The only places with preemptive policing are totalitarian governments where individuals have little to no freedoms.
What if
it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck?
I've tagged many accounts
like this one. They spam their scam because people keep falling for it. Do you agree on tagging those before a victim complains about this particular user and website? One could argue it's an innocent new account that truely "provides a unique opportunity", but I've been around long enough to go with the duck approach.
Unfortunately not everyone is reasonable and observant as you. Also you don't need to use your tagging activities as a form of ego masturbation because you are not emotionally a sad child that needs to get their self value from lording over others.
The question is not if the tags are some times correct or not, the question is, is the benefit worth the the cost of opening up an ambiguous method of trust system abuse that itself can help protect and conceal scams. Most people don't have the ability, time, or expertise to tell the difference, and that leaves people just taking the word of the accuser at face value regardless of the validity of the accusation.
On one hand I agree that there are far too many frivolous ratings being sent. Ratings based on opinions or because of arguments, because of a clash of personalities, because of differing idea or views, trolling, and so forth, are both inappropriate and counter productive. They cheapen the entire point of the trust system, and serve more as a punishment against the person rather than a useful indicator of trustworthiness.
However, as Loyce has pointed out above, there are plenty of examples of accounts being correctly red tagged without yet having stolen anything or violated any contracts. If your entire ICO is plagiarized, then you are not a legitimate project. If you are advertising impossible ROIs, then you are not a legitimate project. If you are asking for users to enter their seed, enter their private keys, deposit before they are allowed to withdraw, and so on, then you are a scammer. I disagree that we should be letting these users freely peddle their scams when we have the ability to pre-emptively tag them.
I am sure Mao killed lots of bad people that were criminals. No one says, "there are examples of him correctly killing people that deserved it", because the problem is all the collateral damage and innocents caught up in it. Again, the question is not if people are correct some times or even most of the time. The question is, is the damage created by allowing such an arbitrary standard worth the minimal amount of impact the "correct" ratings have? I don't think so.
People who aren't doing this basic level of due diligence are just on borrowed time until they are robbed and no amount of shitting out tags is going to stop them from getting stolen from. Also doing so creates a false sense of security that the forum is moderated protected against such things. Then there are the people who use it to punish people bringing their own crimes to light and to discredit those accusations. Also the negative rating spam effectively dilutes the value of leaving a negative, because it is so common people learn to disregard it. All this ends up being is signal noise. Signal noise actual con artists can manipulate to cover their tracks and punish their detractors.
...
It's helpful, especially to newbies, or at least it was more so before the flags, but people should be responsible for their own money I guess. I honestly don't know whether it would be worth just getting rid of negative feedback for all the drama that's involved with it, but it would lead to a lot more people getting scammed but that's the compromise.
Anyway, I partially agree about the objective standards, but there's no getting around the fact that some subjectivity is going to have to creep in somewhere. It always does and there's no getting around it.
Unless you can somehow make all mods part of a hive mind then there's always going to be difference of opinion in enforcing the rules, all you can do is enforce them to the best of your ability, but one person may think someone is trolling whereas the other doesn't. Some people think their posts are on topic when they're clearly not and when there's humans involved in either scenario you're going to get differences of opinion.
This is exactly why I am advocating for an objective standard of evidence of theft, violation of contractual agreement, or violation of applicable laws before rating. IMO this is the last possible way to salvage the tagging system beyond just scrapping negatives entirely. I warned Theymos leaving so much room for ambiguity would mean the failure of the system, but he was intent in his belief that it would work.
The objective standards I am referring to are meant to apply to negative ratings. The forum rules are usually less ambiguous, but that is another issue. Perhaps all the mods could get Borg implants?
I would also like to know who gets to decide what counts as an "objective standard".
You know facts. Transaction IDs. Receipts. Tracking numbers. Documentation. I know it is a hard concept.
Clown music.
I left it up there because I knew if I just erased it you Bozonians would try to claim I was hiding something. Serves me right for making appropriate adjustments. I should know better. Like I have said before, there is no road to redemption with you people, it doesn't matter what I do you will invent some story around it to spin it to attack your targets. And you pretend to wonder why I am so obstinate and resistant to pretty much anything you say. I am just so unreasonable!
