A second concern is that I think this system is going to be slow to be able to react to someone who was previously honest and later turns into a scammer.
If someone directly trusts a a scammer, then they are indeed in a bad situation, and they'll need to remove the person manually. I might add a warning to trust pages for people who directly trust a scammer if this ever happens.
It's not a big deal at lower depths due to exclusions.
The exclusions feature would rely on enough highly trusted people using it. Looking at a trust list that only trusts DefaultTrust, I counted a total of 7 people who are excluded by someone who is trusted by default trust. Looking at the hierarchical view only 3 out of 14 people trusted by DefaultTrust have utilized the exclusion feature.
In theory, over time, more people will learn to, and use this feature, so I will give you this one.
With that being said, it is very difficult to know for sure when someone has scammed. A good amount of business is conducted outside of the forum (but originates in the forum) where evidence is less assessable. Not only that but often times the evidence averrable is not complete.
You yourself even recently said that you were not 100% sure that TF in fact scammed all his customers.
A last concern is one that was touched on before, but not heavily discussed. This system would not be difficult to manipulate, but it would be much more difficult to detect manipulation. One could quietly buy up a lot of accounts then buy a 2nd set of accounts they want to be trusted. The first set of accounts could all have the 2nd set of accounts added to their trust list which would result in them being often suggested for newer users to add to their trust list. More experienced users may not even notice when this is happening because they are not being asked to add new users to their trust list.
You'd need a lot of accounts for that. 20 full members to make the list, ~100 to get reasonably high in it (currently -- the requirements will probably become higher if this system is adopted). And I'd stop this from happening once I'd notice it, so people buying these accounts would be spending a lot of money on only a very short-term advantage.
After the market crashed I was able to buy full member accounts for as low as .02 and was able to buy several (250 activity) senior accounts for .055 each. It would probably be somewhat unrealistic to be able to buy 100, or even 20 at those prices, however if you were to double those prices then it would cost roughly .8 to buy 20 full members or 4 to buy 100, and 1.1 to buy 10 seniors 5.28 to buy 48 seniors. This compares to the rough price of between 3 and 3.5 when you market a default trust account for sale (if you wait long enough). Bear in mind that these could potentially be used to create a near unlimited number of "trusted" members.
Not only that but the purchased higher level accounts could potentially be sold once enough other accounts are "infected" by trusting people they otherwise should not trust (this is very similar to how someone can attack a PoS altcoin).
If you stop this from happening once you notice it wouldn't this be moderating the trust system?
Another thing that I found very interesting is that throughout the recent drama regarding Vod giving out negative trust to various people who disagreed with his trust rating, I noticed that they all tended to trust each other and gave each other positive trust feedback. Two of them even traded with each other. (I don't think they are all controlled by the same person). If this kind of trend were to continue then, in theory, all the scammers will trust each other and the scammers will naturally rise to the top of the randomly selected suggested list.
My point here is that Default Trust gives a new user a good starting point about who to trust and who not to trust, while this new system asks them to pick their own "Default Trust" pretty much at random, since they will probably have little reason to pick one name over another.
-snip-
And if a highly-trusted user who was previously suggested starts creating and trusting fake accounts, I'll do something to stop him, or at least warn users.
Again, don't you think this would be moderating the trust system? I think you would agree that the trust system should be moderated as little as possible, however I think this would involve more potential moderation then our current system uses.
I think it would be very difficult to know for sure when this happens. One of the reasons why the sale/trading of accounts is allowed here is because it is not possible to stop, the same principle applies in this case.
I also see that bobsag3 who openly scammed me and had his original username scammer tagged is on the list, adding positive trust for companies like Black Arrow who have stolen hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars from this community.
He's still quite widely trusted. Users will be able to avoid selecting him on the suggestion page.
I could manually exclude people like him, but doing that would likely be controversial in itself, and I'd prefer to keep this as automated as possible.
Outside of this thread, I have never head of bobsag3, how would I know that I should avoid selecting him? I would say this is a good example as to how this kind of system would be very slow to react.
You are correct to say that manually excluding people would be very controversial.
I think your proposing this is essentially a bow to one particular user who is screaming particularly loud about the current trust system. I wouldn't say that it is necessarily correct to make changes to a system or a procedure just because one person complaints loud enough.
I would say that it would probably be appropriate to exclude the opinions of some percentage of the "x" percent of people who are the "loudest" arguing for either "side" of what to do. This would exclude the outliers of the conversation. If you exclude TECHsHARE's position on the current trust system, there are really very few people who are against the current trust system, and really no one who makes an argument with any kind of substance.
