One of the reasons people use bitcoin or any crypto currency is to eliminate the need to trust the other party.
The use of scammer ratings and trust ratings increases the ability of people to rely on trust in their transactions.
BitcoinTalk forums should remove all references to scamming, scammers, scams, trust and the like, in order to decrease the community's ability to rely on trust, and encourage business models that are transparent and do not rely on trust.
Thoughts?
I think that users should be able to post 'scam'/'trust' etc... because (1) preventing them from doing so == censorship =/= good, and (2) trust is an important part of any financial deal.
That said, I think trust ratings don't work remotely well. If possible, we could have some forum where people can open up ONE THREAD PER USER either posting positive feedback or negative feedback, or just have the existing trust system but without the 'default trust' users.