Cliques are obviously going to develop anywhere and people make friends just as they do enemies. There's nothing wrong with that but people are becoming biased to certain things especially if they're pally with people and the reporting of users posts as off topic when it was one of their buddies that took it off topic in the first place is a perfect example of that and people need to knock it off. If people don't like each other they should either just ignore them or keep their beefs out of every other thread and keep it confined to Reputation or something because threads going off topic is out of hand.
The question is, is it worth constantly creating drama, conflict, covering up abuse, and driving away good users in exchange for getting those that fall out side of these standards?
See, I don't think any good users are being driven away from the forum because of red-tagging.
Some will leave, but what about all those users that are given negative that don't deserve it? If you haven't got a thick enough skin or feel like the forum has betrayed you in some way you would have every right to think fuck it and leave and this probably happens more to newer members than older ones. Neither shouldn't have to accept it or just grin and bear it. You might not get along with certain people and not like their behaviour but obviously users like tecshare and timelord don't deserve negative feedback as much as you might dislike them. If you're not a scammer or there's no very strong suspicion that you are one then people shouldn't be leaving negative feedback. The only exception I would possibly make is for the full time trolls who are only here to be disruptive, but again and as I've said before, I think people are stretching the definition of a troll and tagging people who they just don't agree with.
I don't think putting a big red warning on a potential or actual scammer is accomplishing nothing, by the way. Sure, there are some members who are trying to build their reputation by doing so, but as long as they get it right I don't have a problem with the motivation. I started tagging account sellers after I got scammed back in 2016, when it became obvious to me how harmful sales of high-ranked, green-trusted accounts could be--not because I wanted to get on DT. I never thought that would happen and was absolutely shocked when I got put on it.
It's helpful, especially to newbies, or at least it was more so before the flags, but people should be responsible for their own money I guess. I honestly don't know whether it would be worth just getting rid of negative feedback for all the drama that's involved with it, but it would lead to a lot more people getting scammed but that's the compromise.
Anyway, I partially agree about the objective standards, but there's no getting around the fact that some subjectivity is going to have to creep in somewhere. It always does and there's no getting around it.
Unless you can somehow make all mods part of a hive mind then there's always going to be difference of opinion in enforcing the rules, all you can do is enforce them to the best of your ability, but one person may think someone is trolling whereas the other doesn't. Some people think their posts are on topic when they're clearly not and when there's humans involved in either scenario you're going to get differences of opinion.