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.
The same applies for outside the forums, so not very forum/community-specific issue.
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.
I guess that people generally understand "trust system" to be quite a strong indicator, when coming out of nowhere to deal with total randomers. See a red score, and you'll just move elsewhere. I think trying to improve or change the way people understand what is the intention of having trust system is a too big battle... People naturally weigh a lot on such things. Pretty complicated stuff.
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 would need to make a proper analysis of the effects/consequences of having had the trust system here. For sure, it has increased drama and wasted loads of time, in addition to increasing bad blood around the active community of BCT. I think it largely boils down to having communication problems, misunderstandings and so on. People have different views (but still probably same goals) and (almost always) too little information to form a proper model of what someone else is meaning/arguing/thinking for real when they say something. Especially over the internet emotions play a large role, too. And there are no real consequences, so no real incentives to do everything as well as possible. People naturally form exaggerated views of others (for good and for bad), as all they see of someone else is text. These are somewhat studied subjects.
And of course accounts change hands, people change, trust system gets gamed, DT gets gamed, general misuse of trust system happens, people have different intentions when they rate someone from how the reader of the rating reads/understands it, etc.
So do the good stuff of this system outweigh downsides? It would be interesting to see an analysis about this, with some semi-objective measurements and argumentation and so on.
Btw, I think it's also worth noting that most of the users of these forums do not know or care at all about the trust system.