Replacing DefaultTrust

[DebitMe]

Something I thought of while reading this thread (not to sure about implementation though) would be a way to either remove trust from yourself or others (not being the one who originally posted it), have it counted less (kind of already works this way as the person who left it incorrectly probably doesn't have positive trust), or have another category under trust, something like, "untrusted feedback and others agree" that would allow people who simply leave neg rep for the sake of it to be able to be mitigated if others don't really agree with the trust, and agree it should be counted less.

I also like the idea of buttons to quickly add and delete people from your trust list, would really speed up the process after a transaction.

Another point to bring up is what about trusted users who don't really do trades.  There are plenty of very knowledgeable forum members who don't spend much time in the markets sections.  Lots of people would trust these users, but since they have never traded with them, have not left positive feedback.  You start to see a lot of bias towards those who spend a lot of time doing trades in the top 50 members, and start to leave these people out.  Perhaps some formula to calculate a number based on forum history (length of time on forum, posts made per week over that time, trust received weekly over that time, etc...) would help to level the playing field a bit?

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[TECSHARE]

Something I thought of while reading this thread (not to sure about implementation though) would be a way to either remove trust from yourself or others (not being the one who originally posted it), have it counted less (kind of already works this way as the person who left it incorrectly probably doesn't have positive trust), or have another category under trust, something like, "untrusted feedback and others agree" that would allow people who simply leave neg rep for the sake of it to be able to be mitigated if others don't really agree with the trust, and agree it should be counted less.

I also like the idea of buttons to quickly add and delete people from your trust list, would really speed up the process after a transaction.

Another point to bring up is what about trusted users who don't really do trades.  There are plenty of very knowledgeable forum members who don't spend much time in the markets sections.  Lots of people would trust these users, but since they have never traded with them, have not left positive feedback.  You start to see a lot of bias towards those who spend a lot of time doing trades in the top 50 members, and start to leave these people out.  Perhaps some formula to calculate a number based on forum history (length of time on forum, posts made per week over that time, trust received weekly over that time, etc...) would help to level the playing field a bit?

This is not a bad concept having a trust system that can put trust weight on individual ratings, but it would still include all the flaws of the current trust system regardless of this small improvement. The trust system is SUPPOSED to operate as a way to judge who is and who is not a reputable trader, but unfortunately 3rd parties unrelated to the trades in question involve themselves in issues making it not so much just trade related any more.

[Grand_Voyageur]

The common consensus seems to be that the trust system is specifically in place to help newbies not get scammed but the reality is that 99% of the newbies that come to this board have no idea what the trust system is and how it works.  There is nothing about it in Beginners section and throwing a screen at them and forcing to choose from members they have never heard of/interacted with isn't going to help either.  Even to this day I'm not 100% how the depths work and who gets to be on DefaultTrust. How is a newbie going to know?

There should be a concerted effort to educate newbies on how Trust works and how to set up the list properly if newbie scam prevention is really the goal.

+1. As I said in my previous posts (1, 2, 3, 4), while I like some of the improvement theymos brought to us, I was really concerned about the user-unfriendly results of having few guidelines & helps in the points an user used the most. Some people are lazy for sure, but if needed informations are not readily available the Whole (any) system is useless.

[SaltySpitoon]

Since the Trust system is mainly for the newbies, why don't we (I mean Theymos) make a poll about what changes/protections they would like in the newbie section? The problem with this thread is that 90% of the people answering and I'd assume voting, are those that know about the meta section, and are legendary/hero/senior accounts. While its all fine and good to have a discussion with everyone about this, why don't we propose different new systems to the newbie section, get newbie responses, and then pick apart the proposed systems until we have a system that was popular with newbie members, and then picked apart to make sure its a sound system by everyone else.

If you think its a good idea, Theymos/Badbear please make the poll or thread in the newbie section, no one else please. People that have agendas or biases one way or another will word things oddly or propose systems that couldn't be implemented, etc and it would take away from the point of asking the newbies. Because as a lot of people are mentioning here, they don't neccessarily need the trust system as it is, because they have been here long enough to use whatever tools are available. So this has pretty much boiled down to what can we do to help the newbies, but at the same time not screw everyone else over.

[DebitMe]

Another idea, how about IP bans for people that go really far into the negative trust (or get enough votes for it, IDK something like that), or people who have created multiple accounts from the same IP that all have negative reps.  I have a feeling if you look at most of the scam accusations nowadays, they will probably be towards a single person who does a scam, then makes a new account and starts over.  I understand they can easily change their IP in a multitude of difference ways, but it may at least help a little bit in not allowing those members back to the forums.

[TECSHARE]

Another idea, how about IP bans for people that go really far into the negative trust (or get enough votes for it, IDK something like that), or people who have created multiple accounts from the same IP that all have negative reps.  I have a feeling if you look at most of the scam accusations nowadays, they will probably be towards a single person who does a scam, then makes a new account and starts over.  I understand they can easily change their IP in a multitude of difference ways, but it may at least help a little bit in not allowing those members back to the forums.

Won't work for a plethora or reasons.

[qwk]

Since the Trust system is mainly for the newbies, why don't we (I mean Theymos) make a poll about what changes/protections they would like in the newbie section? The problem with this thread is that 90% of the people answering and I'd assume voting, are those that know about the meta section, and are legendary/hero/senior accounts. While its all fine and good to have a discussion with everyone about this, why don't we propose different new systems to the newbie section, get newbie responses, and then pick apart the proposed systems until we have a system that was popular with newbie members, and then picked apart to make sure its a sound system by everyone else.

I doubt that the newbies would come up with any meaningful decisions or even suggestions. Yeah, I know that sounds rather arrogant, but to be honest, you don't believe for a minute yourself that someone who's hardly grasped the proceedings of this forum would be able to find a technological solution to a complex problem like a web of trust?

Let's be paternalistic, as we already were with the DefaultTrust system, and just give our beloved newbs a big red or green flag "trust this guy / distrust that guy". It'll be for their best.

If you think its a good idea, Theymos/Badbear please make the poll or thread in the newbie section, no one else please. People that have agendas or biases one way or another will word things oddly or propose systems that couldn't be implemented, etc and it would take away from the point of asking the newbies. Because as a lot of people are mentioning here, they don't neccessarily need the trust system as it is, because they have been here long enough to use whatever tools are available. So this has pretty much boiled down to what can we do to help the newbies, but at the same time not screw everyone else over.

I personally wouldn't mind screwing everyone else over if it helped reducing the number of scammed newbies.

[Sumerian]

This system is better than the current system in any way. Many people are abusing the current system

[gmaxwell]

It would be nicer if it could tell you about which of the recommendations you've communicated with before (maybe with links to some past threads where you've posted after them)... but sadly if you're new to the forum that data doesn't exist.

[SaltySpitoon]

Since the Trust system is mainly for the newbies, why don't we (I mean Theymos) make a poll about what changes/protections they would like in the newbie section? The problem with this thread is that 90% of the people answering and I'd assume voting, are those that know about the meta section, and are legendary/hero/senior accounts. While its all fine and good to have a discussion with everyone about this, why don't we propose different new systems to the newbie section, get newbie responses, and then pick apart the proposed systems until we have a system that was popular with newbie members, and then picked apart to make sure its a sound system by everyone else.

I doubt that the newbies would come up with any meaningful decisions or even suggestions. Yeah, I know that sounds rather arrogant, but to be honest, you don't believe for a minute yourself that someone who's hardly grasped the proceedings of this forum would be able to find a technological solution to a complex problem like a web of trust?

Let's be paternalistic, as we already were with the DefaultTrust system, and just give our beloved newbs a big red or green flag "trust this guy / distrust that guy". It'll be for their best.

If you think its a good idea, Theymos/Badbear please make the poll or thread in the newbie section, no one else please. People that have agendas or biases one way or another will word things oddly or propose systems that couldn't be implemented, etc and it would take away from the point of asking the newbies. Because as a lot of people are mentioning here, they don't neccessarily need the trust system as it is, because they have been here long enough to use whatever tools are available. So this has pretty much boiled down to what can we do to help the newbies, but at the same time not screw everyone else over.

I personally wouldn't mind screwing everyone else over if it helped reducing the number of scammed newbies.

Perhaps, but everyone is familiar with some sort of feedback systems, be it Ebay's, OTC, Amazon product reviews, etc. If the purpose of the trust system is to help the newbies, why make it more complicated than they can understand? That said, of course everyone understands we are talking generalization. Some newbies here have never touched cryptocurrencies nor many tech features that we take for granted, and some newbies here have been developing decentralized systems for 30 years. I didn't mean have the newbies decide the depths of the technical features, I mean ask them what would help them out, and then have the older members (people in this meta thread) design a doable system around what they need.

If you have never been scammed, and know with complete certainty that you can avoid doing so in the future, your motivations in the new trust system will be minimally compared to those that actually need it. I personally would be just fine without any sort of trust system, so I probably wouldn't be the best person to design a trust system. However I can understand the need for one. So why not ask the people who will use it what they want and go from there?

[dogie]

Perhaps, but everyone is familiar with some sort of feedback systems, be it Ebay's, OTC, Amazon product reviews, etc. If the purpose of the trust system is to help the newbies, why make it more complicated than they can understand? That said, of course everyone understands we are talking generalization. Some newbies here have never touched cryptocurrencies nor many tech features that we take for granted, and some newbies here have been developing decentralized systems for 30 years. I didn't mean have the newbies decide the depths of the technical features, I mean ask them what would help them out, and then have the older members (people in this meta thread) design a doable system around what they need.

If you have never been scammed, and know with complete certainty that you can avoid doing so in the future, your motivations in the new trust system will be minimally compared to those that actually need it. I personally would be just fine without any sort of trust system, so I probably wouldn't be the best person to design a trust system. However I can understand the need for one. So why not ask the people who will use it what they want and go from there?

I'm starting to feel like a moderated system would solve almost all of our issues. Mods don't even have to do the work as you can set up a tribunal like system as the super popular game League of Legends uses. Because there would be fewer cases and members to vote if people appeal ratings, it would be more appropriate to say have a tribunal of 7 review each case and the evidence users submit.

Without moderation, we're struggling to come up with any even remotely viable systems because there's always going to be a way for someone to freely abuse it if we don't set up rules and enforce them. As with this forum, there has to be some level of centralisation for things to actually get going and build a stable base for appropriate decentralisation.

[freedomno1]

The common consensus seems to be that the trust system is specifically in place to help newbies not get scammed but the reality is that 99% of the newbies that come to this board have no idea what the trust system is and how it works.  There is nothing about it in Beginners section and throwing a screen at them and forcing to choose from members they have never heard of/interacted with isn't going to help either.  Even to this day I'm not 100% how the depths work and who gets to be on DefaultTrust. How is a newbie going to know?

There should be a concerted effort to educate newbies on how Trust works and how to set up the list properly if newbie scam prevention is really the goal.

Perhaps we do need to communicate these level of discussions better with newbies and get their input.
And make it a bit more obvious in the beginner faq if people are still missing it
That said there is a brief one liner on it in beginners and help so it does get a mention in the beginners sticky which is easy enough to miss.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=177133.msg1844234#msg1844234

(Read up on the trust system in this thread.  If you have questions about it, ask them over here.)

Links to a thread that hasn't been touched since 2013 (I think newbies are scared of necroing it or no one reads these things nowadays lol)
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=215278.0

Pertaining to discussion above
Analysis of other trust models sounds reasonable as we are trying to find the right piece to fit the puzzle more input and case studies would make for a good sample before we decide on any changes.

[Quickseller]

A second concern is that I think this system is going to be slow to be able to react to someone who was previously honest and later turns into a scammer.

If someone directly trusts a a scammer, then they are indeed in a bad situation, and they'll need to remove the person manually. I might add a warning to trust pages for people who directly trust a scammer if this ever happens.

It's not a big deal at lower depths due to exclusions.

The exclusions feature would rely on enough highly trusted people using it. Looking at a trust list that only trusts DefaultTrust, I counted a total of 7 people who are excluded by someone who is trusted by default trust. Looking at the hierarchical view only 3 out of 14 people trusted by DefaultTrust have utilized the exclusion feature.

In theory, over time, more people will learn to, and use this feature, so I will give you this one.

With that being said, it is very difficult to know for sure when someone has scammed. A good amount of business is conducted outside of the forum (but originates in the forum) where evidence is less assessable. Not only that but often times the evidence averrable is not complete.

You yourself even recently said that you were not 100% sure that TF in fact scammed all his customers.

A last concern is one that was touched on before, but not heavily discussed. This system would not be difficult to manipulate, but it would be much more difficult to detect manipulation. One could quietly buy up a lot of accounts then buy a 2nd set of accounts they want to be trusted. The first set of accounts could all have the 2nd set of accounts added to their trust list which would result in them being often suggested for newer users to add to their trust list. More experienced users may not even notice when this is happening because they are not being asked to add new users to their trust list.

You'd need a lot of accounts for that. 20 full members to make the list, ~100 to get reasonably high in it (currently -- the requirements will probably become higher if this system is adopted). And I'd stop this from happening once I'd notice it, so people buying these accounts would be spending a lot of money on only a very short-term advantage.

After the market crashed I was able to buy full member accounts for as low as .02 and was able to buy several (250 activity) senior accounts for .055 each. It would probably be somewhat unrealistic to be able to buy 100, or even 20 at those prices, however if you were to double those prices then it would cost roughly .8 to buy 20 full members or 4 to buy 100, and 1.1 to buy 10 seniors 5.28 to buy 48 seniors. This compares to the rough price of between 3 and 3.5 when you market a default trust account for sale (if you wait long enough). Bear in mind that these could potentially be used to create a near unlimited number of "trusted" members.

Not only that but the purchased higher level accounts could potentially be sold once enough other accounts are "infected" by trusting people they otherwise should not trust (this is very similar to how someone can attack a PoS altcoin).

If you stop this from happening once you notice it wouldn't this be moderating  the trust system?

Another thing that I found very interesting is that throughout the recent drama regarding Vod giving out negative trust to various people who disagreed with his trust rating, I noticed that they all tended to trust each other and gave each other positive trust feedback. Two of them even traded with each other. (I don't think they are all controlled by the same person). If this kind of trend were to continue then, in theory, all the scammers will trust each other and the scammers will naturally rise to the top of the randomly selected suggested list.  

My point here is that Default Trust gives a new user a good starting point about who to trust and who not to trust, while this new system asks them to pick their own "Default Trust" pretty much at random, since they will probably have little reason to pick one name over another.

-snip-
 And if a highly-trusted user who was previously suggested starts creating and trusting fake accounts, I'll do something to stop him, or at least warn users.

Again, don't you think this would be moderating the trust system? I think you would agree that the trust system should be moderated as little as possible, however I think this would involve more potential moderation then our current system uses.

I think it would be very difficult to know for sure when this happens. One of the reasons why the sale/trading of accounts is allowed here is because it is not possible to stop, the same principle applies in this case.

I also see that bobsag3 who openly scammed me and had his original username scammer tagged is on the list, adding positive trust for companies like Black Arrow who have stolen hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars from this community.

He's still quite widely trusted. Users will be able to avoid selecting him on the suggestion page.

I could manually exclude people like him, but doing that would likely be controversial in itself, and I'd prefer to keep this as automated as possible.

Outside of this thread, I have never head of bobsag3, how would I know that I should avoid selecting him? I would say this is a good example as to how this kind of system would be very slow to react.

You are correct to say that manually excluding people would be very controversial.


I think your proposing this is essentially a bow to one particular user who is screaming particularly loud about the current trust system. I wouldn't say that it is necessarily correct to make changes to a system or a procedure just because one person complaints loud enough.

I would say that it would probably be appropriate to exclude the opinions of some percentage of the "x" percent of people who are the "loudest" arguing for either "side" of what to do. This would exclude the outliers of the conversation. If you exclude TECHsHARE's position on the current trust system, there are really very few people who are against the current trust system, and really no one who makes an argument with any kind of substance.

[🏰 TradeFortress 🏰]

Quickseller, this has nothing to do with TECSHARE so get it straight (and stop commenting on things you are very misguided about).

This is more about this precedent:

IMO your ratings of gweedo are inappropriate. His thread title is inaccurate and overly harsh, but this doesn't imply that he's untrustworthy. I feel that allowing your ratings to exist in the default trust network would be counter to the forum's mission of free speech, so I've removed you from the default trust network.

which was not applied to an instance that has already been conclusively settled as also violating this criteria, however the user was not removed from DefaultTrust.

This is the obvious catalyst, as also hinted by:

- There won't be people who are clearly "at the top" of the trust system. Furthermore, I will no longer need to carefully ensure that the default trust network is OK for everyone.

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So, please think before you hit 'Post'.

[Quickseller]

Quickseller, this has nothing to do with TECSHARE so get it straight (and stop commenting on things you are very misguided about).

This is more about this precedent:

IMO your ratings of gweedo are inappropriate. His thread title is inaccurate and overly harsh, but this doesn't imply that he's untrustworthy. I feel that allowing your ratings to exist in the default trust network would be counter to the forum's mission of free speech, so I've removed you from the default trust network.

which was not applied to an instance that has already been conclusively settled as also violating this criteria, however the user was not removed from DefaultTrust.

I disagree. I was honestly not here for the gweedo incident, so I cannot say how much time elapsed between the time when you left the negative trust and the time you were removed. You have since removed the negative trust, however it looks like you opened a scam accusation that was immediately locked at July 13, 2013 that commented on him spreading FUD about your lending sites.

Looking at the TECHSHARE example, it looks like he left Armis negative trust on November 5, 2014, which is the same day he opened a thread asking for him to be removed from default trust list. It was not until over 3 days later that he was removed from default trust list. During this three day period, the community had the chance to discuss the rating in question and TECHSHARE has the opportunity to remove the rating.

If you were to look at recent examples of Vod's recent controversy, he removed his negative ratings on all users in question within less then 48 hours, and after the community was able to voice their opinion on his ratings. I want to say it was closer to 24 hours, but the timeline is not crystal clear on this (additionally the people he gave negative trust to were acting like 2 year olds while Armis was acting professionally the entire time).   

This is the obvious catalyst, as also hinted by:

- There won't be people who are clearly "at the top" of the trust system. Furthermore, I will no longer need to carefully ensure that the default trust network is OK for everyone.

theymos would still be at the top of the trust system. As you can see from my response above his proposed system would be subject to a number of instances where he would need to "moderate" the system. The trust system would remain centralized.

The current system allows for people to have much more information in order to make a judgment as to whose ratings can be relied upon and whose should no be. Anytime you use any level of randomness to determine which users' trust reports to rely on you are asking for trouble.

[coinits]

If there was an option to scrap the whole trust system then that is what I would choose.

[theymos]

If you stop this from happening once you notice it wouldn't this be moderating  the trust system?

It'd be very slightly moderating the suggested-trust-list-users system, which I think would be less centralized than managing DefaultTrust.

[Vod]

I'm interested to see what the votes will be!

[forzendiablo]

i would like 3rd option - update default trust with latest more active users [and no - not me]

[Blazed]

I agree maybe add a couple more users and see how it goes. I am going to put my trusted list back in and see how much it changes.