Yup, I like NIP-77, the heart and soul of which is 3 fields: context, score, and confidence.
And when it comes to follows and other proxy indicators of trust, I like the idea of interpreting those data points as if they were NIP-77 formatted. And giving them a low confidence, since proxy indicators do not necessarily equal trust. But sometimes it’s the only data we have, so we use it.
I skimmed the thread Vinney linked but I'm not understanding at all. What are these fields or the points of them? Why not just 1 field, which is either a priority ranking or a weight for each npub in your list, allowing the rest of the functionality to rely on well used indicators like follows, reports, likes, upvotes/downvotes?
For one thing, you lose the context then. I may trust you highly for your programming opinions but not for your political opinions. If you lose context then you're back to the crude world of "this npub 100% good, that npub 100% bad", which is not a nuanced social model.
That was the first thing I addressed tho - you do context by changing the rankings
They could be weights but rankings are easy to click and drag when changing, or a UI could represent weights as rankings with advanced settings to see the numbers for best of both worlds
Ideally something like a wiki client would remember your list for each wiki category, for example, so if you have wildly different lists for different topics you don't have to change them every time or switch npubs to switch lists
This would also allow cool features like a hypothetical "trusts all npubs in existence" slot in the list that you can click and drag to the top to override all reports and see everything unfiltered
Oh, I see after giving it more thought how a context field would be useful for adding another degree of separation into the "web"
I rate npub x at 90% for politics, they rate npub y at 90% for politics, npub y gets their opinions included without being in my list - doesn't work for different contexts without the "for politics" field
But that's still only 2 fields - why would we want 3? 🤔 I might have to read the thread more later today
After reading the thread a bit more, I can now see reasons for 3 fields: genre context (code vs politics), action context (edit vs delete), and trust score/ranking.
I still can't see the reason for the 3 fields to be context, score, and confidence. Still reading.
Have read about half the thread and it all further solidifies my opinion that the ideas being discussed in that thread are over-complicating something that can be much simpler.
If anyone wants to give a direct explanation of what I'm missing, I'm open to it.
Otherwise, it seems to me the best path to functionality right now would start with adding 1 field, then maybe a second and third could be added later.
I see those three fields as a goal although that doesn’t mean we have to graduate from what we have now to using all 3 instantaneously. Doing things in baby steps for the sake of simplicity is the strategy I’m following right now.