Exactly. Common ground. Instead of suspicion and guesses, you don't act to harm some ones ratings without a review of evidence. I would say the best way to do it frankly would be to present any evidence of theft, violation of contractual agreement, or violation of applicable laws to the community in the scam accusation area, then allow others to review it. If the evidence presented is sufficient naturally people will want to negative rate them.
I disagree with you here. Many scammers rely on pulling in as many customers as possible over a short period of time, before they are exposed. If we require every suspicion to be first posted, and then wait for the community to review before tagging, you are now giving them an extra 24-48 hours to continue scamming until they get tagged. It also simply isn't feasible to start a new thread and have a discussion about every suspected scammer - the board would be overrun with new threads and being a DT member would become a full time job to read and review every accusation.
I think your method is correct and workable in marginal or uncertain cases, but these are the minority. Trying to apply this to every case would rapidly overload the system.
Does Theymos currently run around enforcing the "guideline" that it is not acceptable to leave ratings for disagreeing with people's opinions every time some one does this? No, of course not. People point out to them that it is not acceptable and either they change it or they lose their own reputation and or are excluded. You can have both, because we already have both.
Fair point, which I accept. However, you seem to be arguing against yourself here. Many DT users pre-emptively tag account sellers, Ponzi promoters, loan requests with no/fake collateral, fake ICOs, etc, before they are successful in their scamming. By your metric, none of these people would be tagged until after they had scammed and there was evidence of theft. Now, if the community decided this was "not acceptable", as you put it, then the users who leave these ratings should be "losing their reputation and/or being excluded". This isn't happening, so the only conclusion is that a majority of the community supports this position. You, of course, can completely disagree with this stance, but as theymos has more-or-less made DT a democracy, the majority view wins.
I agree with you that we shouldn't be tagging people for disagreements or differing points of view, but I disagree that we should be waiting for evidence of a scam being successful before we tag the scammers. I also don't think theymos just giving a top down declaration, but leaving the system as is - inclusions and exclusions based on community votes - would actually result in the change you are looking for.
Oh you disagree do you? Based on what expertise exactly gained in your 2 whole years of activity here with zero trading under your belt?
Again this goes back to due diligence. We should be teaching users to do it and READ RATINGS not just the number which is largely now meaningless anyway. There is NOTHING stopping you from making a post in the scam accusations area and referencing it with a neutral rating in their trust. This has become more about the feeling of influence and giving the perception they are doing more than they are by seeing those little red numbers flash on an account and watching people react. They are all running around trying to get their dopamine hits and bulldozing thru anyone in your path with zero recourse for anyone wronged. It has been this way from the beginning but with the lack of any rules whatsoever just "guidelines" it has just increasingly deteriorated over the years. This is driving the people we want out and the people we don't want just keep buying accounts. Maybe that's the profit model now?
Think about what you said for a minute. You called this place a Democracy. In a pure Democracy individual rights don't exist. Pure Democracy is literally mob rule. Is that how this place should best be run in what was originally a largely libertarian community? Ok, well then you can pretty much count on this becoming dogecointalk as the people who built this whole market bail and you are left with the jokers LAARPing Game of Thrones over trust ratings. Again, nothing is stopping people from utilizing neutral ratings and posts in the appropriate sections for preemptive warnings. New users will be better off being taught the protocol of due diligence, rating reading, and checking out their partner before trading instead of blindly trusting the trust overlords.