No. Poal is a communications platform. It seems to allow anyone to post whatever they think is interesting or important. Merit is up to the audience to decide. Personally, I find much of the content uninteresting. I have no interest in much of the discussions going on. And I find there are also many interesting topics and posters on here. I seem to run into the same group of about 20-30 people most of the time. I ignore conversations and topics I don't care about. Sometimes that means I don't respond to most posts: it's noise to me. That's ok. I don't demand content I like. I just don't find merit in it.

Monarchy. Nothing wrong with that. If you like the monarch, it's good. If you don't, then you wouldn't like it regardless of the system.

Let me preface this by saying I really don't care. With that being said, I've seen low level people suddenly jump to blue or red for some reason. Not going to name names, but a few users do come to mind. I don't know the story behind why, maybe they've done something to deserve it. Unexplained things like that make it look as if it's not exactly a meritocracy based on points alone. There must be other ways to become The Poal Elite that have nothing to do with the points. Let me stress again that I don't care, I'm not trying to stir trouble, they're just stupid internet points. Just an observation.

At the rate I'm going, I've estimated I'll level up somewhere around 2025, and that's fine with me.

Edit: I've thought about this for about an hour now, and it seems as though the level jumpers are usually always prolific posters who provide a lot of link content for the site, and the level jumps are maybe an incentive to stick around and keep on trucking along.

Indeed.

It's a message board.