Vod is in a position of trust within the forum, and should restrain his disgust when dealing with someone who has not ACTUALLY crossed any lines.
The part of your response that I put in bold texts is where subjectivity, opinion and the contradictions in criteria that are bound to happen is taking place. It would be very reasonable to argue that he has/is crossing a line, because this is a Bitcoin forum; not a political organization. There has been nothing that defines what "Crossing the line" is, and theymos saying it is acceptable to rate a user in general would seem particularly fitting in this case.
In this particular example, you are probably right that no harm is done. I've seen little evidence that BADecker is doing anything here other than running his mouth, so it doesn't greatly affect him.
But what if he WERE doing business? And what if you were a new guy, seeing red trust?
I know you just provided this as a particular example because it is something close to you and I'm not saying there isn't a systematic problem, but as we seem to agree there is minimal to no harm done in this case so I wouldn't pick this hill to die on. I like to tackle specific problems, and if this is a systematic problem we can surely find more egregious examples of DT ratings based on opinion stopping a user's day-to-day operations on here. I would be more willing to stand by you and call out the problems if we had an example where harm has been done and can be agreed upon communally.
If he were doing business here, then it might have more of an impact, but if he were doing business here he probably would have less time to spread his own ideology in the toxic Politics and Off-topic sections. He has made a name for himself by having a strong-will and strong(unpopular)-opinions and this is bound to manifest itself in their trust score. Anyone thinking to do business should look into the ratings themselves and judge if they are in agreement to their standing on trust. I know this is uncommon for newbies, but this is not the responsibility of DT members, in my opinion.
I, after being here for many years, am quite aware of how to remove someone from default trust FOR ME. There is no way to do it IN GENERAL, other than action by the mods
If you got the right people, not even mods as far as I know, to agree that Vod is being unreasonable, breaking guidelines, acting maliciously or thwarting users from using the forum based solely on their opinions (opinions which don't affect their actions on the forum) then they would remove him from their trust networks and his ratings would all become irrelevant in the context of our discussion.
EDIT : I can certainly agree that there is too much opinion and not enough substance in the trust system, but I do not know how to adequately modify that without losing much more value overall.
I'm certainly not going to die on this hill. But it does bother me, and has for some time. Not just this one example. I think, though, that your edit says it all. The system needs an overhaul, but I don't have any really good ideas as to HOW that might be done. It is definitely worthy of discussion. The problem, as always, is people. The very fact that it does happen with people who have default trust, and who, frankly, have done fairly well with that level of responsibility overall, makes it even harder.
As I said earlier, I would not want default trust. I try to be somewhat gentle in my words, but my opinions are often quite extreme, and I could easily see myself abusing it in a moment of anger. How do you fix that? I'm not sure it can be.
At any rate, you've certainly given me some interesting perspectives. Perhaps I'm reading more into this than there really is. Or maybe it's just the best that can be done at the moment. All things evolve...
I'm gonna bow out for a while, see what others have to say. Thanks for a good conversation. Given the venue, I expected polemics, not thoughtful debate. That was refreshing in itself.
