Its very clearly being manipulated by a small group of users which makes it worse than the previous system. This was likely expected and theymos already reserved the right to blacklist people. I urge people to use their best judgement with their trust network and dont be intimidated by this group of users playing games with the trust system. Have faith that this will be sorted out by the community eventually. I mean, DT has confirmed extortionists, doxxers, and scammers on it right now. I dont think that will last forever. Its embarassing.
Yes, centralization of power has made it more worst as most of the people who reach DT tend to joining this "small group" and supporting there thought and I feel its the fear for them getting removed from DT if they don't follow the cliques rules or harm anyone's reputation from the clique. It pretty simple to judge and we can see it happening around many times. I personally use theymos trust list dropped by LoyceV
here and can see much of the red-trusted members too are on the DT which seems very odd too me.
I hope this will be sorted out quickly and spotted by the new arising DT's here to put the scammer and other clique out of this and make the environment here pretty healthy and motivating (I see it's totally demotivating from newbies point of view). We should better work on helping people to adapt to this crypto community rather than trying to harass or frighting them about the rules as soon as they post something. It is not just about being compassionate you should rather act upon it.