I support clients in rejecting badges entirely. What I don’t like, although with in their rights and in the nip, is clients acting as gate keepers for approving which badge issuers they will approve.
Discussion
Depends on the client I guess. But yes, for general purpose social clients that's probably a good rule of thumb.
I see what you are saying, I think it would be advantageous to try to use tags in badge descriptions to segregate between types of clients for example #gitbadge or add some meta data to the nip.
I don’t think there is anything nefarious at face value gate keeping badges, I just think it’s a bad signal about what else, as it’s just one user mentioning another… a client white listing who could mention in kind 1 would be a huge red flag. where as client where mentions just aren’t rendered is more nurtural, wouldn’t be useful, but isn’t a red flag.
I hope users are sophisticated enough to not have a crazy number of badges on their profile, or to highlight joke/meta badges issued while users explored this new nip. And if they are that loose with it, I doubt they will gain many sophisticated followers that way.