My man, I started this whole discussion. I see the bad incentives from free relays as a massive problem. But there are a few relays making money now. So, somebody else found the answer to the why that you are looking for and is making it work. If you need the community to figure out how to make your company work, your company is worthless. That being said, I have been helping several relays getting paid with specs for one-click payments and renewals on demand. So, there are people trying to help if you are interested.

I’d love to collaborate with someone in the creation of a service that keeps track of your web of trust, i.e. it monitors follows, mutes, zaps, reactions, etc and processes them in real time into influence scores as calculated using the grapevine protocol. These scores will be stored using events which will probably be too large for most standard relays to want to store. But clients will want to access these scores, either by API or by accessing the relevant events, and use them to stratify content. In theory everyone could run a personal “grapevine relay” that stores these large files, but in practice most users won’t do that. But what they will do is pay for a service that runs one of these specialized relays for them. I talk about the grapevine in a podcast with hodlbod — I’ll post the link to the podcast below. Or check out brainstorm.ninja, which will calculate these scores (your grapevine) for you. What I haven’t done yet is build the relay to store the scores as some kind of specialized event. Anyone who knows how to build relays and would like to collaborate on a project like this, hit me up.

i am very interested in these wot scores. i attempted to calculate mine but something went wrong on brainstorm.ninja it said i had 40k wot but couldnt show it or etc, i have a follow list of approx 1200.. i will try and run it locally maybe and see whats happening..

Sounds a bit like a social credit system. Ahaha