Much as I may like my analysis, neither of those threads now reflect how trust works. @Theymos modified the trust system this June (see
Trust flags). There are now two dimension to trust (+ a lateral dimension of determining the DT network): Trust Flags and Trust Rates. In essence, although those two threads have part of the fundamentals, the Trust System does not work exactly that way anymore.
I think that several of the problems with Trust were because three different goals were being jammed into one system:
1. Getting a general idea of someone's trade history and trustworthiness in one convenient location, sort of like reviews on sites like EBay. <…>
<…> Use-case #1 is the old trust system, but I made the descriptions on the rating types a bit more general and removed the concept of a trust score. The numbers are now "distinct positive raters / distinct neutral raters / distinct negative raters". You should give these ratings for anything which you think would impact someone's willingness to trade with the person, but you should not use trust ratings to attack a person's opinions or otherwise talk about things which would not be relevant to reasonable prospective traders. <…>
In other words, the Trust Score (a derivate of the positive and negative trust scores over timr ) does not exists anymore. Instead, all three counters are now independent. For example, you can have 2 positive trust scores, none neutral, and three negative ones. Those 3 counters stay as they are, with no aggregate summary counter as there was before. It is always up to each person to determine if the trust feedback itself is meaningful to him or not in accordance to his interests.
Note that in the above quoted text, the idea of these ratings and their feedback should be related to trade. This was the original intent shown in the link you referenced from @theymos, but criteria is personal and, overtime, it has been used for all sorts of things, tagging people for reasons that differ from trade in one way or another. That feedback is still there, and some people have revised to some extent some of their prior feedback in accordance to this guideline.
I don’t want to extend myself much further (done so enough), so I’ll skip flags here (refer to link above for a full understanding).
Complementary:
[GUIDE] Overview of the trust flags