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.
This was such a great post that hit the nail on the head. The current trust system does more harm than good. It can easily be manipulated by a few users, and actually leads to more centralization in the trust network. In my opinion, the only way to move forward with this current trust model is to completely remove negative trust, so that a handful of greedy users can't join together and destroy the trust ratings of some of the most trusted users on this forum. It might also show those like Lauda just how worthless their efforts have been as scams won't become more prevalent, and give them an opportunity to focus on helping to build the Bitcointalk community, instead of playing gatekeeper to who can participate.
After several months of reading on this forum and investigating the full history behind the gripes of many rep and meta threads, I have noticed a significant uptick in friction on the board around the time the new selection process was introduced. I also note that it is entirely truthful that persons of ill repute are installed within Default Trust. The systems that enabled their installment and encourage group think are very damaging long term. Any serious damage done by those installed into DT of whom admin had prior knowledge were dirty is going to reflect very poorly on the entire community. Questions of why those types of individuals were allowed to remain in DT are going to be asked. I don't know if saying: because a handful of their supporters wanted them there, is going to be enough. I think admin and the board owner will still be held accountable.
In light of this, why does the board owner 'Cobra?' or theymos? simply not decide to scrap these systems before more lasting damage is done? Experimenting with trial and error is acceptable with a testnet, but this forum is live and the damage is in real time and irreversible. I presume he would have okay'd them before allowing the admins to push them live. Now that we see they are causing multiple issues, surely we can just switch them off?
The board environment is quite hostile. I have only made 3 posts, and I have already attracted the unwanted attentions of some of the recently installed DT1 brigade. It seems that unsubstantiated accusations, false allegations and generally telling members to shut up and close their threads are seen as acceptable behavior from those that are the pinnacle of trust here.