Web of Trust Score

As of June 2024, the web of trust (WoT) score is the state of the art method for curation of content on nostr using the web of trust.

Although there is no official formal definition for the WoT score, in practice, the WoT score of Alice from the perspective of Bob is typically calculated as the number of profiles in the intersection of Bob’s follows and Alice’s followers. There may or may not be a downward correction to take mutes into account.

Several clients implement the WoT score, including Brainstorm, Noracle, and Wikifreedia.

The WoT does a good job of filtering out obvious spam. However, the WoT score suffers several disadvantages: - The WoT score rewards users for accumulating high follower counts. It is not unfair to call it a popularity contest. - Any profile more than two hops away from you will have a WoT score of zero. The WoT score cannot "see" past 2 hops, and is poorly suited for content discovery. - It is not at all clear how to use the WoT score to reflect context.

The Influence Score has been proposed as an alternative to the WoT score to address each of the above disadvantages.