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I really think that trust is the wrong word, and it comes with baggage too, while the word you want to have is reputation. It's not about trusting someone really. It's not about trusted users but about reputable users. I think those are different things, and they only matter for ranking algo purposes. But, and that's a big issue: it's hard to measure holistically from a system-wide perspective.
The downside of introducing any further metric is loss of simplicity, which is the greatest thing gained with the "november" update.
In my mind trust refers to relative visibility (ie show me things from users who like the same kind of things as me), while reputation refers yo what SN used to call "global trust" (I think?) -- all users are ranked and those who are higher get more visibility.
I wonder if there is a world where the experience of SN when not logged in (anon mode) is purely sats based, while the logged in experience is unique to each user: what you see is affected by users you trust.
I've been reading a lot about the recent (last couple years) decision on LessWrong to ban Said Achimz. LW seems to value a unified experience for all users (I have no idea what their code actually implements, just going off what the head mod and other users say). They seem to want a forum where users end up talking about the same things. So they use reputation while a place like X is based on relative experience, and so users are shown a feed that is presumably? unique to them.
We currently show everyone the same feed (except for muting), and I believe it is one of the principal sources of strife on the home page. SN could show each user what they want to see, but this would be a big change from treating the home page as a market.
To my memory k00b once made a point about remote controls (on your post: #1471077) and there only being one at his party. So I think that the uniform view is desired here too - at least it was the last time we discussed that in-depth?
The problem with sats-only for anon is that that is exactly where it hurts now.
I used to read in the order notifs -> new -> top/lit and now i just skip the last part. So for me, situations of sat suppression don't matter, also because new is exempt from filters other than the ones the user sets (coming back later to this part.) So for my consumption, while it would be nice to have a ranking that reflects the attitude of the whole more than the attitude of a few, I don't truly care because I get by regardless.
However, if original content created will be hidden because of some troll or a dude with a grudge downzapping way above organic thresholds - content that mind you someone paid to have published - then, at differing thresholds for each individual stacker, it at one point becomes better to not treat SN as a home for such content. Post the content elsewhere, repost / link on SN, or not, but at least the content can be indexed other than through SN. Which means that SN slowly becomes an aggregator only, whereas I feel that many of the stackers we interact with today aren't here for the aggregation, but for the "community" - for lack of a better word. So original content ought to be more visible?
Now here's the thing: the casually lurking stacker, unlike you and I, doesn't change their downzap threshold to -∞, or even logs in. So they won't see the downzapped posts, and neither will any crawler, unless found elsewhere. Instead, they'll see some very monotonic front-page every time there is someone spending a ton on influencing visibility. This sounds nice, but I don't think that at those times the front page and the visible items reflect that community that many are here for. So the one selling point I am sure is there, becomes kind of invisible.
All this is manageable, and it's not catastrophic. But, yes, there's only one remote control, and oligarchy at their whim can control it.
In trying to answer this, I kept thinking, honestly: I like sats as the only moderator. Do we really need trust?
I think zapping (both up and down) is not very widespread. There are a limited number of SN users who are highly active zappers and many more who only occasionally zap. So the burden of using money as the moderator falls on those few rather than emerging as a consensus of the whole community. Trust might be a way of magnifying the actions of users who the community tends to agree with.
Heres one example: Zapping (both up and down) is not a terribly widespread habit -- it seems like there are some users who are highly active, and then many more who only occasionally zap or not at all. This means when some scammer boosts their stuff, the burden of downzapping it mostly falls on the few who really care (rather than some beautiful world where everyone chips in a little bit to create a big downzap effect). The same is true for downzapping: if one user decides to go on a jihad against another, the victim is often on their own to boost their posts back up. If we had some amount of trust affecting the weight of zaps, highly trusted users could spend less to achieve the same effect.
I'm very interested in being convinced that no trust is required, and that we only need to tweak the way sats are used, but we've been using only money as a moderator for more than half a year now and it is clear that when someone wants to spend to distort things away from what most users would like, it is expensive to combat them. And that there isn't a "whole community" reaction against such a strong hand. Rather it seems that most users were kind of like "ugh, I guess I'll just check back when this is over."
Now, the reality of SN is that such actions things seem to pretty quickly be "over" because it is expensive to manipulate on a big scale. And we did get some pretty nice reward pools.