This is correct, but what I meant with this topic is to help people understand why it is important for them to build a good reputation on the free market. Without building a good reputation for yourself you won't be able to settle too many transactions and many users would tend to avoid your services and prefer the services offered by others, although they may be more expensive, if those services are offered by members with good reputation. Choosing an escrow is limiting the risks at some level, but not entirely. Besides, even that escrow should have a good reputation and thus we come back to the topic's idea: if you would like to become an escrow you have to build a good reputation first, otherwise traders won't be interested in your services.
What I'm trying to say is more a general idea: no matter if you are interested in buying, selling or escrowing, at first you have to work for having a good reputation. The reputation systems mentioned by Tim May decades ago are now present on the free market and this is how the free market works. If I'd like to buy a Bitmain coupon of 100$ and I find it -- let's say -- at mikeywith, which is selling for 50$ and I also find such coupon at a newbie which registered yesterday, selling the coupon at 30$, I'd choose to make the deal with mikeywith. Why? Because he is a well established member of the forum, he has made hundreds of transactions with Bitmain coupons, he has good feedbacks from other users, he has earned thousands of merits and he is trustworthy. But it took him years to reach this point. Reputation can't be built over the night and patience is needed.
This holds true for all market places and not only the bitcointalk services section. If anyone wants to work on fiverr, the reputation and reviews are extremely important to get the orders. That's the reason a new person often find difficult to get their first orders because they don't have any work history and review. After you get some orders and good reviews, then the next important thing is SEO.
True, cause when we are working online, a good reputation is needed because how would they trust you if they don't even know if your true, or if their money would not go to waste if they do some transactions with you. A good reputation is almost equivalent to how can people trust you even though you are just connected online. Same thing with life actually, you need experiences or a bachelors degree for a company to trust you with a position. And in online freelancing jobs, you need to have feedbacks from other employers and a sample of your works, and how you do your work, how you communicate with your employer and etc. And that will be your reputation, you build it for months and years, same thing with accounts here.
It's true too that there are trustworthy people that will tarnished their good reputations, which is so unpredictable, sadly that's how humans live. Sometimes we humans create our own destruction, messing with all the hard work we did in the past. A good reputation can be tarnished but still, it is the one needed if you wanted to have a career in any industry you wanted to dominate.