merited), and seeing what happens. Not going to happen on Bitcointalk, but definitively an interesting experiment.
By the way, this is the distribution of the number of meriters per post:
nMeriters nPosts % Posts
1 138431 77,89%
2 22780 12,82%
3 7589 4,27%
4 3361 1,89%
5 1767 0,99%
6 1121 0,63%
7 642 0,36%
8 423 0,24%
9 323 0,18%
10 234 0,13%
11 167 0,09%
12 147 0,08%
13 123 0,07%
14 93 0,05%
15 57 0,03%
16 67 0,04%
17 38 0,02%
18 36 0,02%
19 45 0,03%
20 28 0,02%
21 14 0,01%
22 26 0,01%
23 18 0,01%
24 11 0,01%
25 17 0,01%
26 12 0,01%
27 12 0,01%
28 17 0,01%
29 8 0,00%
30 8 0,00%
31 12 0,01%
32 6 0,00%
33 4 0,00%
34 8 0,00%
35 6 0,00%
36 3 0,00%
37 4 0,00%
38 6 0,00%
39 4 0,00%
40 2 0,00%
41 3 0,00%
42 4 0,00%
43 3 0,00%
44 2 0,00%
45 1 0,00%
46 3 0,00%
47 4 0,00%
48 1 0,00%
49 1 0,00%
50 1 0,00%
51 3 0,00%
52 1 0,00%
55 3 0,00%
56 1 0,00%
58 1 0,00%
59 1 0,00%
60 1 0,00%
63 1 0,00%
66 1 0,00%
69 1 0,00%
74 1 0,00%
82 1 0,00%
86 2 0,00%
88 1 0,00%
103 1 0,00%
106 1 0,00%
144 1 0,00%
158 1 0,00%
198 1 0,00%
328 1 0,00%
77,89% of the merited posts are done so by a single person, and 12,82% by 2 people. The record is 328 people meriting a single post. Guess which one.