A good example of this happening was CITM who had an outsized trust list that was not kept up with, which resulted in many scammers eventually getting onto DT via him; after some time, it became widely known his trust list was not good, and there became calls for him to be removed from DT1 (IIRC, he was only removed when he gave a frivolous rating to Dogie, which IMO was far too late).
Source:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=990074.0. CITM was effectively selling DT2 positions as a free perk for buying as little as a USB miner from him.
Thanks for this.
Despite the problems related to CITM, I think this was a time when the DT system worked best. There was a fairly small amount of controversy and when there was controversy, issues were usually resolved in one way or another after a public discussion.
The introduction of trust exclusions gave people an excuse to not remove a controversial (inappropriate) person from their trust list.
The exclusions were a hand crafted feature to allow people who control the trust to never have to take responsibility for who they choose to use their inordinate amount of influence to deny others any say in how the system works. They never even have to explain themselves. It is just acceptable to exclude people now because you don't like them. This is a pathetic popularity contest spawned from systematically avoiding responsibility, not a trust system.