Re: Bitcointalk trolls, dysfunction and all out flame wars. Guide to the scandals.
You're right, though, about red trust not being a deterrent anymore. Reputation used to be full of threads asking for negative trust to be removed, but nowadays it seems like bounty managers will take any Jr. Member with a pulse, feedback be damned. And I'm still not sure why reputation doesn't seem to matter to people all that much anymore, because it certainly used to. I'm thinking partially it has to do with the emphasis that was placed on it by those members I mentioned who've now left the forum. They were members who gave out a ton of negative trust and created threads exposing scammers and other undesirables, and we don't see as much of that these days.
In my opinion, this is too abstract a statement when it comes to bounty hunters, since I cannot remember a single hot public discussion involved in the appeal of the red tag. But I swami agree if we talk about the debate dedicated to the appeal of the red tags on the basis of a personal vendetta. By the way, do not curse the feedback system, since almost every manager has his own custom list of trust, so the tags you see may differ from the tags on the basis of which the manager accepts this or that person in the campaign. 
Correct me if I'm wrong but I have the feeling that since the trust system is decentralized, having a red tag is not so important, is that so? Apart from the issue of custom trust lists, which icopress mentions. For example, it appears to me that yahoo62278 has one red tag, but he has 36 in green, and it is not the only case that appears to me of highly trusted member with 1 or 2 red tags. I guess it is not that important.
The rules of my signature campaign, for example, say:
- If you receive legitimate negative feedback during your stay in the campaign you will be removed without notice or payment.
Taking into account that Best_Change also has a red tag (some time ago I could see two), I suppose that he will not automatically expel a member from the campaign for a simple red tag without first analyzing the case.