Hi
What is merit and what is it for?
Does it give any advantage?
And how to earn it?
Thanks
Firstly, let me start by explaining using facebook and Instagram analogy. Merit is just like the likes or love icon you click on a post on facebook or instagram whenever you find the post interesting or useful, it's same thing here on the forum, whenever people find your comment or thread educating or useful, they merit your post (either thread or comment). Same thing with you, you give out merit to a post whenever you find it useful, this is a way of compensating the author of the post for his problem solving skill.
Now, this is the advantage of merit: without merit, you can't move up the ladder of rank in the forum, you can check
here to see the various ranks available in the forum and the corresponding number of
Activities and
Merits required to attain them. Merits help you to scale up your rank in the forum and it could also partially describe your reputation on the forum.
Lastly, to earn merits, your goal should be to
create quality (Educating) post, without this it might be difficult to earn merit on the forum. You must be ready to contribute sterlingly to the forum.
You can also earn merit by participating in some activities that give merit as reward for getting the challenge right, example of this are:
[Merit] Hey Newbies! Can You Sign A Message?, or/and
[Merit] Hey Bitcoiners! Can You Send Encrypted Messages?.
You can also earn merit through the magnanimity of some higher rank members who create threads to assist newbies and people who have little merit left to transit to the next rank, check
here for merit assistance, you might be lucky to be assisted!