I was not going to reply here, but I keep winding up in a loop thinking about the entire thing.
Some people have the attitude of 'I would rather 10 guilty people go free then put 1 innocent person in jail' Other people have the 'Kill them all let God sort them out' attitude.
I think the majority of us are somewhere in the middle.
Do I think JG is a bit overzealous? Yes.
Do I think it matters? Not really. <-- And there is the issue that I think a lot of people miss.
There are 2 places where negative feedback matters.
1) When doing trades with people
2) If you are in or want to join a signature campaign where the manager excludes people with negative trust.
In case #1, you really should read peoples feedback anyway before trading to see why the numbers are what they are. And then make your own decision. If you just look at the numbers without doing some other form of checking then well IMO you are on your own.
In case #2, most campaign managers are going to do a bit of research. If they just see the 1 negative from JG and do no more research about the applicant, that is up to them.
But, I would also say that if the company whos signature I am wearing now goes evil and starts scamming people
I would expect a negative tag from JG it's just who he is. Would not want it, don't think I would deserve it, but would expect it. Now, if the next manager that I apply to just looks at that and not my 4000+ post history and all the merit and other positive trust. Well, IMO they are going to loose a good participant in their campaign. [Sound of Dave patting himself on his back, yes Dave you are a good poster, keep it up]
The problem comes back to this:
LoyceV's guide seems reasonable.
The system is for handling trade risk, not for flagging people for good/bad posts/personalities/ideas.
...
Ratings
- Leave positive ratings if you actively think that trading with this person is safer than with a random person.
- Leave negative ratings if you actively think that trading with the person is less safe than with a random person.
- Unstable behavior could very occasionally be an acceptable reason for leaving negative trust, but if it looks like you're leaving negative trust due to personal disagreements, then that's inappropriate. Ratings are not for popularity contests, virtue signalling, punishing people for your idea of wrongthink, etc.
- Post-flags, ratings have less impact. It's only an orange number. Some amount of "leave ratings first, ask questions later" may be OK. For example, if you thought that YoBit was a serious ongoing scam, the promotion of which was extremely problematic, then it'd be a sane use of the system to immediately leave negative trust for everyone wearing a YoBit signature. (I don't necessarily endorse this viewpoint or this action: various parts of the issue are highly subjective. But while I wouldn't blame people for excluding someone who did this, I wouldn't call it an abuse of the system.)
- Exercise a lot of forgiveness. People shouldn't be "permanently branded" as a result of small mistakes from which we've all moved past. Oftentimes, people get a rating due to unknowingly acting a bit outside of the community's consensus on appropriate behavior, and such ratings may indeed be appropriate. But if they correct the problem and don't seem likely to do it again, remove the rating or replace it with a neutral. Even if someone refuses to agree with the community consensus (ie. they refuse to back down philosophically), if they're willing to refrain from the behavior, their philosophical difference should not be used to justify a rating. For example, in the YoBit mass-ratings example above, ratings should be immediately removed after the person removes the signature, even if they maintain and continue to argue that they didn't do anything wrong. If someone agrees to "follow 'the law' without agreeing to it", that should be enough.
So in that respect, yes he should be leaving more neutral.
BUT for whatever reason, theymos never added a separate trade vs general feedback number. So, you are always going to have people who need negative feedback but strictly according to the rules should be neutral.
That does not work some people need negative numbers in their feedback not neutral.
Is the amount of it that JG is doing making it better or worse. IMO it is making it very slightly better. AND having all the drama around it, helps make people aware of what is going on so that is not a bad thing either.
Just my view as always.
Enjoy the rest of the weekend people.
-Dave