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That was a nice welcome to the forum indeed …
The VPN you state you are using, since it’s a Brave extension, I’d assume it’s not a proper VPN, but rather much a proxy. Regardless, that is not really the issue, nor the nature behind at this stage. I may not like your proposal (as others on the VPN thread), but that does not qualify for negative Trust in my book.
Trust feedback’s main aim is on providing feedback for economical transactions. This here does not quality as such, since it is an opinion based on "poor criteria" (as per the tagger’s criteria). If we go by poor criteria we’d probably have to tag the majority of accounts here on the forum at some point, mine included.
Now some people tag others for reasons related to scams, and here we fall on the frontier of what the Trust system covers in intent. Indeed if someone is deliberately trying to scam others, there is an economical nature under the surface, and therefore using Trust tagging is applicable in principle, providing there is solid evidence that the intent is to scam, and the intent here for me is key. Here I do not consider that you had an intent of the nature.
Tagging is also used for all sorts of other reasons, which it should not, and at some point, it would be better to have a dual system: one for economical feedback and one for other type of feedback (such as "nice guy", "dumb troll" and so forth). That nevertheless is a different matter, and we only have the current system to go with (along with the Trust Flag system which is more to the point on economic issues in principle).
It’s probably best to
read the whole post I’m going to extract here, but I’m highlighting the core principle of the ratings here as per the real
one above all (on the forum):
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Ratings
- Leave positive ratings if you actively think that trading with this person is safer than with a random person.
- Leave negative ratings if you actively think that trading with the person is less safe than with a random person.
- Unstable behavior could very occasionally be an acceptable reason for leaving negative trust, but if it looks like you're leaving negative trust due to personal disagreements, then that's inappropriate. Ratings are not for popularity contests, virtue signalling, punishing people for your idea of wrongthink, etc. <…>
Bearing that in mind, negative trust here is uncalled for in my opinion.
The main problem is that not that many people know the exact usage to apply to the Trust System, and that makes the textboxes’s content spin away from the system’s intent. There is also no real hardcore concensus on all that is applicable, regardless of what the quoted text above states.