Private torrent trackers have been doing this for a while. If some number of your downstreams act like shitheads - you get nipped and so do your other downstreams.

This seems like the best way to handle it. Also, smaller communities. It's cool to do the global thing, but once you have 10k active users you can't moderate it with a team of 5 volunteers.

I think the attestation approach works best if there are different reasons for the punishment. Eg someone inviting a turd doesn't ban the person who invited them. Someone going full ai spam should.

[dead]

Was it demonoid? That was like this way back in the day? Needed an invite and if you leeched you were cut.

This takes it a step further than what you describe. They keep track of who you’ve invited, who they’ve invited and so on and if there’s enough bad leaves on the tree they just cull the entire tree. It’s a somewhat common practice with private trackers

what.cd was better. You either got an invite where if you tanked your reputation you'd get banned and risk the inviter getting banned too; or you had to take an interview where you got quizzed on how to properly rip music in a variety of methods and how to ascertain between different qualities of rips (like mp3 bitrates to flac cue files).

If you weren't a bellend on what.cd you got access to certain forums where there were even more and better private trackers. Once you built that trust there were social privileges, but if you abuse that trust you got rightfully banned.

It's tons of them doing this...

Demonoid was semi private, but yes, most private trackers require you to keep up some kind of seeding ratio to remain a member.