> I'm well aware that my @Silberengel account has a rock-bottom WoT, because it has no follows, and my @Laeserin has a lowish one, as I don't follow that many npubs, but I leave it like that, on purpose. Your sense of WoT is reverse to the way I understand it. If your @Silberengel account follows someone, that doesent increase your own WoT; rather it depends on who follows the @Silberengel account that increases the score. Yes, you don't follow anyone, but that only means you don't need reciprocity due to your own established credibility. The WoT idea is that "high trust" people (who has *your* "trust" which depends on your own follow list and the trust score of who they follow) are depended upon to only follow high-value identities. If your "friend" is following a bunch spam (evidenced by their reposting of crap accounts), you will hopefully unfollow them due to the low value of their posts. Its this score that gives credibility, but only in the sense that the accounts aren't spammers or imposters. The purpose of this WoT isn't necessarily to know who you *should* follow, but to filter out who you *shouldn't* follow and clutter up your feed.

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Not having follows is one major reason why I get muted so much and have surprisingly few follows. There are scripts that auto-mute and/or auto-unfollow anyone without follows. It's also a major reason why people refuse to follow me, as they only do the follow-back thing. My npubs have lots of mutes (also just because I'm such a horrible person and I make people feel unsafe ๐Ÿ™„), which counts negatively toward WoT, and some of the algos deduct points for not having follows, on principle, as we're seen as "refusing to WoT with others", so we get actively penalized.
Maybe the solution is to standardize on a WoT schema, which includes allowing people to decide what contributes to the score and set their own thresholds for muting. I think your beef is with clients that make it difficult to see people on a ban liat, and/or with being binned in with bots and spammers.
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