Topic: The DT system needs to change. (Read 880 times)

Do you in anyway think that the management of Trust system has not been managed well and caused great legends who have more influence outside of the forum to see this forum as bygone relic? The trust system was introduced for a purpose and such purpose it’s serving currently. The trust system might be misused or not well handled or abused by some members who have the privilege to be one, maybe through their subordinate they’re able to give a DT2 rank. If at all a change need to be made, facts needs to be there for such members that have abused the system. And also for DT2 to be giving that position, maybe they should pass through two more confirmation by other DT1 member, since some people feel they’re abusing the system. 



It is difficult to make a modification as stated. It must pass a number of evaluations made by representatives with voting rights. It will take time to come up with ideas to amend the rule; it won't be simple right away.

Roughly 99% of the people currently on DT have very little or 0 significance to crypto space outside of this forum.

Thus the greater crypto community has started to largely ignore and consider this forum a bygone relic. DT1 is a joke, Trust system is a joke, a joke at the expense of real legends that founded and made this forum famous.

@theymos should know better, perhaps he is the only person left who gives a shit about the DT lists who also has any clout in the real world, so if your entire political system has collapsed into an irrelevant echo chamber, it's high time for a change.

A change that should have happened about 3 years ago when most people had greater hopes left for satoshi's legendary forum and this place hadn't become a ghost town outside of signature cronies and salaried yes men...

The advantage is obvious: being able to improve the forum by sharing your view on who can or can't be trusted. If you're not on DT, it's often overlooked.

That's obvious too: in any democracy, people disagree, and some abuse their power.

I did that already

First of all, what exactly is the advantage of DT power? why so much drama about it?
As a DT, I didn't recognize any special benefits, except that I get more PMs from newbies and spammers to help them solve the red tag mostly.
I would say that DT status is overrated, most often because of the created conspiracy theory and accusing DT members of joining clans. mostly drama started by trolls or spammers, who failed in their original intention of spamming the forum.


someone proposed to introduce more levels of DT, maybe it could be a solution, where the number of necessary inclusions for each level would be increased.

I'm thinking it can be interesting, maybe LoyceV could use the data he collects to recalculate what the trust system would look like with these changes. I believe that it is feasible if he would include a couple of conditions like a minimum 2 or 3 inclusion for DT1.


I already wrote about it, but I will repeat it again. A couple of users who delete their trust list do not mean much, not even enough to be excluded from the DT1 list.
I believe that only if the top 20-30 members from the list https://loyce.club/trust/ranking/ insisted that they be removed or blacklisted, would cause some change. again, the forum would certainly continue to function, there is even no guarantee that it would be of lower quality with all that changes.

I was thinking of supporting the initiative to yahoo62278 and dkbit98, but I'm really lazy to filter the list because I wouldn't touch my distrust list.

Bounty managers do not care if a user rehashes jargons on their fake social media accounts, with dozens of fake followers and then spam the project to death without even knowing what its utility is; it's no surprise they do not care much about the trust system.

Imo, the trust system has for a long time not been used at it was intended, and many joined in (giving feedbacks and flags) to attain a status symbol, rather than to keep the forum clean, leading to what we have today.

Can it be fixed?
I do not think a perfect system exists, and any which is created would be subject to how it is used, but some changes can be made to improve it.

Thanks for the info, that archive from 2019 is a useful start here. Notably there were many less users eligible back then, many less than I thought.


I don't think I'm suggesting for it to have high restrictions by comparison, simply as low restrictions, as opposed to much lower restrictions (as is the case now). For example if there were 700 members who had earnt 10 merit back in January 2019, and now there are 700+ members* who have now earnt 100 merit, then the restrictions would be just as low as they previously were wouldn't they?


Thanks again, but was hoping there would already be some charts available for amount of merit earnt by users here, without having to compile the data myself  

*Similar to the chart from here (referenced above), but if it were to include all merit earnt by users, not just for rank requirements, hence it's far from accurate.


I see your point, sort of, but the issue here is that DT1 eligibility therefore becomes increasingly easier over time for all, to the point where there aren't 100+ members, but 200+, then 400+, etc. It's maintained for new users by only requiring 10 merit, but as DT1 eligibility is also based on inclusions from merit earning individuals, I'm not suggesting making it more difficult for new users to be included in DT1 I don't think.

For example increasing inclusion requirements to 100/500 would make it more difficult for new and old users alike, as the requirement of 10 earnt merit to be eligble would remain the same.

Hopefully that rambling makes some kind of sense...

I have data on eligibility: https://loyce.club/trust/ranking/
This was archived a month after theymos implemented the current DefaultTrust system: https://archive.ph/PmrZn

From what I remember, it was intended to have low restrictions, so users who joined later still stand a chance.

My overview of Merit earned (on very large HTML pages) starts here. But it may be easier to just parse the data from merit.all.txt (31 MB). This file has every Merit transaction and the exact time.

It's maintained for new users, and gets easier for older users. The alternative would be that new users barely stand a chance (kinda like how they can't catch up on Activity).

I was thinking very similar recently, based on how many users had previously earnt 10 and 250 merits compared to how many have now. I was trying to find data/charts on how many users had earnt this amount when DT1 eligibility had changed, in order to propose what it should be now, so that DT1 eligibility would remain at the same "difficulty" level. I'd guess there are as many users who have now earnt 100 as 10 back then, and 500 for those who earnt 250, but that's just a guess. It'd be interesting to see how many users would remain eligible if the requirements for DT1 were increased from 10/250 to 100/500 for example. I don't think it would remove that many users, but simply return the number of eligible DT1 members back to how many there were originally - at least that's the idea and theory for increasing the difficulty.

If anyone can point me towards data earnt user-merit data from DT1 changes it'd be appreciated. While I agree with other proposals such as DT2 requires +2 strength, I think fundamentally DT1 eligibility becoming easier and easier as time goes on (with more merit distributed) will forever be a worsening issue until it's resolved. The eligibility difficulty should be maintained in my opinion, not lowered over time.

I understand that the question is rhetorical, as it seems to me that this has already been discussed many times, and I think it is because management prefers that this traffic stays here rather than go elsewhere.

If it were as simple as if they go elsewhere, the rest of the traffic remains the same and therefore there is more net quality in the forum, it would be desirable, but you do not know if it will reduce the overall traffic of the forum even more.

The real question is: why does Bitcointalk give a flying fuck about bounty spammers? It's allowed to spam millions of links to spam on social media.
And as long as they don't pay something that has real value, but only in tokens they made up by themselves, spamming has no real cost and only benefits to them.

If you change your mind later on, I have a backup

That's likely because most people who really care about this issue have been around a long time and realize how futile polls are.  

At this point I'm almost indifferent about the trust system as a whole.  It's so broken, so unnecessarily complicated with flags and red/green/black feedback, trust lists, default trust, etc., that I just don't care anymore.  I'm not sure if Theymos designed it or what, but the whole thing is like some Rube Goldberg contraption an engineering student made as a project to impress his teacher.

Plus I'm pretty sure nothing works as intended anymore.  Bounty managers don't even care if their participants have red trust, and that ought to tell you something about how the system is viewed by the average user who doesn't give a flying fuck about bitcointalk.  

I think I'm going to clear my trust list tonight.  Just wipe it clean.

Hear, hear, my dear.

Many of the changes brought by theymos few years ago were very good ones in my opinion. DT has been very centralized before and in my opinion, the current trust system is more aligned with Bitcoin's decentralized approach. It should be possible for everyone to have a vote in DT, while scammers or trolls can still be restricted quickly, therefore it was a good decision from theymos.
A decentralized DT will also encourage participation.


I'm in favor to change DT1 inclusions to determine DT2 and increase required inclusions.
Only one DT1 inclusion can be easily abused and 2 would be better for sure.
If there's still abuse, present in on Reputation and DT will review it. That's DT's job.

But I'm not sure if clearing our trust lists to achieve changes is really necessary.
Why can't our moderation simply give a statement if they are in favor of changing requirements?
Creating a new topic on Meta should be enough but since lots of things are taking extremely long, like our new forum design, I'm also clueless what to do.

Emptying our trust lists just to get a response from the moderation is a bit too much.
We all know the trolls are still around and they can activate their accounts very fast. In case of an attemped hostile takeover we would have more drama than with our status quo.
Trolls, scammers, sigspammers are just waiting to get back to their business.
It's a shame anyway that some accounts are spamming for 1xbit while being negged...
If there's a tipping point and they can take over DT, we might need a reset from theymos.
Similar for some centralized shitcoins.  

I'm not in support to risk it, while I'm still for more required inclusions.


Since DT is discussed here, I would like to add some more points:

- Bring back a column for "risked BTC amount". It's very useful and maybe some people might give out "nice guy" feedbacks less leniently.
- The current space for feedback text is not enough. We can barely describe and justify some trusts. It's currently limited to 3 rows, can't we make it at least 5 rows? I know it got abused by trolls when they posted walls of 50 rows or more but 3 rows are almost nothing. Or increase available rows per account rank. Up to Full Member get 3 rows, Sr. Member 4 rows, Hero 5 rows and Legendary 6 rows...
- Increase limits from 10 / 250 Merit to 50 / 500 Merit. Merit scores are increasing daily and are far away from the meaning when DT was changed. 10 Merit is obtainable by almost every troll account very quickly.

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For a more decentralized system, each DT account will have less power, which is effectively better in case someone turns out to be a scammer / hacked.
I would compare it to Bitcoin and Shitcoins:
Bitcoin is very decentralized, many nodes and even miners.
Shitcoins are reliant on a few (trusted) nodes, often hand picked by the developers. Very centralized.
A few nodes going offline / malicious are a big problem. Take Solana how often it crashed down.

Effective is for me, to weed out scammers while enabling broad participation of as many accounts as possible without DT getting easily compromised.

You made a whole lots of sense here and I strongly believe that what you stated is what theymos also stand for. In as much as the voting system remains correct and in the hands of the admin, I think we are safe. I have been around not for so long, so I can't just imagine how many DT1 and DT2 were there. But I know the fewer the DT members, the stronger the system and the more easy for it to be hijacked and turned into a gang or a cult.
Again, if the larger the DT members, the less powerful and maybe effective it will be. It therefore means that everyone will have to read the feedback on profiles and decide what exactly to believe or not.

Haha, like I said I don't have any more influence than anyone else. In fact, theymos is far more likely to listen to a community in support of something, rather than listen to a singular user, I would've thought, unless they already agree with that user. I might be wrong there, but I guess it's much more likely that the community would get the attention of theymos, especially from a urgency point of view. 

I do think we'll see adjustments given time though. I'm not suggesting that we don't do anything because we'll never get the perfect system, I'm just saying that these things need to be considered carefully. Although, I'm probably in support of the most popular suggestion being made. I don't see too many drawbacks to it, and think it'll make a little difference.

The trail mode is already over as this is now 3 years old .
There is and was drama before the Trust system has changed , it was even more drama as now.
In my opinion the protest and empty the Trust List will change nothing and this makes it even more worst when the next monthly DT update will come.
Even when there will be a upgrade or update on the Trust system it will takes not long and the next will be complaining and the drama will start from scratch.

I am sure that all members (including you) won't clear their trust list, so I don't worry at all about forum, and if you think this is very important for you than continue business as usual.
You keep telling people to create custom trust list but I don't see much benefit from that, except maybe for abusers.

Nah, honestly I am sick of all the drama some DT wannabes are creating recently, so I won't be coming back until I see some changes.
I am sure you will do just fine without me, and I don't consider I did anything really important in this forum, but I am not going anywhere.

Be a good sport and consider telling theymos to consider reducing number of DT members, especially DT2 inclusions.
I would appreciate if anyone could create good new topic with realistic suggestions for improving overall DT, for start this could be collection of all previously made suggestions.
I am aware that perfect system will never be created, but let's start making small changes and move in good direction.

Really? I always thought I leave enough room for a debate, well, noted.



Limiting the number means closer to an oligarchy, common, let's be real, having half of the people deciding means what it means, fewer people in charge of deciding, even if it's not an oligarchy is definitely closer to one that having 2500 is.
Again, I'm not saying it's a bad idea, I'm not saying this system is good, just that it is what it is, I do not think it's normal for just one moron to have the launch codes of a nuclear missile, I don't think it's a great idea to hold a national referendum each year if we need to drop a bomb or not! Seeing how the guy that wrote the scam report format got arrested and jailed for credit card fraud, I'm really curious in two years how we will look at this case that caused it all and who is wrong or who is right.

As suchmoon said, the system is as good as we make it, and I'll add that if people are complete jerks they will be able to make it as bad as it can get, no matter the design, just like the drama you see now is not caused by the system, is caused by the ones using it.

I have respect for quite a few users outside of DefaultTrust, and I don't use DefaultTrust as a way of gauging someone integrity or trustworthiness I don't think many others will agree, but I see the DefaultTrust as a way of flagging up issues you might have not been aware of. For example, it's almost impossible to be in every section, and know what's going on for the average user, so they might miss out on some of the scams going around or what x user did. So, the DefaultTrust is a way of flagging up issues. However, I wouldn't be against the flag system replacing the trust system with some adjustments. Maybe, reducing the amount of influence that users have individually would be a nice thing to see.

I'm spit balling just like everyone else though. I'm not sure I know the answer to fixing it to that the majority are happy.

Thats the thing. Internal feud or somehow reputation to reputation issue has rises sometime which affect the trust system as a whole. Of course others value its important having a role on DT but some never really care for it either they are in or not. The impact it will create will spill and obviously gonna affect with the general concept of trust system.

This is should be used accordingly. Reputation shouldnt be based if not on the dt list. I would give respect to a number 1 dt which have equal respect to a lower rank regardless the difference.

Personally, I don't use it much. I think over time it has lost its importance. There's been a lot of internal feuds which have some what discredited the system. However, an argument to be had is its our responsibility as a community to sort of drop those users off the list if they're having such a negative influence. However, that's the problem the community is split, divided. Some of us agree with one side, and then others agree with the other side. I generally see points made from both parties, and hence why I don't get involved.

I think the implementation of the trust system was a decent one, but its always going to have problems when we've got such personalities in the community. I also think that the trust system isn't being used for its intended purpose, and that's trading. Its become X doesn't like Y, and sort of lost meaning. I made the decision a while ago, that going forward I'd only use the trust system as a way of rating transactions that I've made on the forum, and throw the reputational side out the window, unless there was a particular problematic case. However, flags were introduced to kind of take over from that, at least somewhat.

I think it would be beneficial to have some sort of trust system, but I'm of the opinion that the current implementation has been lessened of importance over time. That's not a fault of anyone mind, that's just how these types of systems often work.

We are always going to have internal feuds, and I'm not saying that they aren't warranted at times either. The issue is when those internal feuds spill on over to a system used by the majority of the community, that might not be particularly interested in that feud, but ultimately get influenced by it because of the impact it has had.

However, my personal opinion doesn't have any more weight than the next user. Users are absolutely going to be in disagreement on me with the above, and that's their right. I guess what I'm getting at is to implement a system without disadvantages like above is going to be incredibly difficult, because even if you do, not everyone is going to support it anyway.