diumIn short
- Trust score = 3 per best answer + 1 per helpful mark + 5 per live session + 1 per reply.
- One score per person across all of Dium, recalculated when those events happen.
- Only the Wave's author or a moderator can mark the best answer. One per Wave.
What the trust score is
Every Dium member has one trust score. It is a single number that rises as you help people: when your answers are marked best or helpful, when you run live sessions, and when you reply. It is shared across all of Dium, not kept per Flow.
It is a rough signal of how much someone has helped, not a rating of them as a person. [Confirm where the score is shown today: profile, member list, reply cards]
What goes into it
The current formula adds up four things:
| Event | Weight | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| A reply of yours is marked best answer | 3 points each | Chosen by the Wave's author or a moderator |
| A reply of yours is marked helpful | 1 point each | The mark can be taken back. [Confirm who can mark a reply helpful] |
| A live session | 5 points each | [Confirm what counts: hosting a session, or attending one] |
| A reply you posted | 1 point each | [Confirm whether hidden or deleted replies still count] |
So a member with 2 best answers, 5 helpful marks, 1 live session and 10 replies has a score of 2 × 3 + 5 × 1 + 1 × 5 + 10 × 1 = 26.
Likes and emoji reactions are separate from helpful marks. [Confirm whether likes count toward the score; the documented formula counts helpful marks only]
The formula has no input for your plan or for payments.
When it updates
Your score is recalculated when something that feeds it happens, such as a best-answer mark, a helpful mark or a live session. There is no daily batch.
Older activity does not fade. [Confirm: no time decay is applied]
How best answers work
- Only the person who started the Wave, or a moderator of the Flow, can mark a best answer.
- A Wave has at most one best answer. Marking a new one removes the mark from the old one.
- Marking a best answer sets the Wave to Solved and notifies the person who wrote it.
Replies are listed in the order they were posted, with replies to replies nested under them. A reply can be pinned so it shows in a banner at the top. [Confirm whether best answers are shown first in the Wave and ranked higher in search, and describe the search ranking rules]
Guarding against gaming
- You can post at most 30 replies a minute, and Waves can use slow mode (30 seconds between messages by default).
- Helpful marks are a toggle, so one person adds at most one mark to a reply.
- Trading marks, using extra accounts, or paying for marks breaks our community guidelines and can lead to suspension.
- [Confirm whether people can mark their own replies helpful or best, and whether suspended accounts' points are removed]
What money cannot change
[Confirm before publishing: Sponsorship does not change organic scores.]
[Confirm before publishing: sponsored Waves and Pages are labelled as sponsored wherever they appear]
If your score looks wrong
If a vote was miscounted, fraud affected your score, or a best-answer mark was changed by someone without the right to, see our correction policy.
Version history
- September 28, 2026: version 1. Weights 3 (best answer), 1 (helpful), 5 (live session), 1 (reply).
When we change the formula, we will update this page before the change goes live and add a line here.