That's true. But it would take more effort than I'm prepared to expend (and anyway make me pretty uncomfortable) to maintain a secret alt account (and if it weren't secret, then I'd expect any reputational consequences to affect my actual account, on the basis that trust is/should-be about people, not accounts).

Ha! Imagine spending a month in jail because you used the Swiss coat of arms in a way that "might offend Swiss national sentiment". How would you even reliably determine that? Another one I like from that article (though I haven't checked if it was properly sourced; these days, most of what I read online often turns out, after recursive investigation, to be incorrect) is the ban on taking a bath with a donkey after seven in the evening... I mean, remind me never to move to Oklahoma, because that ban would really cramp my style (typically, I like to be in the tub with my donkey when I'm shampooing it, sometimes late into the night).

That's true... I can't imagine too many users curating ~100 inclusions. I don't have a good answer for that one. That changes my position a bit, and sets my get-rid-of-DT seriousness-level back down to something like 60%. Hmm... I wonder if DT1 being 100-wide is not so much a very-carefully-selected design parameter, but more something that's just as big as it can reasonably be? Because if it's the latter, then it shouldn't be taken as some kind of target to aim for with a custom trust list (which is to say, there'd be no real basis for an argument that goes: "We have to keep DT because most users are never going to be able to achieve that kind of tag/flag visibility-coverage on their own").

The thing is, while that observation of yours does give me pause, I still can't shake the feeling that DT, in practice, produces far too many negative consequences in exchange for its benefits. Ask yourself this: What problem is DT (as a concept) meant to solve? All I can come up with is: It's meant to solve the problem of new users having nothing to go on, and mitigate the observed problem of too many established users not bothering to curate their own trust lists. If that really is the problem it's intending to solve/mitigate, then I think it's doing so at hideous expense. I mean, there are other ways to get there that wouldn't have nearly as many knock-on negative effects.

For example, what if instead of "DefaultTrust" (and everything that goes along with it: voting, the lottery, a non-flat user hierarchy, necessarily out-in-the-open trust lists) there were something like "StarterTrust". StarterTrust could be comprised of something like the ~30 users with the most merit that have also posted within the last 30 days. Now, before anyone says "That's bullshit! The people with the most merit are just good at getting merit! They don't necessarily leave good feedback or have good trust lists.", firstly, I'd argue that high-earned-merit-balance is a pretty-accurate heuristic to use for identifying reasonable, intelligent, and well-meaning people, and secondly, StarterTrust would just be about giving new users something to go on. The idea would be that nobody is supposed to keep StarterTrust on their list forever, and that a few smart, well-timed, and well-placed account reminders to curate your own trust list would encourage users to move on from StarterTrust. And if people end up ignoring or disabling those reminders, then, well... that's their business.

Basically. Though, if I'm being perfectly honest, I'd much prefer the more-freedom-less-safety side to (eventually) become the "majority fork".

But, thinking about what you said, and comparing it with my own experience(s), I think you're probably right: most people don't want freedom (or, at least, they don't want it when it comes at the expense of safety, and, even more depressing, they sometimes don't even want it when the only thing that it would cost them is convenience).

Haha, yeah. I think what I'd do for composite (0+1+2) mode is give each side's posts a different background color, or something, to help make sense of the two different "channels" of thought. I don't think it'll be as confusing as you might imagine (I mean, it's already the case that multiple, independent post-streams can and often do exist within a single thread). In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if, in practice, it turns out to be easier in some cases to make sense of the discussion.

Ditto. The thing is, without something in this vein, and with this particular more-freedom-less-safety vs. more-safety-less-freedom issue, I don't see how it would be possible to do better than a some-freedom-some-safety compromise that would leave both sides unhappy (I mean, mutual-unhappiness is usually a sign that a given compromise is fair, but, that's only the high-water mark when it's just not possible to give both sides what they want).