I remember it well, and my decision to work on Hive was in large part because I decided that Hive was the perfect blockchain to build a web-of-trust system of the type we talked about back then. I believe the applications for such a "trust computation" system are nearly endless, and will have radical implications for productive organization of human endeavors.

And you're also not the first to see an analog between what we're doing with decentralized lists and the trust computation system I've described in the past. One of the guys here actually suspected that this was my stealth way of introducing the trust computation system on Hive :-)

But in truth, the decentralized list implementation was just introduced to solve immediate problems with Hivemind performance and centralization issues. Nonetheless, the nature of the solution was no doubt influenced by my thoughts on web-of-trust based systems and we may gain some useful real world information related to web-of-trust systems from its deployment on Hive.

And your idea for whitelists could certainly extend the abilities of the system to start serving as an early web-of-trust prototype. We could even potentially go further and allow for users to create new types of lists. For example, someone could create a "good programmers I know" list and others users could then make "good programmers I know" lists of their own. The complete trust computation system I envision eventually is much more nuanced than this, but it might be worth deploying a very early prototype just to get ideas for the future.