Topic: Should forum persuade users of the merits of customized trust lists? (Read 494 times)

If I understood correctly the remark made by TECSHARE  he claimed that trust lists are gradually becoming a vendetta ones. Is that correct?

Deemed serious by whom? No one cares until it is their personal problem. It costs nothing to dismiss hundreds of incidents as "not serious", then it is you and suddenly it matters but no one else cares, and no one will back you up because anyone who opposes them, they are sure to punish in any way they can. This is not a gradual process, it has been happening regularly for years but anyone who complains is simply dismissed as a scammer. This place is a clusterfuck of ambiguous rules, nepotism, and obsessive compulsive control freaks pretending to be cops.

They raise their own reputation by "busting" people, regardless if they were up to anything objectionable or not. It matters little as any complaints are summarily dismissed, and anyone who can not be dismissed is harassed and excluded from trust lists themselves or negative rated punitively for pointing it out. This system is completely broken, what you are seeing is the illusion of functionality carefully crafted by those that benefit from it most, the "trust police".

We need a standard of evidence of theft, violation of contractual agreement, or violation of applicable laws to serve as a standard for using this system, otherwise abuse of all kinds will operate freely within the ambiguity of standards, leaving us effectively with none.

Depends who you ask.  What you're asking for here is more of an opinion than any kind of absolute truth.  There have arguably been some abuses of the trust system, since it's not really possible to make it infallible, but for the most part, it seems to be working as intended.  There's still time to make adjustments if the abuses that do occur are deemed serious.

Yes I am sure this isn't a reaction to trust lists being weaponized to silence anyone who objects to this type of behavior now is it? You wouldn't know anything about using trust lists to punitively silence people right?

Ahh, that thread by Lauda is probably where I first encountered that page when I was a newbie then. Perhaps it should be more widely advertised, including a link on the Trust Page of anyone without a custom trust list?


The original post by theymos explains how the list is populated (https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/replacing-defaulttrust-914641), but there is no guarantee things haven't changed since then. Essentially the top 60 users based on his criteria are selected, and 30 are displayed at random, with higher trusted users having a higher chance of appearing on the list.

let's agree that the majority of the members are here to spam the forum to get some worthless tokens, and half the minority don't trade any types of goods or services on the forum, if you come to understand this point then it will be easy to understand that most users don't care about trusting/distrusting anyone in the first place, let alone making a customized trust list.

it's also very hard for a new comer to know who to trust, this is what DT is for , another fact to add to the story is that you don't have to add people you trust to your list, for many people it's good enough to know that they can trust the user to trade with and they see no need for a 5 seconds waste of time adding them to their trust list.

Newbies can surely see it if they click on the link.

Trust list suggestion was announced by theymos here and



Newbies could not see this trust list suggestion page directly they at least need to read the rules listed in the sticky thread by lauda on Beginners & Help section or the announcement from theymos above. I will try creating a thread about it in the Beginners & Help explaining its usage to newbies as there is no other dedicated one.

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I have noticed an interesting feature about the link to the trust list suggestion.

Every time you click on the trust list suggestion link or refresh the suggesting page the list of suggested DT members keeps on changing randomly. This makes the system more free for newbies and gives every potential member a chance to be on a forums suggested trust list.

I'm actually not sure. I definitely saw that page at some point when I was a newbie, because I remember being overwhelmed with being told I should be picking names from a list of users I had never spoken to or interacted with, and then deciding to close the window and ignore the whole thing. theymos' suggestion in the thread I linked to (forcing newbies to set a trust list before being able to view marketplace topics) obviously never came about, so it's not that either.

Perhaps someone else could shed some light on this? Perhaps I'm mistaken and newbies don't see it at all, and I just followed the link from another thread somewhere.

Where do newbies see that? When they click on Trust in Profile settings?

It is impossible to write an algorithm for "suggested users" which take in to account the trustworthiness or shadiness of their individual posts or signatures. If you want theymos to start hand-picking users to include on a list of suggestions, then that is essentially a big step back toward the centralized DT system we had before.

Novices could easily fall in to a traps, which is why I think forcing custom trust lists is counter-productive. Recommending them is fine, but the whole point of default trust is to try to protect the newer forum members who don't know who they can trust yet. Forcing them to pick from a list of users that they don't know doesn't really achieve anything. Much better that we recommend they spend some time learning who they can trust first, whilst having at least a bit of protection from default trust ratings.

It does already do that, and you can see the page that newbies would see here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=trust;suggest. Perhaps it needs to be more widely advertised.

The criteria for appearing on that list are a bit complicated, and can be read in this post. This is provided theymos hasn't changed the criteria since creating that page 4 years ago. In short, the majority of people on said list are DT1 members.

Technically he has a trust list  
and he is right when he said...

The current 4.160 Custom Trust Lists are a net 278 up from the toll on the 05/01/2019, so objectively, the changes in the Trust System have not brought along barely any new net Custom Lists. Although the changes really applied on the DT front, there was an encouragement to create our own trust lists (although with just Meta visibility):


Many of those 4.160 trust lists are related to forum members that are no longer active. For example, I make it roughly around 2.473 belonging to forum members active (logged-in a least) since June 2018, and the number drops to around 1.150 if we consider forum members active during 2019 so far.


Having said that as a general context, I’m pretty sure the vast majority of forum members do not know about Trust, and at best, see some coloured numbers related to profiles, and may know that they originate in something called something like DT or so.

Persuading people to create a custom trust list is perhaps not a great idea. Many may not engage or interact with others enough to trust them (their judgment in principle), and getting them to create a trust list may have even the opposite effect of what could be considered a good move.

If people were to create custom trust lists under some sort of pressure, rather than a self-aware decision process, and include a few people that the interact with, everyone would be seeing different versions on the trust score numbers, and only if they drill-down to the ratings (both trust and untrusted) would they get a cleared picture. For the vast majority, I’d say having a DT view will suit their needs best (which in general are none).

Where I’m getting at is that I’d say it is way better to have a DT trust view, than a very small trust view with a not too good a choice custom list member composition.

Taken to an extreme, if Custom Trust lists were to be mandatory from a certain rank onwards (or activity), people may end up copy/pasting other people’s trust lists just to comply. The most popular copied trust list would be a sort of DT-alt set of forum members.

I disagree with the premise of needing topics to explain "the benefits". We need discussions on all aspects of the trust system, particularly if we want more people to use custom list. We have a lot of that, starting here:

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/defaulttrust-changes-5095156

And there are threads aggregating at filtering that info. CryptopreneurBrainboss already provided you a link to a thread specifically about trust lists.


That's false. For example look at LoyceV, DT1 member - has a bunch of threads on all things related to DT/merit/etc and does a whale of a job enlightening everyone who cares to read. There are many other DT1 members discussing the system here in Meta to the point that some whiny bitches users are actually complaining of the opposite (too much talk about DT/merits/etc) but that's another story altogether.

Not everyone is interested in the whole Trust (DT) politics therefore the forum shouldn't pressure them into getting a custom trust list. Personally I wasn't interested too until earlier this year when I picked interested and made my custom trust list after viewing numerous thread started on the whole trust, CTL, and DT system especially this thread;


All the thread relating to CTL started on the forum are already doing the job of advertising therefore, sending  PMs will just be a sign of desperation from the forum.

The main purpose of the trust system must be to reduce the amount of scamming. So people who have scammed, along with users who are untrustworthy and are very likely to scam, should be tagged. I agree custom lists should be used, this would reduce the abuse and would allow people to see trust left by users they personally trust. However the main purpose of the trust system should not be lost.

The forum should encourage custom lists as long as that feature is not misused in a way not enough feedback is seen by default. I think the forum should list some recommended users to newbies and may even have some minimum requirements like adding minimum 5 users (custom DT1) who have at least 20 users in their lists (custom DT2) who have left trust at least 100 or 200 times (custom trusted feedback). That way the user who created that custom list will still see a lot a scammers marked with a nice "Trade with extreme caution.".

As DooMAD said, if everyone removes DefaultTrust and adds a single user then the main purpose of the trust system would be defeated. Using DT would be much better in those cases.

Okay, but you do realise the part where, if everyone set up their list in the same way as you have, the trust system wouldn't actually work correctly, right?

There is definitely an argument to be made for leading by example.

There are many threads on the topic already; "no, thank you" to forum-sent PM spam; adding an announcement (not a banner) at the top of the page might be OK at some point once the dust settles.

But in general users should learn how the system works and not just set up lists because someone told them to. It takes time to get to know people you can trust. And some assholes try to discredit the idea of trust lists by weaponizing them.

I have a question: why didn't you set a custom Trust list yet?
This is yours now:
One way to promote Custom Trust lists is by actually using it. And post a link to Trust settings in all relevant topics
I don't think banners are going to convince the users who know about it already.