Trust Score
Trust Score
Your trust score is a measure of your standing in the community — built through real interactions, not self-promotion.
Why Trust, Not Rating?
Most platforms use ratings: five stars, thumbs up, review counts. These have a problem: they measure how many people have transacted with you, not how much they actually trust you.
Karmyq uses a different model. Trust is built through the structure of your relationships — who you've helped, who's helped you, and how those people connect to the rest of the community.
How Trust is Built
Trust in Karmyq is relational, not transactional. When you complete a request for someone, you don't just get karma — you build a trust connection with that person.
When their connections see your profile, they see someone their trusted neighbor has interacted with. That second-degree relationship is meaningful in a way that a five-star rating from a stranger is not.
Depth vs. Breadth
Communities can configure their trust model along two axes:
Depth-focused trust: Values close, repeated interactions. Rewards loyalty and sustained presence.
Breadth-focused trust: Values wide reach. Having connections across many parts of the community signals that you're integrated and known broadly.
Balanced: Most communities sit in between — valuing both depth and breadth.
Breadth reaches across communities
Depth is always local: it counts the exchanges you have had in this community, and the people here you have helped more than once. Breadth is different. It counts the range of your participation across every community you are active in.
That has a consequence worth stating plainly: when you join a new community, you do not arrive with nothing. If you have been active elsewhere, a small amount of standing comes with you — enough to show you are a real participant somewhere, and not enough to substitute for showing up here. Someone who has never completed an exchange anywhere starts at zero, and stays there until their first one.
It is a deliberately modest carry. Your reputation in one community is evidence that you take part; it is not a claim on anyone's trust in another. Depth and the exchanges you actually complete here are what move your standing in this community.
Breadth is not the only thing that travels, though. Feedback does too. Ratings are weighted 70% from this community and 30% from everywhere else — but until you have been rated here, your rating from elsewhere is all there is, so it counts in full. That is deliberate: someone people have consistently vouched for elsewhere is not a stranger, even on their first day here.
A community can turn the breadth weight down to zero, and then range of participation stops counting. That narrows the carry; it does not end it, because feedback still crosses. Only someone with no history and no ratings anywhere starts at a true zero.
Trust Paths
When someone decides whether to accept a request from you, Karmyq can show how you're connected to them through the community graph. "Alice is trusted by Bob, who is trusted by Carol, who you know well."
This mimics how trust actually works in real life: through chains of personal vouching, not anonymous reviews.
Trust Decay
Like karma, trust decays over time. Someone who was very active two years ago but has been absent since is not as connected to the current community as their old score would suggest.
Decay keeps trust scores honest: they reflect your current, living presence in the community — not just your history.
What Your Trust Score Affects
- Visibility in the feed: Higher trust users may surface higher in community feeds
- Request prioritization: Trust can be a factor when multiple people want to fulfill the same request
- Community eligibility: Some communities may require a minimum trust score to join
- Reputation display: Your trust level is visible to community members
Trust is Local
Like karma, trust is community-scoped. Being highly trusted in your neighborhood community doesn't automatically mean you're trusted in a new professional community you join.
You build trust in every community by showing up.