I agree to disagree that the forum is centralized, instinctly. What I really meant despite of centralization of the forum, theymos always want to keep it as decentralized as possible, through different systems, from Trust to Merit. Noticing that theymos disclosed his raw plans to more decentralize the merit system. There are not too much details on his plans yet. In fact, I can not imagine how a decentralized forum can work; and one good example is decentralized exchanges. They also have staffs, support teams, and so on. Recent months, some DEX also require KYCs.
This thought occurred to me recently:
If you wanted to implement Merit in a decentralized forum (ie. one in the vein of Freenet's Frost or FMS), you could do it in this way:
- Everyone can, from their own perspective, give unlimited merit to posts, and these merit transactions are put into files which each user publishes via the decentralized system. (Like a merit.txt.xz which every user publishes.) Unlike on bitcointalk.org, you can also give people merit without an associated post.
- For everyone who has merit, you download their merit-transactions-list, but scale down/up all of the numbers so that the total merit that they send is equal to the actual sMerit that they own. It might or might not be useful to do this via some sliding time frame scheme so that merit transaction amounts aren't just continually diminished over time as they increase in quantity.
- Apply the above step recursively, creating a web-of-trust-style merit network
Then every user has a subjective merit score for each post (sort of like the bitcointalk.org trust system, which was inspired by FMS). And if you wish, you can assign people to be merit sources from your perspective by sending them large amounts of merit directly; these might or might not appear in the merit-transactions-list which you publish.
Thanks for sharing this one.