I think the trust system does way more harm to the community than good, it should be removed IMO. The amount of people I get direct messaging me on Twitter complaining how they stopped using this forum because of issues around trust is noticeable, or ranting about Lauda. I don't think these people are necessarily scammers either.
Better to just remove it. I'm sure the overall happiness of the community would go way up. Let people figure out for themselves if someone or a business is trustworthy, as they do on the rest of the internet. It's a noble idea but it just builds resentment among members which might actually lead to more shady and dubious behavior. Mobs going around bullying members with trust scores is shady activity. Feels like more people complain about getting their trust fucked with and characters like Lauda than they do about scams here.
Trust scores are mostly meaningless, it's closer to a popularity contest than a true measure of someone's trustworthiness. Just by using this site, all of you are implicitly trusting me, but that isn't reflected at all in my trust score, in fact I probably seem less trustworthy on first observation than some actual shady people on here. There's so much angst with the whole system, maybe there's a way to make it work better, and tweaking it could eventually lead to that, but for now it just looks like something that's dividing the community.
The problems with the trust system started when threads complaining about DT ratings were moved from Meta to Reputation, which coincided with when DT ratings effectively stopped being both moderated and mediated by the administration and forum. This allowed complaints about trust ratings to go ignored, and those who left questionable ratings were no longer forced to defend their ratings, and ultimately has lead to complaints about ratings being answered with cat pictures and other trolling.
The trust system got much worse (and if the above alone happened, it probably would not have gotten anywhere near as bad as it is now) when Blazed was added to DT1, and eventually added several questionable people who didn't have any business in being in any position of authority. These questionable people eventually earned reputation, conducted business successfully, and were able to "tag" enough scammers for others to trust them, however there were a lot of people "tagged" along the way who weren't by any reasonable definition a "scammer" nor could you reasonably say why they would attempt to scam in the future. IMO, adding Blazed to DT1, and more specifically/importantly, keeping him there when problems went unaddressed, was probably the single worse decision theymos has made as admin (assuming each time the forum was hacked was the result of a bad decision on his part). I can't really blame theymos for adding Blazed to DT1 in the first place, at the time he was trusted by many, had an extensive trading history, was known to be fair both when dealing with others and in his trust ratings, and was willing to take responsibility when he messed up; for the most part, this is mostly true, although he was involved in
this escrow dispute in which millions of dollars were unaccounted for, although it is unclear his specific role as there were multiple escrows, perhaps the reason he escaped unscathed was the lack of public statements and transparency, which is something I find shady in-itself, but I digress. None of these reasons are enough to account for ignoring problems with his trust list.
The problem with ignoring abuses of the trust system for years, as has been done, is that once someone has been "tagged" for a long time, they cannot easily be "untagged" even if the abusers are removed from the trust system. For example, the last time Lauda was outright excluded from DT, some accounts "woke up" and when straight to the lending section to ask for a loan; most of these accounts were probably not reasonably scammers when they were tagged, and if not for the inactivity that was likely caused by the red trust, it might not be unreasonable to believe these people would repay their loans had they not just gotten their "red trust" removed. Obviously given the circumstances, they were unlikely to repay any loan they might receive, and were likely attempting to scam via taking a loan they had no intention of repaying.
The current state of the trust system does not do much in terms of protecting against scammers because the criteria that so many people use to leave negative trust spans so far beyond "tagging" because someone is a "scammer" that the value of "tagging" has become diminished. Someone could attempt to do business with someone with negative trust after reading the comment and believing it is safe to do business with the person, and end up getting scammed, and this could happen many times because the non-DT negative ratings can be chalked up to being from trolls and/or competitors, while the DT negative trust will still not explain why it is unsafe to do business with the scammer.
I have no good solution as to what to do with the trust system. Ideally, we would go back to moderately moderating the trust system, and forcing people to defend their ratings when disputed, however this would also need to involve removing many people from the trust network (see above problem). The forum is also a lot bigger than it was back then, and as such it would be difficult to suddenly accounting for all that growth in terms of the number of disputes; the trust network would also need to be bigger than it was back then, although perhaps not as big as it was immidiately prior to this thread. I don't think the new system is a good change to the trust system, nor is anything that does "not generally be trying to cultivate a good list". There does not appear to be an admin who responds to many meta threads and as such, I don't believe there is an admin who monitors all meta threads (like BadBear did). I think outright getting rid of the trust system is probably extreme.
EDIT: Where are all the scam busters when an
ACTUAL THREAT appears?
Perhaps they were doing something similar to what they were doing in
this thread.
