Of course the other solution is to encourage users of the german subforum to build their own trust networks. Perhaps you put a sticky that says, "take full advantage of what the trust system can offer: add some german guys to your trust list".
I remember your stance on encouraging private trust lists.
As much as I would love to see people creating their own, I doubt that many people, especially newbs, actually do this.
Is there some statistic on that somewhere?
I don't know of any particular measurement, and I agree that most people do not create custom lists. However, I see this as problematic, as leading to a centralized system that can be gamed (see the recent Quickseller drama) due to a central point of failure (to fool everyone, you only need to fool one or two people on the default list). And it's doubly problematic because there's a feedback loop created where because very few people create custom lists, if you do create a custom list and you're not in default trust 1, then you are simply putting yourself out of the loop. You're tuning out the feedback from the trusted few. Of course this might be a good thing to do, but you end up not knowing what the majority of the people are seeing. For example, I have a custom trust list, but I keep having to go back to the trust page to put it back to "default/depth=2" in order to "read the news" about what the vast majority are seeing. I think this feedback loop is a shame because it essentially nullifies all of the nice features the trust system has for creating a robust, decentralized network.
I guess I see your question about how to promote the feedback of some particulare users in your subforum as a great opportunity to try to break out of that feedback loop. If you put a sticky at the top of your subforum that says "ACHTUNG: Bitte prüfen Sie Ihre Vertrauenseinstellungen" ["ATTENTION: please consider your trust settings"<- from google translate, I don't know if it's a good translation
] and within that thread you have people discussing the best German-language posters to add to your trust list in order to see the high-quality ratings they provide as "trusted", then this might lead to people starting to take full advantage of the capabilities of the trust-system software, and perhaps make the overall trust system more robust as a consequence. Who knows, if you do this for your subforum and it's helpful, perhaps other subfora will follow suit. If all of the local subfora have these kinds of stickies and have their users making their own trust lists, perhaps Theymos will consider again whether something like this should be done for the global forum. It's just an idea, anyway.
BTW, I remember theymos suggesting something like a default "create your own trust" page where he suggested a list of 100(?) users to incorporate into your first one. Anyone know what's become of that?
Here are some links to those discussions (including the one where Theymos presented an alternative to default trust):
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/trim-or-eliminate-default-trust-1031791https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/replacing-defaulttrust-914641https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/--1163292I think what happened to that theymos idea is that it lost out in a poll that was at the end of that thread. To be honest, I think that particular idea did have a few flaws that might have been problematic, but I really like the idea of confronting newbies with information about the trust system (in my opinion, newbies should also be simply fine with "opting out"---leaving their trust settings blank and seeing no feedback as "trusted" until they take the time to make a trust list).