Yes, the assholes are after the reaction, for sure. Deny them that and they crawl back into their sad and lonely corner they have made for themselves.

I think the way Coracle has implemented WoT can solve a large portion of the issue already and should be adopted by more clients, but your idea would further improve it, especially if WoT is not "show anyone above this score by default" but more of a recommendation engine, where the user still needs to make the decision about whether they want to add them to the whitelist.

this discussion makes me think of something too... so, i already have a simple size-related caching strategy implemented, it runs on a timer and trims down the database when it gets to a certain size and trims it back to a second size (high and low water marks)

it might be an interesting addition to the cache prune heuristic to selectively prefer to remove entries that have few inbound references, ie, the less engagement, AND the more stale (last accessed timestamp) combined would be a good heuristic for pruning not just stale events but irrelevant events, which are going to largely be botfarms