Quote from: LoyceV on November 04, 2024, 11:36:00 AM

But ... The Trust system doesn't take away anyone's ability to express their opinion. They can still type whatever they want. It just discourages most people from doing so for the sake of earning money.

Yup. That part of what I wrote is a bit confusing. If you change say to do in that particular expression of Voltaire's thinking (which I think is from a biography by Evelyn Beatrice Hall), then you'll end up with: “I disapprove of what you do, but I will defend to the death your right to do it.”, which, while simple-minded in that unqualified form, is more in keeping with the point that I've been trying to make. What I'm saying is: even though I personally disagree (strongly) with a large part of the pro-police side of the forum, I have no (genuine, non-impulsive) interest in stopping them from doing their thing. With that in mind, I think the best compromise is to just let them keep pursuing their own ideology and keep trying (with far too much zeal, IMO) to tag and flag undesirables, but only amongst themselves (as in, with other users that share their ideology). I appreciate that it's headache-inducing to see how that could possibly work, but I suspect it could [1]. The people (like me) that would point-in-time disappear from view from the perspective of the pro-police side, would then be free to do anything permitted by the forum's rules, without ever having to worry about user-to-user power dynamics of any kind (on the no-police side of the forum, there'd be no trust system at all, and therefore no rule-following path that could possibly lead to account ruination; you could say or do basically whatever you like, and if anyone has a problem with it you can just tell them to go pound sand).

Quote from: LoyceV on November 04, 2024, 11:36:00 AM

I wouldn't always call it "damage" done by DT.

Yup, that's fair. I'm just writing a little lazily there (if I had to qualify every thought, then my posts would be twice the size of JJG's).

I think that they've caused more harm than good, but there's no arguing that they haven't done any good at all (because they definitely have, just, not enough to offset all of the life that I suspect they've choked out of the forum).

Quote from: LoyceV on November 04, 2024, 11:36:00 AM

Even if you exclude DefaultTrust, the DT-levels still exist.

In that quote, I'm not talking about excluding DefaultTrust, I'm talking about abandoning the whole concept. I mean, obviously trust depth would still be a thing (though, I have ideas about that, too, which I won't get into here), but trust depth is a concept orthogonal to DefaultTrust.

Quote from: LoyceV on November 04, 2024, 11:36:00 AM

Hey, don't take away my Trust list viewer Tongue

It's my proudest work here Tongue

Nobody else ever created one.

Haha, yeah. That thought did cross my mind, and you definitely should be proud of that tool (it's great, and I use it often). Wink

The thing is, I really believe that people would curate better trust lists (as in, more useful to them, which is kind of the whole point) if they didn't have to worry about retaliatory exclusions and getting hassled by the peanut gallery for their choices (really, it's nobody's business who trusts who, and who distrusts who, it's better, in many ways, I think, if people arrive at their trust-related decisions by themselves and based on their own experience of other members). (I mean, I know that there are currently good reasons for trust lists to be out-in-the-open, but, if you imagine the trust system without DT, and therefore without voting and everything that goes along with that, then it becomes harder to justify.)

Remember, between me having no authority to do so, and me anyway being only ~70% serious about nuking DefaultTrust (I mean, I didn't actually send the PM-draft I quoted from), I don't think you have very much to worry about. Cheesy

My favorite (for now, at least) trust-system-related idea is the one I repeated at the top of this post. I like it because it doesn't take anything away from anyone, the pro-police side of the forum can keep snooping on each other, judging each other, getting in each other's way, doing "investigations" and all the rest of the stupid horseshit that they seem to enjoy doing, and the no-police side can just be a normal forum without everything always having to take place on some kind of a reputational minefield, and without all of this power gradient bullshit. I mean, I say normal, but, obviously things are going to get really wild on that side, with all sorts of things taking place that would give a pro-policer the shits. But, that's fine because everyone on the no-police side knows that they've opted into a more dangerous environment and that they're liable to get scammed in two seconds flat if they're not careful. (Honestly, I think what you'll find is that the no-policers will spend very little time worrying/thinking about what might be happening on the other side, but the pro-policers are going to frequently find themselves really annoyed at the idea that people on the no-police side are beyond their punitive reach.)

I think that to make the no-police side of the forum more than just a complete balls-out madhouse, the ignore system would need to be beefed up. I also think that, even though it's not a very good ideological fit for the no-police side, some kind of federated ignore system could serve as its "trust system" (but those thoughts are too much to unpack here).

[1] Roughly, posts made before the introduction of this "split" would be marked (in the database) with a 0. Past that point, posts made by the pro-police side would be marked with a 1, and posts made by the no-police side would be marked with a 2. The staff would have a 0+1+2 view of the forum. The pro-policers would have a 0+1 view of the forum. The no-policers would have a 0+2 view of the forum. Initially, everyone's view of the forum would agree, but, over time, old topics would diverge, and new topics would appear just on one side or the other. Probably it makes sense to give users the ability to sometimes see things the same way staff do (0+1+2), but the important point here is that because 0+1 (pro-police) users can't by default see what 0+2 (no-police) users are posting/doing, you can justifiably remove the ability for pro-policers to tag/flag/trust/distrust no-policers (after all, no-police content is meant only for guests and other no-policers, so there's no reasonable argument that a pro-policer can make that they should be able to have trust-wise interactions with users from the other side).

BTW, I noticed that pre-edit misquote. I do a lot of Meta back-reading, and I (months ago at this point) bumped into this post by Maged (and the next few after it, too). I enjoy bumping into these really old, long-standing forum problems and then finding ways to now fix/remedy them. I'm thinking about adding some logic to the post editor that warns you when you have unbalanced quote tags. Not sure why I'm bringing it up, but, yeah... I'm just saying.