I wonder how much drama would actually stop if the feedback system was removed (or negative feedback doesn't paint you 'red'). No more hilariousandco vs mdayonliner? No more Lauda vs Quickseller? No more Cryptohunter vs Everybody? Sometimes I honestly think we should just do away with it because of all the drama it causes but it would only lead to more scams against the newer members. I wonder if we did remove it would we get threads every other day asking WHY ISNT THERE A FEEDBACK SYSTEM HERE in some variation or another.
If the trust system is removed, the marketplace would likely have to be fairly substantially curtailed, or at least changed.
One option could be for people to more commonly open reputation or scam accusation threads about a given person in which people could present their evidence against a person, and the person would be free to defend themselves and refute the evidence. Similarly, people could create a reputation thread for positive vouches. There could be something somewhat similar to the current DT implementation to prevent fake positive and negative ratings, but a person would be forced to review the evidence and decide for themselves if they want to believe someone is a scammer or not.
In effect, trust scores would be removed, and it would be much easier to dispute a rating. Controversial ratings would not have the same negative effects they have now.
I don't think suchmoon should get tagged for buying one of Bruno's accounts. Suchmoon does have a decent amount of trust, a lot of merit, and is on many people's trust lists. If someone was looking from the outside, and saw suchmoon do something, they would reasonably think, based on her stats that it would be acceptable to engage in similar behavior. Suchmoon is not the only person who has bought/sold forum accounts that can be described this way.
Some have argued they don't want to go back "far in time" to tag people who have engaged in this activity. However I would ask those who regularly tag these types of people what they would say if someone saw that a very "senior" (lot of good trust related stats) forum member did something, and assumed this was acceptable behavior, and proceeds to engage in similar behavior?
That was a fairly unique case and I think they should be taken on a case by case basis. I think suchmoon stepped in to try take the account off the market because bruno was trying to sell it and suchmoon effectively gave him a loan so he didn't have to and the account didn't fall into the wrong hands (which would be a good thing or net positive). I could be wrong though. Isn't the account returned to the original owner now anyway? There are plenty of other users that used to take loans out with accounts as collateral but that practice seems to have fizzled out (especially by more notable members probably since account trading became frowned upon).
Bruno was trying to sell his
Gleb Gamow account, and suchmoon stepped in to
buy it, and confirmed the sale
here; in
this thread, she says she will give the Gleb account back to Bruno if he pays her back, but it appears Brunos intentions were to sell the account, not take a loan out against it. IIRC, he took out a loan against
Phinnaeus Gage from BurtW, and didn't make any serious attempts to repay Burt until Burt got into some legal trouble and was in need of money to pay for lawyers.
Even if you are against forum account sales in general, I don't think you would be against this particular account sale, as suchmoon appeared to buy it specifically to prevent someone else from doing damage with it, and to help a long standing forum member out with a financial problem.
My concern about this is that someone who does not follow forum politics closely might see those threads, look at the forum
rules, try to buy or sell an account, and be genuinely surprised when they get blown up with multiple negative ratings. (I don't know him, but
this guy has 6 DT negative ratings, which is just excessive, but it sets up people like
this who are apparently actually scamming, and interestingly,
this guy doesn't even have negative trust....but all that is off topic here). My concern is not only about suchmoon's transaction (hers is often brought up), I have similar concerns about many others, including multiple current staff members (but also other reputable members) who have previously engaged in similar activity.
Or perhaps would you like every feedback to be peer-reviewed before it is published, giving time for scammers to proliferate and the opportunity for the system to be spammed?
As long as the SLA for the peer review process is short, it will have little positive effect on scammers. Alternatively, ratings could be published, but must pass a peer review process within x time in order for them to remain to remove this altogether. Only certain ratings could be subject to a peer review process.
Obviously the above will be worthless unless there is an agreed upon set of rules for which ratings can be left in order for the above to work. As it stands now, what is and is not acceptable reasons to leave ratings is not agreed upon, with one sided shouting very loudly. If there was any real consensus as to what ratings are acceptable, I don't think the trust system would have 5% of the problems it has today.