Reputation I think is the right word. A healthy set of followers is a great heuristic for a good reputation.
Discussion
Yeah, I agree it's probably the best heuristic (so far), but I would quibble with calling it 'great'. It's perfectly fine for estimating a user's reputation; but clearly, a set of followers is sorely lacking on its own for determining the reputation of a product, merchant, etc (when reputation really matters, IMO)... it's just that an npub-linked reputation of such things won't be particularly relevant until having their own npubs becomes much more relevant (or maybe that's a chicken-and-egg thing)
The more interesting problem is how new npubs break into the web of follows. It's impossible to say which note would be the seed, but once one person engages, somehow that seed starts to grow.
It’s like a party, just walk up and start talking to someone. That’s how you make friends- a skill that is all but lost nowadays. No, ai won’t do it all for you. That’s it. You’ll weed out the people you don’t want to chat with.
Good, but that selects for the outgoing. Just like society must create a culture to defend against the lower aspects of human nature, there must be a duty to seek out new, unrecognized value, and tag spam, for instance. I would use a client that shows me a random note that has been marked spam, or a random new npub to rate, prior to accessing my graph.
That forces people to use secondary npubs to follow unpopular people or people who they dont agree with, just to protect their 'reputation,' which will be defined as 'system by which dishonest people win through gaming.'