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.
The trust exclusions "feature" was introduced not long after you were removed from DT2. I strongly suspect that theymos got some pushback when he was asking those on DT1 who had you on their trust lists to remove you from DT.
There is no reason to relitigate the underlying reasons, however theymos did not want you on DT. If there is someone who theymos does not want on DT, theymos should try to persuade the DT1 sponsor to remove that person, listen to any feedback he gets in response, and at the end of the day if the person is still on DT, theymos should be willing to remove the sponsor from DT1 if he still believes the person should not be on DT.
The implementation of trust exclusions allowed a DT1 sponsor to include a person on their trust list who should not be in DT without any real consequences. After Blazed was added to DT1, he added multiple inappropriate people to his trust list, and instead of forcing (or even attempting to) Blazed to address the issue, other DT1 sponsors ended up excluding multiple people Blazed had added to his trust list, some were excluded from DT, others were not. This absolved both Blazed and theymos from taking any kind of responsibility.
With the introduction of the "new" DT system, implemented this January, DT has become more of a popularity contest with those who are unpopular receiving exclusions, and those who say the right things receiving a bunch of unwarranted trust and trust inclusions.