The main purpose of this filter is to weed out spam accounts. Since there are a lot of spam users on the Nostr network, normal users usually end up in the top 10%. But this isn’t fixed, so the choice is left to the user. To avoid filtering out too many legitimate users, I’ve set the default threshold at 40%.
Discussion
I'm interested to understand how user's reputation is derived. I don't want to eat your time, so if you have explained it before or have a link that would be very much appreciated.
It’s basically a simple combination of the PageRank and TrustRank algorithms, both of which have plenty of resources online.
In short, if you’re followed by high-reputation users, your reputation goes up too. The more trusted users vouch for you, the more trustworthy you become.
That sounds reasonable. I suppose at the extremes it needs people of high reputation to venture deep into the noise to rescue those who sit with a Purgatory of ignorance.
A new user only needs to be followed by a regular account to boost their reputation into the top 60%, since spam accounts rarely get any followers, following them would expose the spam account owner.