Scambusting itself is becoming a form of trust farming (not just by Quickseller). Steamroll over a bunch of people, pretend you stopped a bunch of scammers, collect positive ratings, and abuse trusted position even more. This is one of the main reasons I have argued so heavily against "scambusting" in general. People who are wronged will bring it to light, we don't need internet precrime police running around everywhere interfering with what would otherwise be voluntary transactions in most cases.
So are you telling there must not be any scambusters in this forum?
There would definitely be much fewer posts on meta complaining about trust abuse so of course it would be positive. The only problem is there would be so much more threads on scam accusations
Do you really believe that a handful of virtual mallcops are going to stop the tsunami of fraud on the internet? Doubtful. People who are wronged tend to seek justice and bring offenders to light. Preventative precrime type scambusting is inefficient, it also harms reputable users because people want to play private investigator and pump up their trust ratings by harassing people and negative rate them over the flimsiest of pretenses. They get entertained, they look like they are doing something to help, they collect positive trust, then use that trust to abuse their position even more.
Instead of trying to stop the ocean from flooding in why don't you teach some people how to make a boat? We should be focusing on teaching people how to protect themselves, not going on crusades looking for people to crucify to satiate the boredom of a handful of asshats at the expense of the entire community.
Of course having a default trust list won't eliminate all the scams, unfortunately there's no way to do so. However it certainly reduces the number of occurrences. I'm completely sure a lot of scams have been prevented that way and while there are several negative point it's absolutely worth having it until we come up with a better option.
Teaching newbies and everyone how to be safe would help too of course but those two ideas are not incompatible with each other.
And just an advice: to be considered more seriously start speaking directly without generalizing, without trying to put words on other people's mouth and with far less metaphors.
