As you see I am a fairly new user at bitcointalk, Althought I have been mining bitcoin since 2010.
I think the bitcointalk trust system is rediculous and allows high post users to abuse the system. Even if that "high post" user is wrong or doesnt have any evidence.
Thats not how it works.
It is easy to give a negative rating once it is clear that someone is scammer. The idea is that mor experienced users of the board give a warning. The rating does not and can not prevent anyone from useing the service. E.g. i left several users a negative feedback because they run ponzis. The text to the feedback say: "runs a ponzi". IF you came to play a ponzi, how would that rating stop you?
This is a very basic concept and its called: make up your own mind. If you can think for yourself the negative ratings without any usefull information and reference links should not matter to you. A rating is - just like a post - a personal opinion. The opinions of some are given more weight than others because of the way the trust system work, but it does not make it universally true.
I agree.
I dont see the problem. Well spam is a problem, but the rating is not. Its an opinion and if the eyes of the person that gives the rating the operator of a ponzi is considered a scammer the rating is justified. If you think the operator is trustworthy leave own rating accordingly.
There are plenty of threads[1] discussing whether a ponzi can be legitimate or not. Feel free to read them and comment there, I dont want to repeat myself.
I doubt that this is true, well unless you are posting a fraudulent service or one that has a very high chance of beeing fraudulent.
Not everyone is a scammer, maybe we should give the benefit of the doubt to most people and deal with the scammers seperately.
There must be a better system than this.
Theymos recently made a suggestion to improve it. It was not accepted by the community. Maybe you can contribute in that thread[2] with your ideas on how to improve it.
Edit: let me just quote this from the above thread[2] because I think it is a very good summary of how the DefaultTrust system should be used.
The important thing that MANY people seem not to realize is that the "Trust List" should NOT be a list of trusted individuals. If your trust list is a list of individuals that you trust, then you are DOING IT WRONG.
Your "Trust List" SHOULD BE a list of individuals whose OPINIONS YOU VALUE. By adding someone to your "Trust List" you are effectively saying: "If this person has expressed an opinion about another individual, I value that opinion far more than I value the opinions of the rest of the users on bitcointalk.
You can value the opinions that someone expresses about others even if you wouldn't trust them to hold on to a single satoshi for you. You can also trust someone to hold on to 10,000 BTC, and still not value the things they have to say about other users.
[1] e.g. https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/regarding-ponzi-sites-requesting-some-attention-not-another-section-thread-923461
[2] https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/replacing-defaulttrust-914641