Often, one user will give retaliatory negative trust but his ratings are meaningless and he ends up with additional negative trust for “fake ratings”. This is very one sided because one person is effectively trying to defend himself but only ends up with additional negative trust to the extent that he cannot reasonable expect to rebuild his trust score.

Some people also criticize certain people (because of a rating they received or otherwise), and end up receiving negative trust for this specific reason.

Frankly, I think it is past time to ban a number of people from being on DT (both 1 and 2) permanently, and there are a small group of people who should be banned from appearing on anyone’s trust network unless they are directly trusted by the person, and there is a small handful of people who should be considered to be banned from having their ratings show up by default (and their trust list being considered) under any circumstances.

I don’t think it is appropriate to give negative trust for being critical of someone or “slandering” (allegedly or in reality) under nearly any circumstances. Doing this (in response to criticism about you or someone else) should make the person a prime candidate for one of the above types of bans. If you are being criticized, the proper response is to make a well thought out argument, or you can ignore the criticism.

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Regarding CH (since this has become another CH thread) — I don’t think negative trust against CH is appropriate. To my knowledge, he hasn’t ever tried to scam anyone, nor has he done anything that would be reasonably consistent with him preparing to try to scam anyone in the future. It is my belief that his siding with scammers is him being critical of the system and not necessarily to help scammers.