I think the trust system does way more harm to the community than good, it should be removed IMO. The amount of people I get direct messaging me on Twitter complaining how they stopped using this forum because of issues around trust is noticeable, or ranting about Lauda. I don't think these people are necessarily scammers either.
Better to just remove it. I'm sure the overall happiness of the community would go way up. Let people figure out for themselves if someone or a business is trustworthy, as they do on the rest of the internet. It's a noble idea but it just builds resentment among members which might actually lead to more shady and dubious behavior. Mobs going around bullying members with trust scores is shady activity. Feels like more people complain about getting their trust fucked with and characters like Lauda than they do about scams here.
Trust scores are mostly meaningless, it's closer to a popularity contest than a true measure of someone's trustworthiness. Just by using this site, all of you are implicitly trusting me, but that isn't reflected at all in my trust score, in fact I probably seem less trustworthy on first observation than some actual shady people on here. There's so much angst with the whole system, maybe there's a way to make it work better, and tweaking it could eventually lead to that, but for now it just looks like something that's dividing the community.
Someone had to say it : I can't help think that if these exact same words came from someone else on the forums, there'd be a radically inverse response. And I'm not even exaggerating. It really shows how much people here are severely affected by status and prejudice.
I would agree that both the old and current trust system create more drama and issues rather than solve problems. But I don't know about removing the system as a whole. In the end (for me at least.), Trust remains just as a simple indicator of a person's past behaviour, and I almost always check the feedback be it positive or negative before I trade with someone.
I dealt with people who have negative trust before, and also refused to deal with people who had green one. I've already learned my lesson several times that there is no such thing as absolute trust, because being "trusted" is not generally something that can stay forever. People change. So if anything, people just need to start understanding that the trust system is just an indicator, and you need to use your own judgement when dealing with people.