In particular, in my view:
- Giving negative trust for being an annoying poster is inappropriate, since this has nothing to do with their trustworthiness. If they're disrupting discussion or never adding anything, then that's something for moderators to deal with, and you should report their posts and/or complain in Meta about it.
- Giving negative trust for merit trading and
deceptive alt-account use may be appropriate, but you should use a light touch so that people don't feel paranoid.
- You should be willing to forgive past mistakes if the person seems unlikely to do it again.
- It is absolutely not appropriate to give someone negative trust because you disagree with them. I'm disappointed in the reaction to
this post. Although H8bussesNbicycles is perhaps not particularly trustworthy for other reasons, the reasons many people gave for neg-trusting him are inappropriate. You can argue that what he's advocating is bad on a utilitarian level, but he would disagree, and his advocacy of a certain Trust philosophy doesn't by itself mean that he's an
untrustworthy person. DT selection is
meant to be affected by user lists, and it is totally legitimate to try to honestly convince other (real) people to use a list more in-line with your views.
I'm not going to blacklist people from DT selection due to not following my views, since a big point of this new system is to get me less involved, but if a culture
somewhat compatible with my views does not eventually develop, then I will consider this more freeform DT selection to be a failure, and I'll probably get rid of it in favor of enforcing custom trust lists.
Thank you for making clear or reiterating some of your stances on the use of these tools. I appreciate your goal here of trying to make this community largely self managing, but I would like to point something out.
Currently most of the standards you just iterated are enforced already to one degree or another by the community as it is. You and the staff almost never need to pick thru these ratings except in extreme cases. I think everyone agrees minimal overlap with the trust system and the staff is preferable for pretty much all involved.
The problem with this logic is your rubric is still extremely subjective, and this ambiguity is very exploitable. I would compare it to the US federal code. People commit felonies every day and they just don't know it because the laws are so obscure and countless. It creates an atmosphere of not only selective enforcement, but ambiguity in what the real rules are because penalties are applied arbitrarily. Stalin once said under his own rule "Show me the man I will show you the crime." While this is largely hyperbolic, it still demonstrates the notion that the forum exists under an atmosphere of constant fear of retaliation over any kind of dissent.
As the system is now it will likely just turn into a giant toxic tumor. I have pretty much said the same for a very long time, and here we are at golf ball size. There is still time to fix it before it is just a total fucking mess that needs to be brought out back and shot in the head. I suggest you ask people to observe a standard of evidence theft, violation of contractual agreement, or violation of applicable laws before negative rating.
This could be enforced exactly as your above guidelines are, and people who don't follow them simply get removed from trust lists. The trust system mostly is self managing, and as it is now intervention is minimal from staff. All the scam hunters can still do everything they are doing, they just will not get the dopamine hit from dropping red ratings all day and lording over people with no evidence.
Just as we as a community decide if some one is guilty of a crime or scam of some kind will be exactly how it will continue, only the rating needs to be the penalty applied after some factual evidence is presented, not before. This change will fix a lot of the rift we currently have forming in this community, and help return us to having a more productive core community. As a result people will trust it more to invest resources into it as they will not fear that they will be the next one burnt at the stake for pissing off the wrong person.